Romans

By Frank S. Thielman

Concentrate on the biblical author's message as it unfolds.

Designed to assist the pastor and Bible teacher in conveying the significance of God's Word, the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament series treats the literary context and structure of every passage of the New Testament book in the original Greek.

With a unique layout designed to help you comprehend the form and flow of each passage, the ZECNT unpacks:

• The key message.
• The author's original translation.
• An exegetical outline.
• Verse-by-verse commentary.
• Theology in application.

While primarily designed for those with a basic knowledge of biblical Greek, all who strive to understand and teach the New Testament will benefit from the depth, format, and scholarship of these volumes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Nov 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780310555544

Frank S. Thielman

Frank Thielman (PhD, Duke University) is Presbyterian professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of Philippians in the NIV Application Commentary series.

Book preview

Series Introduction

This generation has been blessed with an abundance of excellent commentaries. Some are technical and do a good job of addressing issues that the critics have raised; other commentaries are long and provide extensive information about word usage and catalogue nearly every opinion expressed on the various interpretive issues; still other commentaries focus on providing cultural and historical background information; and then there are those commentaries that endeavor to draw out many applicational insights.

The key question to ask is: What are you looking for in a commentary? This commentary series might be for you if

• you have taken Greek and would like a commentary that helps you apply what you have learned without assuming you are a well-trained scholar.

• you would find it useful to see a concise, one-or two-sentence statement of what the commentator thinks the main point of each passage is.

• you would like help interpreting the words of Scripture without getting bogged down in scholarly issues that seem irrelevant to the life of the church.

• you would like to see a visual representation (a graphical display) of the flow of thought in each passage.

• you would like expert guidance from solid evangelical scholars who set out to explain the meaning of the original text in the clearest way possible and to help you navigate through the main interpretive issues.

• you want to benefit from the results of the latest and best scholarly studies and historical information that help to illuminate the meaning of the text.

• you would find it useful to see a brief summary of the key theological insights that can be gleaned from each passage and some discussion of the relevance of these for Christians today.

These are just some of the features that characterize the new Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament series. The idea for this series was refined over time by an editorial board who listened to pastors and teachers express what they wanted to see in a commentary series based on the Greek text. That board consisted of myself, George H. Guthrie, William D. Mounce, Thomas R. Schreiner, and Mark L. Strauss along with Zondervan senior editor at large Verlyn Verbrugge, and former Zondervan senior acquisitions editor Jack Kuhatschek. We also enlisted a board of consulting editors who are active pastors, ministry leaders, and seminary professors to help in the process of designing a commentary series that will be useful to the church. Zondervan senior acquisitions editor Katya Covrett has now been shepherding the process to completion, and Constantine R. Campbell is now serving on the board.

We arrived at a design that includes seven components for the treatment of each biblical passage. What follows is a brief orientation to these primary components of the commentary.

Literary Context

In this section, you will find a concise discussion of how the passage functions in the broader literary context of the book. The commentator highlights connections with the preceding and following material in the book and makes observations on the key literary features of this text.

Main Idea

Many readers will find this to be an enormously helpful feature of this series. For each passage, the commentator carefully crafts a one- or two-sentence statement of the big idea or central thrust of the passage.

Translation and Graphical Layout

Another unique feature of this series is the presentation of each commentator’s translation of the Greek text in a graphical layout. The purpose of this diagram is to help the reader visualize, and thus better understand, the flow of thought within the text. The translation itself reflects the interpretive decisions made by each commentator in the Explanation section of the commentary. Here are a few insights that will help you to understand the way these are put together:

1. On the far left side next to the verse numbers is a series of interpretive labels that indicate the function of each clause or phrase of the biblical text. The corresponding portion of the text is on the same line to the right of the label. We have not used technical linguistic jargon for these, so they should be easily understood.

2. In general, we place every clause (a group of words containing a subject and a predicate) on a separate line and identify how it is supporting the principal assertion of the text (namely, is it saying when the action occurred, how it took place, or why it took place?). We sometimes place longer phrases or a series of items on separate lines as well.

3. Subordinate (or dependent) clauses and phrases are indented and placed directly under the words that they modify. This helps the reader to more easily see the nature of the relationship of clauses and phrases in the flow of the text.

4. Every main clause has been placed in bold print and pushed to the left margin for clear identification.

5. Sometimes when the level of subordination moves too far to the right—as often happens with some of Paul’s long, involved sentences!—we reposition the flow to the left of the diagram, but use an arrow to indicate that this has happened.

6. The overall process we have followed has been deeply informed by principles of discourse analysis and narrative criticism (for the Gospels and Acts).

Structure

Immediately following the translation, the commentator describes the flow of thought in the passage and explains how certain interpretive decisions regarding the relationship of the clauses were made in the passage.

Exegetical Outline

The overall structure of the passage is described in a detailed exegetical outline. This will be particularly helpful for those who are looking for a way to concisely explain the flow of thought in the passage in a teaching or preaching setting.

Explanation of the Text

As an exegetical commentary, this work makes use of the Greek language to interpret the meaning of the text. If your Greek is rather rusty (or even somewhat limited), don’t be too concerned. All the Greek words are cited in parentheses following an English translation. We have made every effort to make this commentary as readable and useful as possible even for the nonspecialist.

Those who will benefit the most from this commentary will have had the equivalent of two years of Greek in college or seminary. This would include a semester or two of working through an intermediate grammar (such as Wallace, Porter, Brooks and Winbery, or Dana and Mantey). The authors use the grammatical language that is found in these kinds of grammars. The details of the grammar of the passage, however, are discussed only when it has a bearing on the interpretation of the text.

The emphasis in this section of the text is to convey the meaning. Commentators examine words and images, grammatical details, relevant OT and Jewish background to a particular concept, historical and cultural context, important text-critical issues, and various interpretational issues that surface.

Theology in Application

This, too, is a unique feature for an exegetical commentary series. We felt it was important for each author not only to describe what the text means in its various details, but also to take a moment and reflect on the theological contribution that it makes. In this section, the theological message of the passage is summarized. The authors discuss the theology of the text in terms of its place within the book and in a broader biblical-theological context. Finally, each commentator provides some suggestions on what the message of the passage is for the church today. At the conclusion of each volume in this series is a summary of the whole range of theological themes touched on by this book of the Bible.

Our sincere hope and prayer is that you find this series helpful not only for your own understanding of the text of the New Testament, but as you are actively engaged in teaching and preaching God’s Word to people who are hungry to be fed on its truth.

CLINTON E. ARNOLD, general editor

Author’s Preface

C. E. B. Cranfield compared trying to explain Paul’s argument in Romans 9–11 to ascending the North Wall of the Eiger, perhaps the steepest and deadliest technical climb in the Alps.¹ If that is true of Romans 9–11, the challenge of explaining the whole letter is daunting indeed. Cranfield thought that his own magisterial commentary had failed to come anywhere near doing the letter justice.² If my commentary does anything at all to help its readers understand Romans, it will only be through God’s gracious provision of many helpful friends.

I would like to thank Clint Arnold and Tom Schreiner for inviting me to contribute this volume to the ZECNT and to thank Clint and the editorial board for the helpful suggestions they offered for the manuscript’s improvement. I also owe an enormous debt to George Guthrie for help with the diagrams and to Chris Beetham at Zondervan, whose careful editorial work was invaluable. I am grateful to Timothy George, Dean of Beeson Divinity School, and to the Samford University board of trustees for granting me two semester-long sabbaticals, one at the beginning and one at the end of the project, that allowed me to concentrate fully on Romans.

Other friends and family also helped in many ways. My colleague Paul House and my brothers, Sam and Nathan, through a number of enjoyable conversations helped clarify my thinking about Romans, especially its relationship to the Old Testament and its practical application to the Christian life. Nathan and his wife Margaret opened their home near the Duke University libraries to me. My mother, Dorothy Thielman, invited my family and me to visit her often, and her home provided a quiet place to work. Each of my children, Jonathan, his wonderful wife Emily, and my daughters Sarah Jane and Rebekah, took an encouraging interest in the work and helped in practical ways. Fellow members of the small prayer and Bible-study group that have helped nurture my wife, Abby, and me spiritually for many years faithfully prayed for my work on this commentary. I am deeply grateful for their kind interest and support.

In human terms my greatest debt of gratitude, however, is to Abby, my best friend, constant companion, and coworker in the advancement of the gospel. Without her help, wise counsel, and unconditional love I probably could never have written much of anything, and certainly not a commentary on Romans.

My hope for this commentary is simply that it will play the role of a footman, opening the door to Romans and then quickly stepping out of the way so that others might enter the letter itself, sit at the feet of the apostle Paul, and in the apostle’s voice hear the voice of God.

FRANK THIELMAN

Lent 2017

1. C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975–79), 2:445. Cranfield got the image from the Swiss New Testament scholar Ernst Gaugler, Der Römerbrief, 2 vols. (Zürich: Zwingli, 1945–52), 1:327.

2. Cranfield, Romans, 1:x.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations in this volume, and the explanations of them below, generally follow the SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014) and the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic, and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets. Abbreviations for books of the Bible, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Apostolic Fathers, and classical texts do not appear below, but appear in the SBL Handbook of Style.

Introduction

Rome in the Mid-First Century

When Phoebe arrived in Rome in AD 57 carrying Paul’s letter to the Christians there, she entered the nerve center of a vast empire stretching from southern Britain, Gaul, and Spain in the west to Syria in the east, and from the Danube River in the north to the Mediterranean coast of Africa in the south.¹ The emperor, the senate, and the Roman military viewed every place they controlled in this massive area as subservient to the interests of the city of Rome. In the eyes of those who ruled Rome, the gods had given these lands and their peoples to the Romans in order to serve them. Avitus, the Roman prefect of Germany in AD 58, explained the situation to a German leader who appeared before him one day and pled for a homeless tribe of Germans who were starving, asking if they could use a strip of their own ancestral lands along the Danube River that the Romans had left vacant. No, they could not have the land, said Avitus, because the Romans were better than this tribe and the gods had decreed that the Romans should control their ancestral territory (Tacitus, Ann. 13.56.1).²

What were the goals that the Roman senate and people wanted those whom they had conquered to serve? At least in the late 50s AD, the goals seem to have been primarily the honor and survival of Rome’s own citizens and their descendants, preferably in comfortable, entertaining surroundings. The narrative of the Roman historian Tacitus that describes the Roman reconquering of Armenia in AD 58 illustrates those goals and how Rome accomplished them. In that year the Armenian king Tiridates I attempted to retake his people’s ancestral lands, occupied by Rome in the first-century BC. In response, the powerful Roman general Corbulo, believing that the grandeur of Rome was at stake, assembled a large army, and encouraged his troops to strip of his home this vagabond foe . . . to secure alike glory and spoil for Rome (Tacitus, Ann. 13.34, 39).³ Corbulo invaded the fortress town of Volandum, murdered every adult in it, and auctioned off as slaves those who were left alive (Tacitus, Ann. 13.39). Presumably, they were children.

He then moved on to the Armenian capital Artaxata where the population simply opened their gates to the Roman soldiers, offering to give them all their property. Tacitus, writing as a loyal, upper-class Roman about sixty years after the event, states concisely and with no emotion what happened next: The city was fired, demolished and levelled to the ground (Ann. 13.41).⁴ Corbulo could not spare the troops to provide an occupation force for the city, Tacitus explains, and, in any case, If . . . the place were left untouched and unguarded, no advantage or glory would accrue from its capture.⁵ The thunderstorm that descended on the city shortly after the Romans torched it confirmed that its destruction was the right thing to do: Heaven was wroth against it.⁶ The thunderstorm reference seems intended to extinguish any twinge of misgiving about the brutality of Corbulo’s strategy with the reassurance that Jupiter was on the side of Rome. His temple had stood for centuries on Rome’s Capitoline Hill, but his thunderbolts could reach Armenia.

Back in Rome, the following year, the emperor Nero invented something he called the Great Festival at which a series of plays celebrated the eternal existence of the Roman Empire (Suetonius, Nero 11).⁷ As part of the festivities, the Roman historian Suetonius says that Nero handed out lavish gifts to people, 1,000 assorted birds daily, and quantities of food parcels; besides vouchers for grain, clothes, gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, paintings, slaves, transport animals, and even trained wild beasts.⁸ Perhaps among the slaves (listed here between paintings and transport animals) were some of the Armenian children whose parents had been murdered a few months before in Volandum. The anguished face of a young boy taken as war booty under the emperor Marcus Aurelius about a century later and depicted on a triumphal arch in Tripoli, Lybia, vividly expresses the sort of human pain that stands behind the throwaway comments of elite historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius.⁹

Rome was populated with a large number of slaves, many of them war captives or their descendants, from foreign lands. Nero’s advisor Seneca urged elite slave owners like himself not to be too upset if a captive, suddenly reduced to servitude still retains some traces of his freedom and does not run nimbly to mean and toilsome tasks, if sluggish from inaction he does not keep pace with the speed of his master’s horse and carriage, if worn out by daily vigils he yields to sleep, if when transferred to hard labour from service in the city with its many holidays he either refuses the toil of the farm or does not enter into it with energy . . . (Ira 3.29.1).¹⁰

No one knows how many slaves lived in Rome in the late 50s, but the number was high enough that the sales tax on them figured into Nero’s tax reform plan for the city in AD 56 (Tacitus, Ann. 13.31). The conditions in which slaves lived varied widely according to the temperament of their owners and the work they were assigned, but verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, some of it extraordinarily brutal, was the norm.¹¹ Seneca, writing a few years before Paul wrote Romans, urges Stoic restraint in the treatment of the slave. Why are we in such a hurry to flog him at once, to break his legs forthwith? (Ira 3.32.1 [Basore, LCL]).¹² There is no need, he goes on, to call for the whip in the midst of dinner, all because the slaves are talking (Ira 3.35.2 [Basore, LCL]). In the time of Nero, recalcitrant slaves (e.g., those who resisted sexual abuse) were flogged or tattooed on face or forehead.¹³ Two skeletons found, among hundreds of others buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Rome, probably give some idea of what a slave’s life was like. They are of a fourteen-year-old girl and a baby, perhaps that of her master. Her bone structure reveals a lot of running up and down stairs or hills and her teeth show that she suffered from extreme malnutrition.¹⁴

It is no wonder that many slaves yearned for their freedom, and a number of them attained it through a master’s willingness to release them or through saving enough money to purchase themselves. Such former slaves—freedmen and freedwomen–retained some responsibility to their master, but, once freed, it was possible for them to gain significant amounts of wealth and social status. In AD 56, the same year that Nero revoked the sales tax on slaves, the Roman Senate had serious discussions about the irreverent spirit that some in the freedmen class were showing to their former masters (Tacitus, Ann. 13.26).¹⁵ Some, the senators had complained, had gotten carried away with their freedom and were treating their former masters as their equals, even, in some cases, threatening them with violence. Should not power be given to former masters to retract the freedom of surly freedmen?

In its solution to the problem, however, the senate realized that giving masters the power to retract the freedom they had once given to a slave would pose a greater risk to civil order than a few rude freedmen. Many freedmen held important positions in the governmental, religious, and military structure of the city—indeed, quite a few knights and even senators, says Tactitus delicately, derived their origin from no other source (Tacitus, Ann. 13.27).¹⁶ To threaten such people with a return to slavery at the whim of a former master would create more problems than it solved. Instead, it was decided, slave owners should think long and hard before granting freedom to their slaves. They should give it only to the deserving, since once given it could not be retracted.

This debate and the senators’ eventual resolution to it says much about the social fabric of Rome in the late 50s. First, it demonstrates one of the primary expectations that masters had of their freedmen: freedmen were a public sign of their masters’ status and of the honor to which they were due. Freedmen were to remain bound to them as clients, enhancing their honor by respectfully calling on them in the morning both to receive something from their master and, in turn, to receive assignments from the master that would benefit him and his household in various ways. Freedmen would often accompany their former masters when they traveled through the town on important business, and a large number of clients in the retinue of a wealthy person was an important sign of the dignity that he possessed.¹⁷ The problem under debate was generated apparently when a few freedmen became so wealthy and so invested with honor themselves that they could afford to ignore or even insult their former masters.

Second, in its solution to the problem the senate indicates how reliant the city was on the massive number of former slaves that were then playing critical roles in the city’s governance. Many people in Rome at the time of Paul’s letter had experienced the degradation of slavery, and many others had risen out of slavery to possess a measure of freedom and dignity that could sometimes rival even the wealthy freeborn population. Movement between the social classes was not impossible, but class structure was rigidly preserved, and everyone was protective of the honor that their social status gave them.¹⁸ The higher one lived on the social scale, the more benefits one was expected to distribute to others and the more honor one received in return.¹⁹

Most people, whether slave, freedman, freedwoman, or freeborn, were just trying to survive. Although access to the forum, the amphitheater, the circus, and the theater was surprisingly available across the social classes (though seating was strictly arranged according to one’s class) and food was sometimes freely distributed (at least to citizens), life seems to have generally been stressful and short.²⁰ Only seven percent of people reached the age of sixty, about a third of children died before their first birthday, and half died before they reached age five.²¹ Expositio, the abandonment of infants in a relatively safe place in the overoptimistic hope that they would be raised by someone else, was a common form of birth control, at least for healthy infants.²² Those born with some disability were sometimes simply thrown away, as were children of slaves born under an unlucky star or with a weak constitution (Seneca the Elder, Contr. 10.4.16).

Not everyone approved of this. Musonius Rufus, a Stoic philosopher who lived in Rome about the time that Paul’s letter arrived in the city, criticizes the relatively well-off, who are not even able to use poverty as an excuse for exposing children . . . so that the earlier-born ones may be better off (Lecture 15B).²³

As the routine abandonment and murder of children indicate, the fight to survive could be ruthless. Jerry Toner argues that the nonelite in ancient Rome viewed survival as a zero-sum game in which another person’s success depleted the amount of luck available to everyone else, and so working to damage a neighbor’s success could aid one’s own survival.²⁴

The following grave inscription, which shows up more than once, reveals how stressful the struggle to survive was for most people: Bones reposing sweetly, I am not anxious about suddenly being short of food. I do not suffer from arthritis, and I am not indebted because of being behind in my rent. In fact my lodgings are permanent–and free!²⁵

Where did people, in fact, live? Most people in Rome in the mid 50s lived in insulae, islands, that is, large apartment blocks that could reach five stories, but more typically seem to have been three and four stories high.²⁶ Shops usually occupied the first floor and sometimes contained within them an upper mezzanine level that provided living space for the shop owner and his family, although that space would certainly have been low and dark.²⁷

The same was probably true of the lower-rent apartments in the upper levels, which had the added problem of being difficult to escape in a fire. Juvenal describes someone on the first floor of an apartment building shouting ‘Fire!’ but the person up on the third floor doesn’t know anything about it. After all, if the alarm is raised at the bottom of the stairs, the person protected from the rain by only a little roof tile—where the gentle doves produce their eggs—will be the last to burn.²⁸ There were no kitchens, so people either bought hot food from nearby shops or cooked over outdoor grills.²⁹ There was generally no heating system, and Martial, writing in the late first century, could complain that his third-floor apartment on Rome’s Quirinal Hill was a cubbyhole shut in by a window that doesn’t quite close, in which Boreas himself would not care to pass the night (Epigrams 8.14.5 [Bailey, LCL]). Boreas was the god of the north wind.

Light was provided by windows onto the street or an inner courtyard, and access to water and latrines for the whole apartment block was sometimes available on the ground level.³⁰ The Insula of Serapis and the Insula of the Charioteers in Ostia, together with a public bath between them and shops and courtyards on either end, formed their own neighborhood.³¹ Although they are from a later period than Paul’s letter and from Rome’s port town about fifteen miles away, they probably give an accurate, general impression of what many neighborhoods in Rome were like in Paul’s time.³² The archaeological remains of something very much like this apartment-complex neighborhood also showed up in Rome in the 1940s when the Metro stop at the Termini train station was being constructed. Although it comes from the time of Hadrian (emperor, AD 117–38), like some of the the insulae in Ostia it probably reflects how people lived in an earlier period. Here a vast house, clearly the home of the wealthy owner of the surrounding property, existed with rental apartments above it, shops across the street, and a bath complex designed to accommodate the residents of the neighborhood.³³ Those who occupied the lower rent rooms in the upper floors of such neighborhood apartment buildings would have spent little time in their apartments.³⁴ Instead, they would have been outside as much as possible and in constant interaction with others. Life had an inevitably communal nature in such surroundings, says John Stambaugh; people leaned out the windows and looked into the street and into other apartments.³⁵

It was probably this social interaction, leading to social networking, that made life bearable for most Romans. There were not only family groups but numerous larger, more powerful groups that individuals could join and from which they could receive help. There were clubs and trade guilds, always with particular religious associations, in which people helped one another and banded together to accomplish goals that benefited the group’s members.³⁶ In Rome, people with similar occupations tended to occupy the same neighborhood, and it is probable, with the volatile housing market, that people with common interests were sometimes able to occupy the same apartment block or, if numbers were smaller, the same floor in a particular block.³⁷ It is easy to imagine such groups meeting in the larger spaces of an apartment block. Perhaps, if their numbers were high enough or some within their membership were wealthy enough, they could eventually manage to build their own building in which to have their meetings.

At least by the late first-century BC, the Jews of Rome, who lived together primarily in the neighborhood across the Tiber River (Trastevere), were able to build their own Synagogue of the Hebrews, followed by synagogues named after the emperor Augustus and his powerful son-in-law, Marcus Agrippa. These two officials may have either sponsored the construction of the buildings or at least given permission for their construction to a group they favored.³⁸ Sometime in the second half of the first century, perhaps about the time that Paul’s letter arrived in Rome, the Jews a few miles away in Ostia may have finished building their own synagogue, patterning it after the meeting buildings for clubs in Ostia.³⁹

Christianity in Rome in the Mid-First Century

Paul’s letter to the Romans is itself the earliest concrete evidence of Christianity in Rome, but by the time Paul wrote the letter in the mid 50s the city’s Christian community was already famous (1:8) and known for its stability (16:19; cf. 15:14). Paul had never been there, although he had often wanted to go (1:10–13; 15:22–23; Acts 19:21), and he says nothing about how Christianity arrived there.

The only other city in Italy for which there is evidence of Christianity in the fifties is Puteoli (Acts 28:13), about a hundred and thirty miles south of Rome and its busiest coastal port in the mid-first century. It was the place where the grain shipments from Egypt arrived and was well known for funneling products and ideas from the eastern Mediterranean region to Italy. It is the only other city besides Rome where it is certain that a large Jewish community existed (Josephus, J.W. 2.104; Ant. 17.328). Some Jews also lived in Pompeii, and it is now reasonably clear that by AD 63 Christianity existed there too. Yet Pompeii was less than thirty miles from Puteoli, and it is easy to see how Judaism and eventually Christianity could reach Pompeii from the busy port just to its northwest.⁴⁰ Christianity probably entered Italy and made its way to Rome, therefore, by following Judaism along the important east-west trade route that ran through Puteoli.⁴¹

Some of the visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes who were in Jerusalem for the pilgrimage festival of Pentecost shortly after Jesus’s death and resurrection may have brought the gospel back to Rome (Acts 2:10–11; cf. 2:41). In addition, in 16:7 Paul greets Andronicus and Junia and describes them as fellow Jewish Christians who were both well-known apostles and followers of Christ before him. There is no reason to think that they were latecomers to the Roman Christian community, and if they immigrated to Rome from Judea sometime in the 30s or 40s they may have helped spread the gospel there.⁴² Everything, then, points to the origins of Christianity among Jews in Rome in the first half of the first century.

This receives some confirmation from brief and more ambiguous references to Jewish Christianity in Rome in Acts and in Suetonius’s Life of Claudius. Acts 18:2 says that when Paul arrived in Corinth he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. Luke makes no reference to the conversion of Aquila and Priscilla under Paul’s teaching in Corinth, and their willingness to support Paul’s missionary efforts by offering him hospitality and work implies that they were already Christians when they lived in Rome.⁴³

Suetonius adds some detail to this account of Claudius’s expulsion when, in the course of reeling off a series of actions that the emperor Claudius took with respect to foreign people groups he blurts out, Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome (Claud. 25.4 [J. C. Rolfe, LCL]). It is true that Suetonius speaks here of Chrestus, not Christus, and that he writes as if Chrestus were himself in Rome creating trouble, but in light of Luke’s comment about Aquila and Priscilla it seems likely that Suetonius’s statement is a garbled reference to social discord in Rome’s Jewish community created by the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.⁴⁴ If Paul arrived in Corinth in late 49 or early 50 as many scholars believe, then Claudius probably gave his order of expulsion in 49, a date that is corroborated by the fifth-century Christian apologist Paulus Orosius.⁴⁵ It is clear, therefore, that Christianity in Rome took root primarily among the Jewish population of the city and was well established by the time Paul wrote Romans.

If Christianity in Rome originated with Rome’s Jewish community, however, then why did Paul address his letter primarily to gentiles (1:5–6, 13; 11:13; 15:15–16)? Had the expulsion of Jews under Claudius so decimated the Roman Christian community of its Jewish Christians that a group once mainly Jewish had now become dominated by gentiles? Had a small group of Jewish Christians trickled back into Rome after Claudius’s death in 54 and created the tensions over observance of Jewish customs that dominate 14:1–15:7?

Although many interpreters of the letter answer these questions affirmatively, the evidence for this reconstruction probably will not bear the weight placed on it.⁴⁶ Claudius commanded all the Jews to leave Rome (Acts 18:2), but it is unlikely that he rigorously enforced his command.⁴⁷ To expel every Jew from Rome would have involved displacing tens of thousands of people and would have surely made a greater ripple in the historical record had it been strictly enforced.⁴⁸ Tacitus never mentions the expulsion, and despite the claim of Orosius that Josephus gives its date (Historia adversus Paganos 7.6) no extant text of Josephus contains any reference to it. Dio Cassius refers only to Claudius’s prohibition of Jewish meetings in AD 41 and adds that an expulsion would have created too much disorder because of the vast numbers of Jews in the city (Roman History 60.6.6).

The evidence suggests that Claudius issued both the edict in AD 41 and the edict in AD 49 from a need to appear to the public as Rome’s strong bulwark against foreign influences. He seems to have had little will to enforce the edict of AD 49 consistently once it had served its rhetorical purpose.⁴⁹ Some Jewish Christians, such as Aquila and Priscilla, left the city as a result of the edict, but it is not at all clear that the ethnic composition of the Christian community in Rome significantly changed as a result of the number of Jews who left.

It seems more likely that the Roman church was mainly gentile when Paul wrote to it because the numbers of gentile Christians in Rome had simply increased over time. It is probable that many of these gentiles were first attracted to Judaism, like so many other gentiles in Rome in the first century.⁵⁰ The gospel, grounded as it was in Judaism but with its focus on reaching out to all nations, would have been intelligible and attractive to such gentiles, and it seems logical to expect that their numbers would increase (cf., e.g., Acts 8:26–39; 10:1–48; 16:14–15; 17:4, 12). The tensions evident in 14:1–15:7, moreover, certainly had an ethnic component (cf. 15:8–9), but the distinction between the weak and the strong may well not have followed strictly ethnic boundaries.⁵¹ Just as there were many non-Jews in Rome in the mid-first century who followed some Jewish customs, there were undoubtedly more Jewish Christians in Rome than just Prisca and Aquila (16:3–4) who, like Paul, believed they were free from the constraints of the Jewish law (cf. 1 Cor 9:19–23). What probably joined them all together right across their ethnic differences and their differences about the Mosaic law’s interpretation was their knowledge of the Mosaic law and of the Scriptures generally. I am speaking to those who know the law, Paul says in Romans 7:1.

Still, it is likely that when Paul’s letter arrived in Rome most Romans who knew about Christians viewed them as a separate group from the Jews.⁵² Certainly by the time Nero shifted the blame for the great fire of Rome from himself to the Christians only seven years after Paul’s letter arrived, he viewed them as a distinct type of human being (genus hominum) with a particular name (Christiani), and their numbers were large (Suetonius, Nero 16.2; Tacitus, Ann. 15.44).

This ethnically diverse body of Christians probably met in several different places in the city.⁵³ Paul’s concluding greetings (16:3–16) seem to presuppose at least five individual groups of Christians: those who met in the house of Prisca and Aquila (16:5), those associated with the household of Aristobulus (16:10), those associated with the household of Narcissus (16:11b), the brothers and sisters with Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, and Hermas (16:14), and the saints with Philologus, Julia, Nereus, Nereus’s sister, and Olympas (16:15). Apart from Herodion (16:11a), who probably belonged to the household of Aristobulus, it is unlikely that the other people named in the list belonged to any of these groups since they are not named with them. It is also unlikely that they formed a single group, since they are scattered among the other groups. Peter Lampe was correct, then, to conclude that Paul’s greetings assumed at least seven separate clusters of Christians who met in different places.⁵⁴

This fits the pattern of many of the so-called titular churches of Rome (the tituli), twenty of which go back to the third and fourth century.⁵⁵ Their designation as titular derives from the inscription that would have stood over the main entrance of the private building, whether a house or an apartment block, designating the owner of the property where the church met in its earliest existence. It is not that any of these churches can be reliably correlated with house churches of the first century but simply that the pattern they reveal of Christians meeting in various places in the city on private property is similar to the pattern of clusters of Christians meeting in privately owned or rented accommodation that appears in Romans 16.⁵⁶

The titular churches of Rome also reveal the probable geographical concentrations of Christians in the city, and this in turn hints at the social standing of the earliest Roman Christians.⁵⁷ Lampe proposed sensibly that ancient Roman Christians lived mainly in the sections of the city where two or more of these churches exist within a few hundred yards of each other, especially if other factors point to the same places. His analysis concluded that most Christians probably lived in three sections of Rome: the region across the Tiber, the area around the Porta Capena and along the Appian Way, and the Aventine Hill.⁵⁸ The trans-Tiber region was known for its immigrant population, especially its Jewish element, and the Porta Capena where the Appian Way entered the city was the obvious entry point to the city for immigrants from the east.⁵⁹ The Aventine Hill, standing between these two sections, formed a kind of bridge between them.

The Aventine was a pleasant residential area in antiquity, just as it is today, but the other two areas were densely populated, economically distressed neighborhoods.⁶⁰ The trans-Tiber region, or Trastevere, was dominated by warehouses and populated by dock and warehouse workers as well as by those employed in the brickyards just to the north, in the area around the Vatican hill. Trastevere was notorious for its putrid smell because hides were tanned there and the tanning factories used urine from public latrines to cure the hides.⁶¹ Juvenal, writing about sixty years after Paul, could describe the Porta Capena area as dominated by Jewish beggars (Satires 3.12–16). It was the gateway into the city at the end of Italy’s most important road from the south, and so it too was dominated by people who earned a living loading, unloading, and transporting goods.

It is easy to imagine many of Rome’s Christians as relatively poor, hardworking people with roots in the East and speaking Greek as well as or better than Latin. Some of them could have tended shops in large apartment blocks owned by a master or patron and slept and kept a few belongings, perhaps with their families, on a small mezzanine level above their shops or in rooms behind them.⁶² Others might have slept in small apartments on the third or fourth floor of an apartment block, walking down three or four flights of stairs and through narrow, winding streets to their work on docks or in warehouses along the Tiber, or in smelly tanning operations further back from the river, or in the Vatican brickyards to the north.⁶³ If their master or patron were Jewish or a gentile who observed some of the Mosaic law, perhaps they were allowed to rest on Saturday when, at least during Augustus’s rule, not only Jewish but some gentile shop owners closed their shops.⁶⁴ If some gentiles were still doing this in Paul’s time and some of those shop owners were Christians, they could have been among the people Paul describes in 14:5 who considered one day as special over another.

On Sunday, before it was light and shop owners had to get their retail space ready for another day, perhaps one or two of them opened the shop to provide space for Christians in the neighborhood to meet together for prayer, the reading of Scripture, the Lord’s Supper, and collections for the needy.⁶⁵ Or perhaps someone made space available on Sunday evening in one of the upper story rooms of an apartment building.⁶⁶ If the Christians who belonged to the households of Aristobulus and Narcissus were slaves or freedmen and freedwomen who worked within the households of wealthy Roman families (see the commentary on 16:10–11), it is possible to imagine them living in large apartment blocks on the Aventine Hill, overlooking the Tiber or the Circus Maximus. Such apartment blocks might easily have had courtyard space large enough for a fairly large gathering of Christians to hear the long letter from the apostle Paul recently brought by Phoebe, one of his coworkers (16:1–2). It would not have been a burden for Christians from Trastevere and the Porta Capena area to make the half-hour walk up the Aventine Hill to join others who lived there to hear the letter read. A sympathetic insula owner or manager might have allowed it.⁶⁷

It is also possible to imagine that someone rented space in a bath complex in the Porta Capena area or a warehouse along the Tiber in Trastevere for groups of Christians from various communities to come together to hear the apostle’s letter. About a century after Paul’s letter came to Rome, Justin Martyr told the Roman prefect Q. Junius Rusticus (urban prefect from 163–68) that he lived above the baths of Myrtinus and that it was a place of assembly for Christians.⁶⁸ A few decades later still, the person who spun the tales in the Acts of Paul imagined him arriving in Rome and renting a warehouse outside the city as a place for teaching other believers.⁶⁹

Whether Paul envisioned his letter read aloud at many different times to a number of small gatherings of Christians throughout Rome or a few times to larger groups, he seems to have thought of himself as speaking to a large, diverse crowd. His letter is addressed to all who are in Rome, dearly loved by God, called to be holy (1:7), and in the greetings at the end of the letter he urges the whole group to greet certain smaller groups of believers or individuals that he knows personally or by reputation (16:3–16).

Some of these were Jewish Christians, many were probably gentiles, some had Latin names, some Greek, and judging from the names themselves (e.g., Urbanus, Herodion, Persis, Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Hermas) many had slavery, with all the violence that entailed, somewhere in their background. In addition, Paul explains the gospel so frequently in the letter with the help of an unbelieving Jewish interlocutor (e.g., 2:17–29; 9:19–20; 11:1) that it is difficult not to think he imagined a few unbelieving Jews in the audience. It is true that this interlocutor was a fictional pedagogical device intended primarily to aid in Christian instruction, but Paul, writing from Corinth, was familiar with a situation in which unbelievers and inquirers walked off the street and into the places where Christians assembled (1 Cor 14:16, 23, 25), and it is likely that he imagined this happening in Rome also.⁷⁰ The letter is designed primarily to strengthen and unify Roman Christians in all their diversity, but it’s explanation of the gospel is so clear and detailed that it must have functioned as a first step in discharging Paul’s desire, indeed obligation, to preach the gospel to Greeks, barbarians, wise, foolish, Jew, and gentile in Rome (1:14–16).

The Setting of Romans in Paul’s Ministry

When Paul wrote Romans, he had preached the gospel in a meandering line (κύκλῳ) from Jerusalem in Judea to Illyricum, the Latin-speaking area directly across the Adriatic Sea from Italy (15:19). He felt that his work in the east was complete, and he was now setting his sights on Rome and then, with the help of the Roman Christians, Spain (15:23–24). But before he made his way west, he told his audience, he must first complete an act of service to poverty-stricken Jewish Christians in Jerusalem (15:25). The mainly gentile Christians in Macedonia and Achaia had contributed to this relief aid, and delivery of it would show that gentile believers in these regions understood their spiritual indebtedness to Israel (15:26–27).

This travelogue meshes tightly with the narrative of Paul’s travels in Acts 19 and 20. There Luke says that sometime during his three years in Ephesus, Paul resolved in the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying ‘After I have been there, I must also see Rome’ (Acts 19:21). It is clear from Paul’s Corinthian correspondence that his path from Ephesus to Macedonia and Achaia was complicated, and Luke does not describe the complexities, but Luke and Paul agree that he ended up in Macedonia and finally Greece (Acts 20:1–3) or Achaia as Paul calls it.⁷¹ While Paul was in Macedonia, he may have also traveled west to neighboring Dalmatia (cf. 2 Tim 4:10), which was part of the province of Illyricum and the northern end of Paul’s meandering line of gospel proclamation according to Romans 15:19. If so, Luke omits that detail, perhaps to keep the focus on Paul’s eastward movement toward Jerusalem.

According to Luke, Paul spent three months in Greece, and when he departed on his journey to Jerusalem he took with him a group of people from a variety of cities in Macedonia, Galatia, and Asia (Acts 20:3–4). Luke does not say why this geographically diverse group accompanied Paul, but it is easy to determine this from Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. There he plans for individuals from each of the churches that contributed to his collection for the poor in Jerusalem to accompany him on the journey (1 Cor 16:4; 2 Cor 8:19; 9:4). All this makes it virtually certain that Paul wrote Romans during the three-month stay in Greece described in Acts 20:2–3.

The city from which Paul wrote, moreover, was clearly Corinth. Phoebe, whom Paul commends in 16:1–2, and who probably carried the letter to Rome, was from Cenchreae. This town was the port of Corinth and only seven miles to its southeast, on the Saronic Gulf.⁷² It was the port through which Paul himself passed when he left Corinth for Syria (Acts 18:18). Paul also sends greetings from Gaius and Erastus (Rom 16:23), and although these were not uncommon names, it seems likely they refer to the same people mentioned elsewhere with these names who were involved with Paul’s ministry and had associations with Corinth (Acts 19:22; 1 Cor 1:14; 2 Tim 4:20).

A good case can be made that Paul’s three months in Corinth spanned the winter months of AD 56–57. This is the date one reaches by correlating the information about Paul’s movements in Acts 18–20 with the most likely date for the year during which L. Junius Annaeus Gallio was proconsul of Achaia. At some point toward the end of his first stay in Corinth, Paul appeared before Gallio (Acts 18:11–17). An inscription from Delphi (in Achaia) and dated almost certainly to AD 52 calls Gallio the friend and proconsul of the emperor Claudius.⁷³ Proconsuls typically served for one year, beginning exactly halfway through the year (July 1), and under Claudius they sailed from Rome for their overseas assignments on April 1. Gallio, then, must have sailed from Rome to Achaia in the spring of AD 51 and, if he was a typical proconsul, left office at the end of June AD 52. All this means that Paul probably appeared before him in Corinth sometime during AD 51–52.

It is reasonable to think of this happening shortly after Gallio arrived in midsummer AD 51. Jewish opponents of Paul brought him before Gallio, hoping that the proconsul would punish Paul for persuading people to worship God contrary to the law (Acts 18:13). Gallio summarily dismissed the case, making it clear that he had no intention of getting involved in the internal affairs of Corinth’s Jewish community (Acts 18:14–17). Had Gallio been in Corinth more than a few months, the Jews would likely have known he would not hear such a case and would not have wasted their efforts on an accusation doomed to failure.⁷⁴

Luke says that after his encounter with Gallio Paul stayed many days longer in Corinth and then sailed for Syria (18:18). It is not clear whether Luke counted these many days within the year and six months Paul stayed in Corinth during his first visit (Acts 18:11), nor is it clear whether many days refers to several weeks or months, or even a year.⁷⁵ The flow of the narrative gives the impression, however, that Luke included the Gallio incident within the year and six-month total and that the many days was a relatively short period of time after the Gallio incident–enough to show that the Roman proconsul did not impede Paul’s work in Corinth, but not a matter of months or a year.⁷⁶ Otherwise Luke would have used those calendar terms, just as he did in 18:11, rather than days.⁷⁷

If Paul left Corinth for Syria in the late summer or early autumn, before the harsh winter months made sailing on the Mediterranean risky, then he left in the latter half of the year 51 and probably spent the winter months of 51–52 in Caesarea, Syrian Antioch, and traveling overland through southern Galatia (Acts 18:22–23).⁷⁸ He eventually came to Ephesus, probably in the spring of 52 (Acts 19:1), and spent about three years there (Acts 19:10; 20:31), leaving sometime in the spring or summer months of AD 55. Paul stayed longer than he had originally planned in Macedonia, something that Luke does not mention (Acts 19:21; 20:1–2) but is implied by Paul’s reference to preaching in Illyricum (Dalmatia) in Rom 15:19 (cf. 2 Tim 4:10) and by the composition of 2 Corinthians from Macedonia. He then arrived in Greece (Acts 20:2), and it was from there, in the winter months of AD 56–57, that he wrote Romans.

Paul’s Purposes in Writing Romans

Why would Paul write such a long letter, most of it devoted to a closely argued presentation of the gospel, to Christians in a city he had never visited (1:10, 13; 15:22)? Like the argument of Romans itself, the answer to this question is complex.⁷⁹ It is best to begin, however, with the reasonably clear statement that Paul gives near the letter’s opening about his purpose for writing. Paul says in 1:13 that he wants to come to Rome to have some fruit among the Roman Christians since they are (primarily) gentiles and God has made him a messenger of the gospel to the gentiles (cf. 1:5–6).⁸⁰ People from all walks of life live in Rome (Greeks . . . barbarians, . . . sophisticated . . . foolish; v. 14), and no shame is attached to the gospel’s proclamation, he explains, so he is enthusiastic about announcing God’s good news there (v. 15–16a).

If Paul had stopped there, it might be legitimate to question whether anything about Paul’s purpose in writing the letter can be gleaned from such statements: he is describing why he wants to come to Rome, not why