From the prologue to Romans in Tyndale’s English New Testament (1534 edition).
See comments on Rom. 15:25–32 (pp. 262–265).
See Acts 22:28, ‘I was born a citizen.’
Other suggestions of the purpose of the letter are made by some contributors to The Romans Debate, ed. K. P. Donfried (1977).
F. J. Foakes-Jackson, Peter, Prince of Apostles (1927), p. 195.
Pro Flacco 66.
History 7.6.15f. According to Dio Cassius (History 60.6), Claudius had already imposed some restrictions on the Roman Jews at the beginning of his principate: ‘As the Jews had again increased in numbers, but could not easily be expelled from the city because there were so many of them, he did not actually drive them out but forbade them to meet in accordance with their ancestral customs.’ See F. F. Bruce, New Testament History (1971), pp. 279–282.
Life of Nero 16.2.
Cf. G. Edmundson, The Church in Rome in the First Century (1913), pp. 80, 84; T. W. Manson, Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (1962), pp. 37–40.
Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 20.5. Cf. M. Black, The Scrolls and Christian Origins (1961), pp. 114f.
Tacitus, Annals 13.32.3–5.
Satire 3.62.
Tacitus, Annals 15.44.5.
Tertullian, Apology 50.
This description comes from the preface of Ignatius’s Letter to the Romans (c. AD 110).
The title of a lecture first published in BJRL 31 (1948), pp. 224–240, reprinted in T. W. Manson, Studies in the Gospels and Epistles (1962), pp. 225–241, and in K. P. Donfried (ed.), The Romans Debate (1977), pp. 1–16.
This one church, in Manson’s view, was Ephesus: Paul designed Romans 1–15 for Rome, but added chapter 16, to a copy which he sent to Ephesus. This I find improbable (see pp. 266–268). Much more improbable is the theory that the letter to the Romans, as we know it, is the expansion of an earlier general letter ‘written by St. Paul, at the same time as Galatians, to the mixed Churches which had sprung up round Antioch and further on in Asia Minor’ (K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, 1914, p. 363; cf. F. C. Burkitt, Christian Beginnings, 1924, pp. 126–128).
Paul himself took some initial steps to secure a wider circulation of some of his letters; cf. his directions in Colossians 4:16 that the Colossian and Laodicean churches should exchange letters received from him. His letter to the Galatians was sent to several churches. It is implied in Galatians 6:11 that originally the one MS was taken from church to church, rather than that one was sent to each church; but some of the Galatians churches would make copies for themselves before passing it on. The letter to the ‘Ephesians’ was probably composed as an encyclical, and may have been despatched in a number of copies, with blanks left in verse 1 for the address to be supplied—in one early copy the address supplied in the blank space was evidently ‘Laodicea’. Between the original reception of Paul’s letters and the publication of the corpus Paulinum there may have been smaller, regional collections, such as a collection of the letters sent to the churches of Macedonia (1 and 2 Thessalonians and Philippians) and one of those sent to the province of Asia (Philemon, Colossians and Ephesians).
G. Zuntz thinks that the corpus was compiled and published at Alexandria; it was evidently a critical edition, showing signs of ‘dependence upon the scholarly Alexandrian methods of editorship’ (The Text of the Epistles, 1954, pp. 14–17, 276–279). This is at least more probable than the once popular view that it was compiled in Ephesus (cf. E. J. Goodspeed, Introduction to the New Testament, 1937, pp. 217–219; C. L. Mitton, The formation of the Pauline Corpus of Letters, 1955, pp. 44–49), a romantic embellishment of which was J. Knox’s thesis that the prime mover in the compilation of the corpus was Onesimus, bishop of Ephesus c. AD 100 and former slave to Philemon (Philemon among the Letters of Paul, 1935, 31960).
This is said in awareness of the view about the Marcionite prefaces expressed by J. Regul, Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe (1969), pp. 13, 85, 88–94.
F. G. Kenyon (ed.), The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, fasc. 3, Supplement (1936), pp. xvff.
G. Zuntz, The Text of the Epistles, pp. 15, 278–280.
The text of this ancient MS (the ancestor of 1739) agrees with that known to Origen, especially in Romans; the MS may have belonged to the great library of Pamphilus in Palestinian Caesarea.
It is noteworthy that nearly all these witnesses (including P46) are of Egyptian provenance.
d is the Latin text of the bilingual codex D (see next note); it is independent of the accompanying Greek text.
D is the sixth-century Graeco-Latin Codex Claromontanus. It was closely related to the common ancestor of F (Augiensis) and G (Boernerianus), ninth-century Graeco-Latin codices (their Latin texts, f and g, unlike d, have no independent value). See H. J. Frede, Altlateinische Paulus-Handschriften (1964).
The Text of the Epistles, pp. 269–283.
An eleventh-century MS in the Bodleian Library, related to 1739.
G’s sister-codex F lacks Rom. 1:1–3:19, so its evidence is not available for 1:7, 15.
In the Vulgate MSS 1648, 1792 and 2089 the letter ends at 14:23, followed by a benediction and the doxology.
For Marcion’s point of view, see pp. 28–29.
Cf. Corssen, ‘Zur Überlieferung des Römerbriefes’, ZNW 10 (1909), p. 9.
Alternatively, in an edition intended for liturgical purposes, chapter 16 with its many personal messages might have been omitted as superfluous. Certainly no other letter of Paul ends as chapter 15 does.
F. C. Burkitt curiously held that 14:23 ‘is a real conclusion: nothing but a Doxology is really in place after it’, and supposed that 15:1–13 was ‘a weld, a join, an adaptation’, by means of which Paul attached the following personal details when he expanded his earlier circular letter (see p. 27, n. 16) and sent the expanded form to Rome (Christian Beginnings, p. 127).
For Harnack’s view that the doxology was composed by later Marcionites to round off this edition, see pp. 280f.
It has been argued that Marcion’s text lacked also Romans 1:19–2:1 and 3:31–4:25 (cf. T. Zahn, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons, ii, 1892, p. 516; A. Harnack, Marcion, 21924, pp. 48, 103*, 104*).
So says T. W. Manson (Studies in the Gospels and Epistles, p. 230), whose conjecture it is. He would explain the omission of ‘in Ephesus’ from Ephesians 1:1 in the same way, since it was ‘at Rome and Ephesus that Marcion received his two great and humiliating rebuffs’; but this explanation is much less probable for Eph. 1:1 than it is for Rom. 1:7, 15. The context in Romans, as he says, ‘imperatively demands a particular reference to a well-known community not founded by Paul or hitherto visited by him’ (op. cit., p. 229), and indeed this could only be Rome. But almost any other place-name within Paul’s Gentile mission-field could stand in place of Ephesus in Eph. 1:1 without doing violence to the context. Ephesians was evidently designed from the first as a circular letter, a blank being left in the opening salutation which could be filled in with any appropriate place-name. Marcion evidently knew it in an edition which read ‘in Laodicea’ where the majority text has ‘in Ephesus’. Some place-name, preceded by the preposition ‘in’, had to be supplied, as the construction is not Greek otherwise.
See H. Gamble, The Textual History of the Letter to the Romans (1977).
C. H. Buck, Jr, ‘The Date of Galatians’, JBL 70 (1951), p. 116.
‘Or rather’, he goes on, ‘… it is the first study of a single figure, which is worked into a group in the latter writing’ (Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 1865, p. 49).
Cf. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians (1982), pp. 83f., 176.
Cf. 1 Cor. 15:11 for Paul’s witness that he and the Jerusalem apostles preached the same basic message.
An echo of Ps. 143:2; cf. Rom. 3:20 (p. 104).
On the two orders see pp. 48–59, below.
Quoted from Gen. 15:6; cf. Rom. 4:3 (pp. 115–118).
Gal. 3:10, quoting Deut. 27:26.
Gal. 4:6; cf. Rom. 8:15 (see pp. 166–168).
Cf. Rom. 12:9–21; 13:8–10 (pp. 227–229, 239–240).
C. H. Buck, Jr., ‘The Date of Galatians’, pp. 121f.: this conclusion, he says, ‘seems inescapable’ after a comparison of 2 Cor. 1–9, where only the ‘flesh/spirit’ antithesis appears, with Galatians, where Paul uses both this and the ‘works/faith’ antithesis. Galatians is accordingly later than 2 Cor. 1–9, he finds, because if Paul had already formulated the ‘works/faith’ antithesis in his mind before he wrote 2 Cor. 1–9, he could scarcely have avoided using it there at least once in view of the ‘vehement anti-legal position’ he takes up in those chapters. I have tried to show elsewhere (The Epistle to the Galatians, pp. 48f.) that this conclusion is not so inescapable as is claimed. For earlier statements on the polemical origin of Paul’s message of justification by faith see W. Wrede, Paul, E.T. (1907), p. 123; W. Heitmüller, Luthers Stellung in der Religionsgeschichte des Christentums (1917), pp. 19f.; cf. the discussion in K. Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze ii (1928), pp. 18f.
Cf. S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel (21984); R. Y. K. Fung, ‘The Relationship between Righteousness and Faith in the Thought of Paul, as expressed in the Letters to the Galatians and the Romans’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester (1975); ‘Justification by Faith in 1 & 2 Corinthians’, in Pauline Studies, ed. D. A. Hagner and M. J. Harris (1980), pp. 246–261.
See Rom. 9:32–33 (pp. 196–198).
See Rom. 4:25 (pp. 123–124).
See G. Bornkamm, ‘The Revelation of Christ to Paul on the Damascus Road and Paul’s Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation’, in Reconciliation and Hope: Essays presented to L. L. Morris, ed. R. J. Banks (1974), pp. 90–103.
Habakkuk 2:4b, quoted in Gal. 3:11 and Rom. 1:17 (see pp. 85–87).
See J. Buchanan, The Doctrine of Justification (1867, reprinted 1951); J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (1972). Paul whole-heartedly believed in the implanting of a righteous character, but as something logically subsequent to, and distinguished from, the conferment of a righteous status. Reformed theology has generally distinguished the two by calling the latter ‘justification’ (the subject of Rom. 1:17; 3:19–5:21) and the former ‘sanctification’ (the subject of Rom. 6–8). Failure to observe this distinction leads to confusion in the interpretation of Paul. While the distinction—between justification by faith as the initial act of God’s grace and sanctification as the following and continuous work of his grace—is commonly viewed as characteristically Lutheran and Reformed doctrine, there is ample evidence that justification by faith alone was understood and held before and alongside Luther and the Reformers. The Reformed doctrine had been anticipated at almost every point by the Lady Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century. In the first half of the sixteenth century it was expounded by several theologians in the papal camp (especially in Italy). When Cardinal Gaspare Contarini wrote a treatise on justification by faith alone, the English Cardinal Reginald Pole congratulated him on being the first to bring to light ‘that holy, fruitful, indispensable truth’. It was the Council of Trent that checked this trend on the papal side. Despite Pole’s exhortation ‘not to reject an opinion simply because it was held by Luther’, the Council in 1546 defined justification in terms which confused it with sanctification and made it dependent on works as well as faith, and anathematized point by point those who affirmed the Reformed—or rather the Pauline—doctrine. See Acta Concilii Tridentini, Sessio VI (‘De iustificatione’); also L. von Ranke, History of the Popes, E.T., I.ii (1908), pp. 109, 113, 158–160. More recently it has been argued, e.g. by the Roman Catholic theologians W. H. van der Pol and Hans Küng (cf. especially the latter’s Justification, E.T., 1964, with introduction by Karl Barth), that it was not the biblical doctrine of justification ‘by faith alone’ that the Council condemned, but the Reformers’ ‘external’ interpretation of that doctrine, and that the Tridentine formulations (conditioned as they were by the polemical situation) have been misunderstood by Protestants as teaching a synergistic soteriology. There is a concise (pre-Vatican II) critique of this account of the matter in G. C. Berkouwer, Recent Developments in Roman Catholic Thought (1958), pp. 56–63.
A. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, E.T. (1931), pp. 220f.
C. A. A. Scott, Christianity according to St. Paul (1927), pp. 17f.
Excellent treatments of these terms are given by E. Schweizer and others in TDNT VI, pp. 332–455 (article pneuma, ‘spirit’); VII, pp. 98–151 (article sarx, ‘flesh’); also pp. 1024–1094 (article sōma, ‘body’).
Because RSV (like NEB and NIV) sometimes renders these terms (and their Greek equivalent sarx) on a ‘meaning-for-meaning’ basis, some references below (as indicated) are to RV, which renders them uniformly by the literal ‘flesh’.
In these two places ‘flesh’ denotes not only natural descent but also the state of our Lord’s earthly existence before he was glorified (see pp. 68f., 175f.).
‘Flesh’ appears in this sense in the Old Testament as, for example, when Abimelech says to his Shechemite kinsmen, ‘Remember also that I am your bone and your flesh’ (Judg. 9:2).
The Corinthian Christians, though they were indwelt corporately and individually by the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19), were not spiritual but ‘men of the flesh’ (1 Cor. 3:1, 3).
Cf. also Rom. 6:6, ‘our old self was crucified with him’, which has a somewhat different meaning (see p. 142).
In Gal. 2:20 (‘the life I now live in the flesh’), ‘in the flesh’ means ‘in mortal body’. The phrase (en sarki) is the same as in Rom. 8:8, but it has no such pejorative force in Gal. 2:20 as it has there.
One important occurrence of the phrase ‘according to the flesh’ (kata sarka) is in 2 Cor. 5:16, ‘Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more’ (RV; RSV renders the phrase ‘from a human point of view’). These words have been so regularly misapplied that it is worth emphasizing here that Paul does not deprecate any interest in the earthly life of Christ, or suggest that the other apostles’ companionship with him during his ministry was now irrelevant, and of no religious advantage; he contrasts rather his own present estimate of Christ with his estimate before his conversion, as NEB makes clear: ‘With us therefore worldly standards have ceased to count in our estimate of any man; even if once they counted in our understanding of Christ, they do so now no longer.’ It is in the light of Christ’s exaltation, and of the new creation inaugurated by his triumph over death, that his earthly ministry must be evaluated; but in this light the importance of his earthly ministry is enhanced, not diminished.
Cf. Gal. 5:16, ‘walk by the Spirit, and you will by no means fulfil the desire of the flesh’ (see p. 159, n. 22).
What Paul says about the ‘flesh’ in the sense of unregenerate human nature must not be taken as applying to the physical body. Of the ‘flesh’ in that sense he has nothing good to say; but the believer’s body, while formerly used by the master-power of sin as an instrument of unrighteousness (Rom. 6:13), can be presented to God as a ‘living sacrifice’ for the doing of his will (Rom. 12:1), is indwelt by his Spirit (Rom. 8:11; cf. 1 Cor. 6:19–20), and will one day be redeemed from mortality and invested with glory (Rom. 8:23; cf. Phil. 3:21). Paul does not share the Greek depreciation of the body as the fetter or prison-house of the soul. See also W. D. Stacey, The Pauline View of Man (1956); R. Jewett, Paul’s Anthropological Terms (1971).
Cf. A. R. Johnson, The Vitality of the Individual in the Thought of Ancient Israel (1949), pp. 26–39.
Among other usages, not listed above, there are a few occurrences of the word to denote ‘spirit-beings’ or ‘spiritual powers’ such as ‘the spirit of the world’ (1 Cor. 2:12), ‘the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience’ (Eph. 2:2) or the spirits (not always the Spirit of God) by whose inspiration prophets speak (1 Cor. 12:10); or to denote a personal disposition, e.g. ‘a spirit of stupor’ (Rom. 11:8).
Lit. ‘in newness of spirit and not in oldness of letter’. Cf. 2 Cor. 3:6, where Paul and his colleagues are ‘ministers of a new covenant; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ (RV). The allusion to the new covenant of Jer. 31:31–34, explicit in 2 Cor. 3:6, is implicit in other places where ‘letter’ and ‘spirit’ are thus contrasted. The antithesis Spirit/letter is common to Romans and 2 Corinthians, as the antithesis Spirit/flesh is common to Romans and Galatians. See pp. 149–150, 163–164.
The ‘spirit’ of Rom. 12:11 is the human spirit in AV (‘fervent in spirit’), NEB (‘in ardour of spirit’), and probably NIV (‘keep your spiritual fervour’), but the Spirit of God in RSV (‘be aglow with the Spirit’).
Compare the distinction in 1 Cor. 15:44–46 between the present mortal body, which is a ‘physical body’ (sōma psychikon, lit. ‘soulish body’, AV ‘natural body’), and the resurrection body, which is a ‘spiritual body’ (soma pneumatikon).
W. Barclay, Flesh and Spirit (1962), p. 14.
Cf. 1 Cor. 15:45b; 2 Cor. 3:17a. N. Q. Hamilton speaks of this identification of the Spirit with the ascended Lord as ‘dynamic’ but not ‘ontological’ (The Holy Spirit and Eschatology in Paul, 1957, p. 6). E. Käsemann describes the Spirit as ‘the earthly praesentia of the ascended Lord’ (RGG3 ii, 1958, col. 1274, s.v. ‘Geist’). See F. F. Bruce, ‘Christ and Spirit in Paul’, BJRL 59 (1976–77)’ pp. 259–285.
See G. Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (1882, reprinted 1958), pp. 71–7771–77; E. F. Kevan, The Saving Work of the Holy Spirit (1953).
Cf. Gal. 6:8b, ‘he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.’
This ascription of an intercessory ministry both to the exalted Christ and to the indwelling Spirit is paralleled by the twofold use of ‘paraclete’ or ‘advocate’ in the Johannine writings: ‘Jesus Christ the righteous’ is his people’s ‘advocate with the Father’ (1 John. 2:1), and the Spirit is ‘another … Advocate’ (John. 14:16, NEB), sent by the Father to remain with and in believers.
The redeemed body of the resurrection is a ‘spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15:44, 46). In 2 Cor. 5:4–5 the present gift of the Spirit is the ‘guarantee’ of the time when believers will be ‘clothed’ with their ‘heavenly dwelling’, when mortality will be ‘swallowed up by life’.
Memoir of Anthony Norris Groves, ed. H. Groves (1869), p. 418.
See G. Vos, ‘The Eschatological Aspect of the Pauline Conception of the Spirit’, in Princeton Seminary Biblical and Theological Studies (1912), pp. 209–259; The Pauline Eschatology (1952), pp. 58–61.
Cf. Gal. 5:5, ‘Through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness.’ So, in Eph. 1:13–14, believers are said to have been ‘sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, which is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it’ (cf. Eph. 4:30).
But even here C. K. Barrett (The Epistle to the Romans, 1957, p. 149) sees, as elsewhere throughout chapter 7, the law of Moses: he quotes J. Denney’s paraphrase (ad loc.): ‘This is what I find the law—a life under the law—to amount to in my experience: when I wish to do good, evil is present with me.’
To the second, third and fourth of these correspond the three uses of the law in Lutheran tradition: as a means of preservation, as a summons to repentance, as guidance for the church (Formula of Concord, 1576, article 6). Luther himself, in contrast to his followers, taught only two uses of the law—the ‘theological’ or ‘spiritual’ use (usus theologicus or spiritualis) and the ‘political’ or ‘civil’ use (usus politicus or civilis.).
‘Pray for the welfare of the government’, said Rabbi Hanina, deputy high priest (Paul’s contemporary), ‘since were it not for their fear of it men would swallow one another alive’ (Pirqe Aboth 3.2).
A. R. Vidler, Christ’s Strange Work (1944), p. 14.
See also P. Fairbairn, The Revelation of Law in Scripture (1869, reprinted 1957); C. H. Dodd, Gospel and Law (1951); T. W. Manson, Ethics and the Gospel (1960); G. A. F. Knight, Law and Grace (1962); E. F. Kevan, The Grace of Law (1964); C. E. B. Cranfield, ‘St. Paul and the Law’, SJT Supp 17 (1964), pp. 43–68; C. F. D. Moule, ‘Obligation in the Ethic of Paul’, in Christian History and Interpretation: Studies presented to John Knox, ed. W. R. Farmer, C. F. D. Moule, R. R. Niebuhr (1967), pp. 389–406; H. Hübner, Law in Paul’s Thought, E. T. (1985); H. Räisänen, Paul and the Law (1983); E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law and the Jewish People (1983); W. D. Davies, ‘Paul and the Law’, Jewish and Pauline Studies (1984), pp. 91–122.
On the child’s lips these words may have been part of a game, meaning something like ‘Pick up and choose’; but they conveyed another message to Augustine.
Augustine, Confessions 8.29.
Here Luther shows signs of help received from Augustine (On the Spirit and the Letter, 15).
From the preface to the Wittenberg edition of his Latin works (1545); cf. Luther’s Works, American edition, 34 (1960), pp. 336f.
Earlier still, in 1496, John Colet (later Dean of St Paul’s) returned from Italy to his own University of Oxford and (though he had no theological degree and was not even in deacon’s orders) delivered a course of lectures on the letters of Paul, and primarily on Romans, which deeply impressed many of his hearers. He made a clean break with the exegetical methods of the mediaeval schoolmen and expounded the text in accordance with the plain sense of the words, viewed in relation to their historical situation. Erasmus and More were both influenced by Colet; to him Erasmus owed much of his insight into the true principles of biblical interpretation.
J. Wesley, Journal, i (1872 edition), p. 103. See p. 169, below (on 8:17) for his own assessment (in Pauline terms) of what was involved in his ‘conversion’ experience.
K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, E.T. (1933), p. 2.
K. Barth, Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes (1927), preface.
Karl Adam, in Das Hochland, June 1926, as quoted by J. McConnachie, ‘The Teaching of Karl Barth’, Hibbert Journal 25 (1926–27), pp. 385f.
