The Story of Romans

A Narrative Defense of God's Righteousness

A. Katherine Grieb

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780664225254
• eBook ISBN: 9781611642186
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

A. Katherine Grieb insightfully traces the argument of Paul's letter to the Romans and shows how it is grounded in the story of God's faithfulness to Israel. She draws together a number of crucial insights: the narrative character of Paul's thought, the apocalyptic message of his gospel, the depth of his engagement with Israel's Scripture, and the practical and political impact of his theology. She demonstrates the letter's relevance today and invites contemporary readers to locate their own stories within Paul's account of God's righteousness. Informed by recent Pauline scholarship, this book will be useful to scholars, students, and pastors.

1

“Not Ashamed of the Gospel”

(Rom. 1:1–17)

Of my friendly readers I ask that they should take nothing and believe nothing from me which they are not of themselves persuaded stands within the meaning of what Paul wrote. Of my unfriendly readers I ask that they should not reject as an unreasonable opinion of my own what, in fact, Paul himself propounded.

Karl Barth¹

Paul has left us an extremely precious document for Jewish studies, the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew.

Daniel Boyarin²

PAUL AND THE ROMAN CHRISTIANS

In this book, I suggest that the best way into Paul’s complicated argument in Romans is to divide it into sections and to read each section as if listening to a story. This first chapter focuses on the story of Paul’s apostolic call and on the story of how the Roman house churches came to their present situation.

Paul’s letter to the Romans, like other letters, almost certainly presupposes an actual historical situation known to the author and to his first hearers/readers. Later readers may try to reconstruct this situation from the letter itself and from whatever external evidence is available. We are fortunate to know quite a bit about Paul and about the house churches in Rome to which he wrote. Our information about Paul comes primarily from his own writings (the seven or more letters we have that were written during the fifties C.E. and were later gathered, edited, arranged, and placed in a collection of early Christian writings now called the New Testament); from a theological biography of Paul written a generation or so later (roughly the second half of the Acts of the Apostles); from other early Christian writings, both internal and external to the New Testament, that interact with Paul and Pauline theology (or with the authors’ perception of those); and from other traditions about Paul that have been preserved.

Paul was an evangelist, a missionary, a church planter. When he describes himself as “a slave of Jesus Christ, a called apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (1:1), he is explaining who he is by referencing his story, or more precisely, the story of what happened to him when God intervened powerfully in his life in order to change its direction completely. If, as seems likely, sometime around the year 30 C.E. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem and raised from the dead by God three days later, the movement that would later come to be called “Christian” had its beginning then. Most scholars want to date God’s “conversion” or “call” of Paul to within a few years of that event, perhaps 34 or 35 C.E. That would have given Paul enough time to build up a reputation among the Judean churches as a persecutor of Christians (Gal. 1:22–24),³ before the amazing reversal that brought into being the church’s first and perhaps most brilliant theologian.

Paul alludes to the story of his calling in three short phrases, each of which is theologically loaded. First, he describes himself as “a slave of Jesus Christ” (1:1). This says both that Paul confesses Jesus of Nazareth to be the long-awaited Messiah (Christos in Greek) of Israel and that Paul acknowledges him as “Lord” (1:7). In Paul’s way of thinking, no one is autonomous or self-directed; all human beings serve someone or something, whether they know it or not. Paul knows that he belongs to God in Jesus Christ, which means that he is “under obligation” (1:14, a debtor) just as if he were literally a slave. Slaves are at the disposal of their Lord, and Paul often speaks of himself as a slave or even as a prisoner of Christ.

Next, he refers to himself as “a called apostle” or someone “called to be an apostle” (1:1), which tells us more of his story. Whenever Paul uses the verb “call,” its subject is almost always God. Paul follows the biblical custom of referring to God without naming God by using the “divine passive”: instead of saying, “God called me,” he describes himself as “called,” and the reader knows to supply the words “by God.” Understanding this convention enables us to know what Paul’s first readers would have seen: that throughout the letter, Paul is talking almost constantly about what God has done in Jesus Christ, even when he does not actually use the name “God.” An “apostle” is someone who is “sent with a commission” or authorized to perform a particular action on behalf of the sender. In Paul’s case, the Sender is God: God has called him to go on a mission to evangelize or “preach the gospel to” Gentiles (non-Jews) to bring about their faithful obedience, “the obedience of faith” (1:5; 16:26), to Jesus Christ.

Finally, Paul describes himself as one “set apart for the gospel of God” (1:1). The words “set apart” remind us of Paul’s background as a Pharisee (see Phil. 3:5–6) because the word “Pharisees” may mean “separated ones,” or those who had “separated” themselves from the world in order to be holy to God. The term may have originated around the time of the Maccabees in the middle of the second century B.C.E., when the successors of Alexander the Great were seeking to force Greek ways on Israel. Here, Paul uses the divine passive again to speak of God’s action setting him apart to proclaim the gospel, or good news, of what God has done in Jesus Christ (Rom. 1:1–6). In Galatians (1:1, 11–24) Paul describes more fully how God redirected his energies from “violently persecuting the church of God and attempting to destroy it” (1:13) to “preaching the faith he once attempted to destroy” (1:23) as the result of “a revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:12). The word translated “revelation” (apokalypsis) in Galatians 1:12 is also important for understanding Paul’s letter to the Romans. He uses the verb “is being revealed” (1:17) to speak not simply of information about God or from God but to refer to the world-changing event that has occurred in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Paul, this event has changed everything in every place.⁴ The full weight of that statement becomes clearer as one reads his letter to the Romans. Because Jesus Christ is Lord, no aspect of human life—indeed, not even the creation itself nor the heavenly powers that try to oppose God’s will (8:38–39)—falls outside of the sphere of God’s gracious and merciful love, seen most clearly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Nothing in all the world can separate us from that love, which is good news indeed!

Paul had good news to tell (euangelion theou, “the gospel of God”). He did this by telling the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ and by founding communities committed to living out the implications of that gospel in their life together. Paul was a church planter. As Wayne Meeks has demonstrated, Paul’s pattern seems to have been to come into a strategically located urban center, often with coworkers; to recruit local leaders and found a church; to stay for a period of time to assist with instruction and organization; and then to move on to the next city to repeat the process.⁵

Inevitably, Paul was on the road a lot. In order to stay connected, he needed to write letters back to the communities he had established and to his coworkers there. From the travel itineraries described in the book of Acts alone, one scholar has calculated that Paul traveled nearly ten thousand miles during just that part of his career we know about.⁶ Paul’s mobility, and that of his coevangelists, may not have been unusual. Roman roads were excellent and well maintained. Trade routes around the Mediterranean meant that sailing ships were often available for passage. In fact, letters seem to have been entrusted for delivery to someone who was traveling towards the intended recipients, and, judging from the amount of correspondence that has survived from the first century, many of them reached their destination. Paul seems to have sent his letters with coworkers or other Christians who were headed to the church he was addressing. Since the early Christian churches were primarily urban and strategically located in cities along the major trade routes, this was a logical way for Paul to communicate with his fledgling communities.

We know quite a bit about the situation of the early Christians in Rome, both before and during the time Paul wrote to them. As the imperial capital and the administrative center of its political and economic policies, Rome enjoyed enormous prestige. Many wealthy and influential people lived there, but that did not mean that the daily life of Roman Christians was either easy or comfortable. As Elsa Tamez has shown, the fact that Rome was famous for its high consumption of goods from every corner of the known world did not mean that poverty had disappeared.⁷ To use a contemporary analogy, the first impressions of a visitor to Washington, D.C., may reflect the elegance of its monuments, the grandeur of its hotels, or a sense of the political and economic power that shapes the fates of lesser nations. But even a casual observer will quickly see the many poor and homeless people who sleep on the park benches in the summer and on the heating grates in the winter. First-century Rome also would have had its elite, its working class, and its poor.

Urban life during Paul’s time was overcrowded: the population density in cities of the Roman Empire was like that of industrial slums in Western cities today.⁸ Most people were packed into crowded apartments, which were made bearable only by the open spaces of public facilities. Privacy was almost unknown; neighbors saw everything; news and rumors traveled quickly; and riots could spring up without warning. Daily existence was lived out, for the most part, on the streets and sidewalks, where people gathered, where teachers instructed their disciples, where workers made and sold their goods. There were ethnic ghettoes—for example, Jews in Rome were concentrated in an area called the Transtiberinum—and ghettoes of tradespeople who were engaged in a common craft. Areas and streets often gained their names from the artisans who traded there (e.g., Linenweavers’ Quarter, Leatherworkers’ Street, Portico of the Perfumers).⁹ In Acts 18:2–3, Paul and his coworkers Prisca and Aquila are described as tentmakers, who came to know each other through their trade. Much early Christian evangelizing may have occurred just this way: Paul or one of his coworkers would preach the gospel, that is, tell the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ, to other artisans working in the same area.¹⁰ Some would become interested and would be curious to know more. As interest and numbers grew, they would form a cell group, an assembly of Christians, that would meet in someone’s house to worship God, receive instruction in the Scriptures and in Christian ways, and provide mutual support.

The church in Rome was probably composed of several such Christian assemblies or house churches. At least two or three of them are mentioned in Romans (16:5, 14, 15). We cannot be sure if those various house churches assembled at a common meeting place, but we are reasonably certain that the house church formed the basic unit of Christian life. This was hardly surprising, since the household was the standard social and economic unit of city life during this time.

The most important background information for reading Paul’s letter is that these Roman house churches were probably composed of both Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. This is important to know because Jews (including Jewish Christians like Paul, Prisca, and Aquila) and Gentiles (including Gentile Christians) coexisted in an uneasy relationship that often involved misunderstanding and stereotyping of the other group. If groups of people typically interact with others according to a mental map of their social world, in Paul’s time, Gentile Christians typically divided the world into two groups: Greeks, civilized people who spoke Greek including the Romans themselves; and “barbarians” (lit. “bearded”) or uncivilized outsiders. At least some of the Gentile Christians among Paul’s first hearers would have taken for granted his contrasting categorization (Greek/barbarian; wise/foolish) in Romans 1:14, although Paul himself seems to deconstruct it shortly, in 1:22.

For Jews, the mental mapping of the social world also involved dividing humanity into two groups: Israel, the people of God; and Gentiles, the other nations among whom they found themselves and under whose empires they had to live. Israel was further divided into Judeans, or Palestinian Jews, and Diaspora Jews, who were dispersed or scattered among the Gentiles—such as Jews and Jewish Christians living in Rome. Since the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E., Hellenization, or the widespread influence of the Greek language and civilization, was a fact of life for Jews. Greek was the common language, so, for example, Paul’s letter to the Romans was written in Greek rather than Latin. And since Pompey’s first-century-B.C.E. victory over the Seleucids, the Jews had been living under Roman rule.

Life for the Jews under Roman rule and in Rome itself had been difficult. The first known reference to a Jewish commu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 “Not Ashamed of the Gospel” (Rom. 1:1–17)
• 2 “The Redemption That Is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 1:18–3:31)
• 3 “Abraham, for He Is the Father of Us All” (Rom. 4:1–25)
• 4 “The Free Gift Is Not Like the Trespass” (Rom. 5:1–8:39)
• 5 “Has God Rejected His People?” (Rom. 9:1–11:36)
• 6 “Welcome . . . As the Christ Has Welcomed You” (Rom. 12:1–15:13)
• 7 “I Hope to See You . . . As I Go to Spain” (Rom. 15:14–16:27)
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Names