Epistle to the Romans

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The Epistle to the Romans is the longest letter attributed to the apostle Paul and the most sustained statement of his thought, addressed to the Christian community at Rome around the late 50s of the first century. Unlike most of his correspondence, it was written to a church Paul had neither founded nor visited; the letter introduces him and his message ahead of a journey he hoped to make, and in doing so it lays out his theology at greater length than anywhere else. Where his other letters answer crises in congregations he knew — a quarrel, a scandal, a question put to him directly — this one arrives unbidden into a city he had only heard about, written to win a hearing among strangers. It is the nearest thing in the early movement to a considered treatise, though it never stops being a letter, addressed to people named one by one and meant to be carried by hand.

The occasion

The setting can be reconstructed from the letter’s own seams. Paul writes from the east, his work in the Aegean provinces behind him, and he tells the Roman believers what he intends next: to deliver a collection of money gathered from the Gentile churches to the poor among the saints in Jerusalem, and then, at last, to come west — to Rome, and beyond it to Spain, where the gospel has not been preached. Rome is a way station in this plan, a base he hopes will support the next leg. The letter is, among other things, an introduction of himself to a congregation whose backing he wants and whose theology he does not control. He had not planted this church and could claim no authority over it; he could only set out his message in full and let it speak.

The place of writing is almost certainly Corinth, where Paul spent a final stretch before sailing for Jerusalem. The internal evidence points there plainly. He commends to the Romans a woman named Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae — the eastern port of Corinth — and the natural reading is that she carried the letter to Rome herself, a courier entrusted with the most demanding text the movement had yet produced. Near the end, the man who physically wrote it breaks in to greet the readers in his own name: Tertius, the scribe to whom Paul dictated, a rare moment in which the amanuensis steps out from behind the voice he is recording. The body of the letter is Paul’s; the hand is another’s, and for one verse the hand signs its work.

Then comes the long roster of greetings — more than two dozen names, men and women, some Jewish, some Gentile, slaves and freed and patrons, several households that hosted gatherings in their own rooms. Among them are Prisca and Aquila, the couple Paul had worked beside in the tentmaking trade and who now keep a church in their house at Rome. The list is not decoration. It is a map of how far and how fast the new movement had threaded itself through the households of the empire’s capital before any apostle of stature had set foot there. The text was meant to be read aloud to a gathered congregation, not studied in private; it would have reached most of these people through the ear, in a single sitting or a few, as the spoken argument of an absent teacher.

A primary witness

Scholars count Romans among the seven letters whose Pauline authorship is not seriously disputed — with First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, First Thessalonians, and Philemon — which makes it a primary witness to the earliest Christian thinking, earlier than the gospels in their written form. When Paul dictated it, no narrative of Jesus’s life yet circulated as a book. What the New Testament later gathered into a sequence that opens with the gospels was composed in the reverse of that order: the letters came first, and Romans stands near the head of them in weight if not in date. It is a document from inside the first generation, written by a man who had not known Jesus in the flesh but staked everything on what he held God had done through him — and who worked out, in this letter more than any other, what that doing meant for the whole human race, Jew and Gentile alike.

The argument

Its argument turns on a single problem: how a person is set right before God. Paul opens by stating the thesis without apology — the gospel is the power of God for salvation, and in it the righteousness of God is revealed, from faith to faith. He then builds the case for why such a rescue is needed. The Gentile world has known God through the things he made and turned away; the Jewish world has the law and has not kept it; and so the verdict falls on everyone alike. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No one, Jew or Gentile, achieves rightness with God by keeping the law, since all alike have fallen short. The law, in Paul’s reading, names the disease without curing it: it makes sin known and even sharpens it, but cannot lift the weight it exposes.

What reconciles the human being to God is faith in what God has done through Christ, received as a gift rather than earned. He calls this being justified — declared in the right, set on the right side of the verdict — and he insists the principle is not a novelty. It was already at work in Abraham, who was reckoned righteous through trust before the law was given, before he was circumcised, with nothing to show but the act of believing a promise that defied his own body and age. Abraham is Paul’s proof that the standing he describes does not belong to one people by inheritance; it was granted, at the root of the story, on the basis of faith alone, to a man who is therefore father of all who believe and not only of those under the Torah. What was true at the beginning, Paul argues, is the key to the whole.

From there the letter moves through its hardest interior country. There is the peace of those now justified, and the figure of the divided self — the will that approves the good it cannot do and does the evil it hates, a passage read for centuries as the deepest map of the bound human interior. And there is the release: for those in Christ there is no condemnation, and nothing in all creation can separate them from the love of God. The diagnosis is severe and the remedy total, and Paul will not soften either.

Israel and the covenant

Much of the letter then wrestles with what this means for Israel — whether God has abandoned the people of the covenant. This is no appendix. It is the question the whole argument has been driving toward, and the one Paul most clearly feels in his own person, for he is himself an Israelite and grieves that so many of his kin have not received the message. His answer is that the promises hold. God has not rejected his people; a remnant remains, the gifts and the calling are irrevocable, and the inclusion of the Gentiles is a turn within the same long story rather than a break from it. He reaches for the image of an olive tree: wild branches grafted into a cultivated root, drawing life from a stock that was never theirs to begin with, and warned against arrogance toward the branches that were broken off. The hardening, he holds, is partial and temporary, in service of a wider mercy, and the story bends finally toward the saving of all. It is the boldest stretch of the letter — an attempt to hold the faithfulness of God and the freedom of God together without letting either collapse the other.

The final chapters move from doctrine to conduct: how those who hold this faith are to live, offer themselves as a living sacrifice, govern their conduct toward outsiders, submit in their time to the governing authorities, and bear with one another’s scruples. The closing dispute is a homely one — the strong and the weak in a single congregation, those who eat anything and those who keep to vegetables and observe certain days — and Paul rules for mutual forbearance over the settling of the point. The towering argument about sin and grace comes to ground in the question of whether two kinds of believer can share a table without despising each other.

The reception

For the traditions that received it, Romans became something more than one letter among many. Augustine read a few of its verses at the moment he described as his conversion: in a Milan garden in the year 386, wrung out by a struggle he could not resolve, he heard a child’s voice chanting tolle lege — take up and read — opened the book of Paul’s letters where it lay, and his eye fell on the lines from the thirteenth chapter that turn from the works of the night to putting on Christ. The reading he built afterward — on the bondage of the will, the priority of grace, the inheritance of sin — drew its sharpest texts from this letter, and through him Romans shaped the whole western account of the human predicament.

A thousand years later Luther returned to the same soil. He had hated the phrase the righteousness of God in the first chapter, reading it as the standard by which God condemns, until the sense turned over for him: the righteousness Paul means is not the measure God demands but the gift God gives, received by faith and counted to the believer. That recovery of justification by faith stood near the center of the Reformation, and Luther’s preface to the letter, set at the head of his German New Testament, carried the reading to a wide audience; the traditions of Reformed Christianity made Romans something close to a charter. The phrase has divided western Christianity ever since over what exactly Paul meant by it — whether faith excludes works absolutely, or whether the contrast is narrower than the Reformers took it to be, a quarrel that runs from the sixteenth-century debates over grace down to the twentieth-century reappraisal that set Paul more firmly back inside his Jewish world. In 1922 a thoroughly revised commentary on Romans by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth reopened the same questions for modern theology, landing — as one contemporary put it — like a charge dropped onto the theologians’ playground, and turning the letter once more into a wedge against every comfortable religion of the age. The letter’s later history is in large part a history of its rereadings; each age that returned to it found its own argument waiting there.

The text and its readers

The critical study of Romans is among the densest in biblical scholarship, and its great commentaries function as much as histories of interpretation as expositions of the Greek. The standard reference works set the bar: Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s volume in the Anchor Bible series gives a Catholic Jesuit’s philological reading with a near-exhaustive survey of the secondary literature (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, Anchor Bible 33, Doubleday, 1993), and James D. G. Dunn’s two-volume treatment in the Word Biblical Commentary reads the letter through the lens of the so-called New Perspective on Paul, insisting that the apostle’s quarrel with the law was a quarrel over the boundary markers that fenced the covenant people off, not over works-righteousness in the later Protestant sense (James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 and Romans 9–16, Word Biblical Commentary 38A/38B, 1988). That perspective grew from E. P. Sanders’s argument, in Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), that Second Temple Judaism was a religion of grace and covenant rather than of merit — what Sanders called covenantal nomism — which reframed the whole debate over what Paul was rejecting. Against and alongside it stands the older line of reading carried by C. E. B. Cranfield’s International Critical Commentary, which holds nearer to the Reformation account. Karl Barth’s commentary, brought into English by Edwyn Hoskyns in 1933 (overview), belongs to a different genre entirely — less a verse-by-verse exposition than a theological eruption that used the letter to confront its own century. A textual question shadows all of them: whether the sixteenth chapter, with its roster of greetings and its closing doxology, stood originally where it now stands, some witnesses placing the blessing elsewhere — a small uncertainty about the letter’s final shape that does not touch the body of its argument.

What the text itself offers is compact and severe: a diagnosis of the human condition as bound to a power it cannot break on its own, and the claim that the break has come from outside it. Whether that claim is heard as good news or as a hard saying has tended to depend on the reader, and Paul seems to have known it.

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