1. The Theme Of The Gospel: The Righteousness Of God Revealed (1:16–17)
1. The Theme Of The Gospel: The Righteousness Of God Revealed (1:16–17)
W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel (1882), pp. 71f. So, when Isaiah condemns the corrupt judges who ‘acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right’ (Isa. 5:23), he refers to legal decisions; he does not mean that the righteous man is made intrinsically unrighteous. But God’s word is a self-fulfilling word: when he declares someone to be in the right, that person is in the right. See G. Quell and G. Schrenk, TDNT II, pp. 174–225 (s.v.dikē, dikaios, etc.).
Or, to use a modern expression, ‘in the clear’—with which may be compared God’s insistence in the Old Testament that he ‘will by no means clear the guilty’ (Exod. 34:7; see also note on Rom. 4:5, p. 118). Discussing a Neo-Melanesian (‘Pidgin’) version of the new Testament for Papua New Guinea, H. K. Moulton says, ‘We salute strokes of genius such as the translation of “Justification”: “God e spik em olrite’ ” (The Bible in the World, Jan.–Feb. 1963, p. 10; Sept. 1967, p. 15).
From the ‘Hymn of the Initiants’; cf. also the translation of G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (1962), pp. 89–94.
The Epistle to the Romans, I, p. 32, with Excursus, ‘From Faith to Faith’, pp. 363–374.
MT ‘the righteous one shall live by his faith (fulness)’; LXX ‘… by my faithfulness’ (or ‘by faith in me’). One group of LXXMSS attaches the pronoun ‘my’ to ‘righteous one’, whence Heb. 10:38, ‘my righteous one shall live by faith.’
Cf. G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, p. 237.
In the Syriac New Testament this is the term used in the two phrases ‘the words of this Life’ (Acts 5:20) and ‘the message of this salvation’ (Acts 13:26).
A. M. Hunter, Interpreting Paul’s Gospel (1954), p. 9; see p. 47, above.
