Introduction to Romans

A History of Relations between the Jews and Rome

The first Jewish settlers in Rome may have been ambassadors and their retinue, on the heels of Judas Maccabeus' treaty with the Romans c. 160 BC.

A second wave of Jewish influx coincided with Pompey's return from his victories in the east, bringing with him multitudes of Jewish captives, who became slaves. Eventually these were liberated by their masters and became “freedmen,” some as early as one generation after Pompey's victories.

As early as the principate of Caesar Augustus (27 BC - AD 14) Jews in Rome had come to number several thousands and possessed many synagogues. With the eclipse of Jewry in Alexandria, Egypt, in AD 115-117, they became the most important Diaspora community in the Roman empire.

Within Italy, Jews freed from slavery tended to congregate in Rome, and it is clear that the vast majority were to be found in Trastevere to the southwest of the Tiber River.

 This was the oldest “Jewish quarter” of Rome.

Significant Dates

161 BC  Judas Maccabeus sent envoys to Rome to conclude an alliance

139 BC  The Romans attempted to force Jews to "return to their own homes" (in Palestine?) because they "tried to contaminate Roman customs" with their native cult.

62 BC  The Roman general Pompey conquered eastern Mediterranean and Palestine and brought back many Jewish slaves to Rome

60 BC  Cicero (106-43 BC) mentions that there are many influential Jews in Rome and that they regularly send funds to support the temple in Jerusalem

49     In the civil war that began in 49 BC., the Jews in Rome and throughout the Mediterranean world supported Julius Caesar against Pompey.

49-44 BC  Sometime between 49 and 44 BC Julius Caesar prohibited all collegia empire-wide except the most ancient ones; one exception was Judaism, and this exception appears also to have been empire-wide.¹ This explains why we read of Jews mourning the death of Caesar in 44 BC. (Suetonius Julius 84.5).

AD 6-37 Rule of the Roman procurators in Judea (lifetime of Jesus)

30    The Festival of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was given (Acts 2)

35    The Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9)

49    Claudius' edict expelling Jews from Rome. Aquila & Prisca leave for Corinth

54    Claudius died, and Nero revoked the edict of expulsion; the Jewish Christians returned

57    Paul writes Romans from Cenchreae, near Corinth, as he departs for Jerusalem

59-61  Paul in Rome for trial before the emperor (Acts 28)

67 or 68 The Death of Paul

70   Jerusalem destroyed by the Roman general Titus

Demography and Status of Jews in Roman Society

Population estimate.  During the First Century AD it is estimated that the Jewish element (ca. 40,000) comprised about 4% of the total population of about a million people. 1 out of ever 25 residents of Rome was Jewish. This does not mean, however, that in every residential community in Rome numbering over 25 there would be one Jew. Ethnic communities tended to live together then as often now, especially relatively new immigrants. For many pagan Romans, the Jew was a caricature, someone whose peculiar customs he had heard about, but had never met.

Social status.   Although the ancestors of many Roman Jews had been brought there as slaves after wars in the East, they themselves had since obtained their freedom and with it Roman citizenship.

Economic status.  The Jews of Rome did not belong to the upper classes, but were tradesmen and craftsmen. So far as we know, most were not poor, but belonged to the middle class.

Jewish Worship in Rome

Synagogues. Recent scholarship has established that—unlike the earliest Christian house-churches— the Jews had their own buildings for public worship, which consisted of a central hall for worship and a side hall for communal meals.

How many. It has been estimated that in Paul's day there were ten Jewish synagogues in Trastevere.

The Beginnings of Christianity in Rome

The Jews in Rome, like others in the Diaspora, were loyal to Jerusalem and both sent their annual temple tax and made pilgrimage at the time of one of the three major annual festivals (Tabernacles, Passover, Pentecost—see Exod. 23:14, 17; 34:23-24; Deut. 16:16).

Luke tells us in Acts 2 that among the multitude of pilgrims in Jerusalem who believed in Jesus as a result of Peter's evangelistic address were some from Rome (both full Jews and gentile proselytes—Acts 2:10). It is likely therefore that these believing Jews returned home and became the nucleus of a messianic sub-group among Rome's synagogues.

In addition to continuing to meet for Sabbath worship in the synagogues of Rome, they would have formed a network of house churches in which they could encourage one another from reading the Hebrew scriptures in Greek translation, could pray together, and celebrate the Lord's Supper. I use the term “network”, but it presently remains unclear how much intercommunication there was between the house churches. Scholars have identified five house-churches from the list of persons greeted by Paul in Romans 16:1-16. These house-churches probably originated as offshoots of the synagogues, although they had severed those ties by the time of Paul's letter.

In the synagogues of the Diaspora (including those in Rome) most members were genealogically Jews, with smaller groups of proselytes (the men of whom had received circumcision) and of "God-fearers" (gentiles regularly attending but never having submitted to circumcision). The house-churches showed a mixed composition—some more Jewish in composition, some more gentile.

This was the original situation among the very first Christians in the city, long before Paul wrote this letter.

But in the 27 years between that time (AD 30) and the writing of Paul's letter to the Roman believers (AD 57), there occurred a disturbance in the Jewish synagogues which prompted a decree by emperor Claudius in AD 49 to expel its instigators from Rome. This decree was not to expel all the Jews, but only the instigators of the disturbance, who were persons following the leadership of someone named "Crestus." Everyone agrees that this was actually the Greek word christos, which designated the messiah, Jesus "the Christ." So the troublemakers would have been believers in Jesus arguing in the synagogues. These would have been mostly the Christians who were genealogical Jews, who knew the most about the scriptures and were the ones who had made pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pentecost and had heard Peter preach, not the gentile God-fearers. The expulsion was brief, since only 5 years later Claudius died and Nero rescinded the decree and permitted the banished Jewish Christians back in the city.

Among the Jewish believers forced to leave Rome and travel to Corinth were Priscilla and Aquila (had they heard Peter too?). They were not wealthy, but lower-class members of the guild of tent-makers (Latin tabernacularii). Although evidence suggests that over 2/3 of the Jewish believers in Rome were freed slaves, there are good reasons that Aquila and Prisca and two other Roman believers (Urbanus and Rufus) mentioned in Romans 16 were freeborn.

We read about their meeting with Paul in Corinth in Acts 18 After helping him to found the church in Corinth, they followed him eastward to Ephesus (Acts 18:18), where they helped Apollos in his understanding of the faith (Acts 18:26), and generally contributed to the building up of the community of believers along the western coast of Asia Minor.

With the expulsion of the Jewish nucleus of their house-churches, the Christians in Rome became predominantly gentile in composition. And in time, shunned by their non-believing Jewish friends, they came to belittle the value of the Jewish heritage which lay at the root of the gospel.

After five years, when the Jewish believers returned in AD 54, the attitude of the gentile believers toward them was not the same high degree of reverence and dependence as it had been before the expulsion. They also found that in their five-year absence the gentile-dominated churches had established customs and habits that were no longer comfortable for Jewish scruples. Respect for keeping a kosher diet at the communal meals and the observance of ceasing from work on the Sabbath day could no longer be assumed. This situation is reflected in Paul's advice to them about "stronger" and "weaker" believers (ch. 14-15). The "weaker" would have included the Jewish ones like Paul's good friends Priscilla and Aquila, who wished to avoid the violating of the purity and Sabbath laws of the scripture and the needless offending of the non-believing Jewish neighbors who might still be drawn to the faith.

The absence of reference to synagogues in Paul's letter to the Romans and suggests a break from Judaism and its buildings of worship had already taken place. The Christians mentioned in Romans 16:5 were assembling in private homes.

Meanwhile, Paul set out on a third missionary journey from Ephesus, to northern Greece, then southern Greece (Corinth), and was poised to sail for Jerusalem with funds collected from his churches for the poor Jewish saints in Judea, when he wrote this letter to Rome in AD 57, in which at the end he sends greetings to Priscilla (called Prisca here) and Aquila (Romans 16:3-5), who appear to have hosted one of the five Roman "house churches" in their own home (v. 5).

Paul knew enough of the people and the circumstances (Rom 14:1-15:7; 16:3-15) to plan his letter accordingly. Among other things he knew that his letter would be read not to one single large gathering of Christians, but repeatedly to the various house churches, where different aspects of his exposition would be received differently in the different house-churches. The vast majority of hearers would be Gentiles with little knowledge of Judaism or of the Old Testament scriptures. But a small minority (the ones called "weaker brothers" in chs 14-15) would be believing Jews like Priscilla and Aquila.

The Date of the Letter

Paul wrote his letter at a time when he thought he had completed a major phase of his work—his evangelization of the northeastern region of the Mediterranean (Rom 15:19, 23).

Paul's purposes in Writing this Letter

The churches in Rome represented a body of Christianity that Paul could not ignore. Their strategic potential came from their location in the world capital, with its connections to the rest of the empire through people groups represented in Rome’s congregations. What purposes did he have in mind in writing this letter?

1. The missionary purpose

Some think that Paul wished to do evangelistic work in Rome itself, appealing to his statement in Rom. 1:13-15 that he was "eager to proclaim the gospel to you also in Rome". But this places too narrow an interpretation of the words “proclaim the gospel,” which in this case means explaining the full theological implications of the gospel of Christ. This can and should be done to people who already believe, as indeed our pastors do in College Church!

But, if his teaching ministry in Rome was not properly speaking "evangelistic," he had another purpose which was specifically so.

As we saw in our study of the Book of Acts (my comments on Acts 13:2), Paul always was thinking months ahead in making his travel plans. 

 (Image courtesy of NT Gateway @ http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/corinthians/maps.stm)

As he stood on the docks of Cenchreae, awaiting the boarding of his ship for Palestine, his plan was to (1) deliver the generous funds from his gentile churches of Greece to Jesus' brother James for distribution among the poor believers in Jerusalem, (2) make a token appearance in the temple to reassure the Jewish churches that he was no apostate from the faith of their ancestors, and (3) return by ship to the west, stopping over in Rome to preach, teach and collect support for an extended missionary campaign in Spain. With regard to Paul's plans for mission geographically, Martin Hengel observes:

The reality of Paul's Roman citizenship is finally supported by the fact that, so far as geography is concerned, he thinks in Roman categories, and that in his world-wide plans for mission he has only the Empire in view. At an early stage his gaze focuses on the capital, and then extends further as far as Spain (Romans 15:28): his strategy is orientated on the Roman provinces ("The Pre-Christian Paul" in Jews Among Pagans [1992] 31).

There were at this time three Roman provinces in Spain (Baetica, Lusitania and Tarraconensis), three in what today is France, and three in what today is Germany.

At this time Paul’s strategy was to move westward, not northward. Although some scholars have recently argued forcefully that there were no Jews in Spain in the first century, a lack of Jewish communities would not necessarily have prevented Paul from starting missionary work there: according to Rom 1:14, Paul saw himself as having; been sent not only to Jews and Greeks [i.e., "cultivated" gentiles] but also to 'barbarians' [uncultivated ones] (see Eckhard Schnabel, Early Christian Mission [2004], 1276).

Therefore, at the end of the first phase of his great missionary strategy (Rom 15:19, 23) he uses this opportunity to set out in complete terms the nature of his gospel on the basis of which he would be asking the Roman Christians for support—both financial and prayer support.

Little did he know that God would alter his plans by his arrest in Jerusalem (Acts 22), temporary incarceration in Caesarea (ch. 23), testimony to Festus and Agrippa (chs. 24-26), and transfer to Rome for trial (chs. 27-28). It is thought that his appeal before Caesar in Rome (Acts 28) was successful, that he was released, and was able to travel to Spain. But we have very little information about this final phase of Paul's life.

What is certain is that this letter to the Roman believers has become one of the classic statements of Christian theology.

2. “Apologetic Purpose”

A second purpose for the letter is what we might call "apologetic". The implication of such passages as Romans 1:16; 3:8 and 9:1-2, not to mention Paul's extensive use of the forms of Greco-Roman rhetoric, is that he felt himself and his understanding of the gospel under attack and needing to be justified. This would account for the argumentative style of the letter. But if Paul had never been to Rome, how would these opponents have known what he thought and preached, in order to criticize it? Very likely they learned it from the return of Priscilla and Aquila, whose views on gospel and scriptural interpretation would have been thoroughly Pauline. The gentile educated majority of Roman Christians may have belittled and argued against the Pauline gospel as passed on to them by Aquila and Priscilla.

Uneducated peddlers and artisans would hardly be able to appreciate Paul's use of the argumentative techniques of Roman rhetoric, so prominent in this letter. But the economic, social and educational background of the Roman house-churches at this time was quite different from what it was prior to Claudius' decree expelling the Jewish Christians. This presumes that the majority people in his audience that he was most concerned to convince were well-educated, upper-class Romans, mostly gentiles. These would have been the Christians most susceptible to the urbane anti-Semitism of the pagan Roman intelligentsia like Cicero.

Another aspect of what could be called an “apologetic purpose” relates to what Paul may have heard about the anti-Jewish version of the “gospel” circulating in certain circles of the Roman church. To wit, that since the vast majority of Jews in their day had not believed in Jesus, God had “washed his hands of” the Jews. This would certainly have motivated Paul, on the eve of his fence-mending visit to Jerusalem, to correct this extreme view, and to reaffirm his conviction that God’s covenant with Israel had not been revoked. This he deals with in detail in chapters 9-11, but you can see sporadic anticipations of his view already in the earlier parts of the letter.

3. “Pastoral Purpose”

A third purpose is pastoral. How much did Paul know about the internal conditions of the Roman house churches? Had he heard of internal divisions that needed healing? Many current commentators on Romans claim that he knew nothing about the internal condition of the Roman church and that nothing in this letter is addressed specifically to such matters. But I disagree. His words in Rom. 14:1 and 15:7 point in that direction. And the code names “weak” and “strong” must have come to him through these reports from Rome reflecting what the members of the "strong" group called themselves and those they were criticizing. Otherwise, it is unlikely that Paul would have chosen the term "weak" to describe his good friends and co-workers Priscilla and Aquila, who were strong in faith and ministry.He merely turns the condescending terminology of the so-called "strong" party against them.

The very descriptions given in Romans 14-15 of the different attitudes show that the “weak” believers were those who felt it necessary to honor aspects of the law of Moses that the “strong” ones believed were no longer binding on Christians. The “weak” would have included not only Jewish believers like Aquila and Priscilla, but also ex-gentile "God-fearers" who retained some of the attitudes and convictions of the Jewish Christians they associated with in the synagogues prior to the expulsion. The “strong” would be the rest of the gentile believers. One of Paul’s purposes in the letter was to urge these two groups of believers to seek to maintain the unity of the Body of Christ through mutual respect and Christian love.

The Theological Themes & Emphases of Romans

In the service of these three purposes Paul constructed his letter, giving due attention to six key theological concepts. In what follows, I do not propose to sketch "the theology of Romans", since that implies that the letter presents a comprehensive theology, which it does not. It may be an unusual letter—more like a tract—but it is a letter after all. Paul clearly goes beyond his “pastoral purpose,” but it is also clear that he is not trying to tell the Roman believers everything that he knows about Christ or the Bible. We can see from what he writes in other letters, that there was much of his "theology" that he chose not to include here. One of the remarkable absences is any mention of the cross or the Lord's Supper or the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Now let's consider the six themes.

1. Christ (permeates the entire letter)

The first theme is Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God and Savior. The center of Paul's faith was the person of Jesus. He rarely uses the personal name "Jesus," preferring to refer to him under his title of "Christ" (i.e., "anointed one" or messiah), or in combination with "Jesus" as "Christ Jesus" or "Jesus Christ", or simply as "the Lord."

Unlike other New testament writers, Paul seems to reserve the term "God"—with rare exceptions—for God the Father, and the term "Lord" for God the Son.

Twenty-five times in his New Testament letters Paul uses either the phrase "our Lord Jesus Christ." "the Lord Jesus Christ," or "Jesus Christ our Lord." In Romans alone these occur twelve times (Romans 1:4, 7; 5:1, 11, 21; 6:23; 7:25; 8:39; 13:14; 15:6, 30; 16:24). This is the fullest title Paul gives to Jesus.

As I said above, one shouldn't expect Paul to include in this letter all that he believes about Jesus found in his other letters or in his evangelistic preaching, which we know of almost exclusively from Luke's narratives in Acts. But among the roles of Jesus mentioned in Romans are ten items all based upon the text of Romans:

1. was born as a Jew, descended from King David (1:3),
2. is the eternal Son of God (1:4, 7),
3. is the redeemer of lost humanity (3:24),
4. is the giver of a right standing before God (3:22, 24),
5. is the bringer of peace with God (5:1),
6. is God's heir and our fellow heir (8:17)
7. will be the final judge of all humans (2:16),
8. is the perfect example of a life that pleases God (15:1-5)
9. is the guarantee of God's restoration of the Jewish people (15:8) and
10. is the basis for a mission to the gentiles (15:16).

2. The Gospel of God

Right at the outset of the letter Paul identifies himself as an apostle "set apart for the gospel of God" (1:9). And the word "gospel" as well as its content are prominent throughout the letter (Rom 1:1, 9, 16; 2:16; 10:16; 11:28; 15:16, 19; 16:25). Both the Greek term euangelion and our English word "gospel" intrinsically mean "good news", and the content of Paul's "gospel"—a free offer by God of forgiveness and life through Jesus' death and resurrection—certainly ought to be seen as good news. But there are also political implications in the term, especially in its Graeco-Roman civil and political associations. Roman civil authorities announced and celebrated the birth of the current emperor as a kind of "good news." Paul's understanding of the gospel, while not advocating rebellion or disregard for properly constituted Roman government (see ch. 13), would certainly challenge the monopolistic attempt of Roman government to control all aspects of its citizens' lives. In Paul's gospel, Jesus alone has right to the title "lord" (kurios) which the Roman Caesars would aspire to own for themselves.

3. God's Making Humanity Right Again (chs. 1-8)

Although Jesus, the Son of God, stands at the center of Paul's thinking about God, even a cursory reading of Romans will reveal that the narrative emphasis is not on Jesus per se, but on a plan of the Triune God for making right fallen humanity and the reconciliation of all creation to God. 

 This "making right" (or "rectifying" as some commentators prefer to put it) is what theologians often call "justifying" or "justification." It is something God graciously does on the basis of Christ's death and resurrection in response to the faith of those whom he calls. 

Although Luther and the Reformers were right in their day to stress that "justification" is primarily God's declaring sinners to be "righteous" (or "right") with himself, it would not do justice to the letter to the Romans to limit the term to this judicial or forensic aspect. Chapters 6-8 show that what Paul meant by God "making right" sinners included enabling them to fulfill his holy will in their daily lives. And in chapters 12 and following he outlines some of the ways in which that holy will needed to be implemented in their particular setting. Thus the whole letter is an explanation of God's plan for making sinners right (or righteous).

4. The Law of God

One of the reasons why many scholars have assumed a large Jewish element in Paul's audience is the large amount of attention given in the letter to the law of Moses. But this can equally well be explained, if we assume that Paul was troubled by what he had heard about the anti-Jewish attitudes among the growing gentile majority of Christians in Rome. Paul knew that the essence of his message was the fulfillment of all that began in the Old Testament and found its culmination in the Jewish messiah. He knew that the essential Jewish basis of the "gospel" he was preaching and for which he wanted the support of the Roman house-churches needed to be explained and defended before he personally arrived in the city. But from his experiences in the East, Paul also knew that a misuse of the law could undermine the gospel's basis in God's grace.

Prior to the coming of Christ all Jews were "under the law (of Moses)." Gentiles were not under that law but had a "law" in the form of their consciences ("by nature", Rom. 2:14-15), which served the purpose of making them aware of good and bad. For Paul—and ancients in general—human conscience was not created by social environment but was something resident in the mind from birth.

Jews in Paul's day acknowledged that perfect obedience to the law was impossible for anyone. "Transgressions" were inevitable. But they believed that their acceptance with God, their participation in the final resurrection and the life of the Age to Come depended upon God's mercy and grace in providing them with forgiveness through the "means of grace", which for them were repentance and the temple sacrifices.

Paul and the other early Jewish Christians continued to observe the law—including food laws, circumcision, temple worship, pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the festivals, and vows—but they understood that their salvation depended entirely upon the messiah's death and resurrection. For them temple sacrifices were not effective against sin, but merely commemorative, like the Lord's Supper.

Paul grasped the truth that the law had been given to Israel, not to the gentile nations. And therefore, gentile believers had no reason to observe them and should not be forced to do so.

For Jews, a principal role of the law of Moses was to show them that they could never obey God completely and needed his mercy and grace in Christ. For gentiles it was the "law" of their consciences, which equally condemned them for not obeying it completely, and drove them to the mercy of God in Christ. In both cases, a "law" played a crucial role, and in each case simply having that ability to recognize sin (and "judge" it in oneself and others) was not enough to avoid guilt and God's righteous judgment (ch. 2). For the law of Moses itself pronounced a curse upon anyone who failed to obey it completely. And the only way that curse could be removed was by transferring it to the only truly efficacious sacrifice, Jesus the Messiah. This became Paul's argument in chs. 1-2 of this letter and parts of his earlier letter to the Galatians.

Furthermore, even after a believer's conversion these laws continued to force him to acknowledge that he could not live a post-conversion life of perfect obedience (Rom. 7)q. Faced with this humiliating fact, every believer has to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to apply the effects of his union with Christ in death and resurrection in order to live "eschatologically" in the present (Romans 6 and 8). [See also theme number 6, below.]

So that, on the one hand, Paul can affirm that the law of Moses is good and holy (Rom. 7:12, 16). And on the other hand, it is weak, powerless because of sin, and useful only to raise consciousness of sin (Rom. 3:20; see 1 Tim. 1:8-10), to judge sinners (Rom. 2:12; 3:19), and to "bring (God's) wrath" (Rom. 4:15).

5. The Present Stumbling and Future Restoration of Israel (chs. 9-11)

The gentile majority in the Roman house churches had begun to consider the Jews a lost cause and to deny them any significance in God's redemptive plan. But didn't God make commitments to the Jewish people in the Old Testament? Why then does it appear that he has abandoned them? How can gentiles be sure that he will not similarly abandon his commitment to them? Is he truly a faithful God, or not? What exactly is the status of ethnic Israel in God's plan? Is there a future for her, or not? And if so, in what form? In chapters 9-11 Paul affirms Israel's crucial role in the past, present, and future of God's plan for history, and shames the gentile Christians for their arrogance in thinking otherwise.

6. The "Eschatological" Living of Believers in this Age (chs. 12-16)

One of the themes of Paul's thinking that doesn't jump out at you as you read Romans, but which informs it at every point, is the idea that the age to come, the "last days", the great Kingdom of God, that which will not be realized outwardly and historically until Jesus returns, has already begun internally for believers (see Hebrews 1:2). In the OT eschatological scheme, the Last Days were to begin with the coming of the messiah, the destruction of Israel's (and God's) enemies, the bodily resurrection of all believing Israelites, the gathering of the righteous gentiles, and the inauguration of a reign of worldwide righteousness and peace with its center in Jerusalem.

By seeing this scheme in an "already" and "not yet" double fulfillment, Paul and other Christians could see Jesus death and resurrection as the destruction of God's ultimate enemy Satan. In the spiritual union of new believers with Christ in his death and resurrection they could see the bodily resurrection of the righteous. In the mission to the gentiles they could see the gathering of the righteous nations. And in their own lives, individually and corporately as a church, they could see the "already" facet of the future earthly reign of the messiah in peace and justice.

Seen in this way, by virtue of their union with Jesus and the indwelling Holy Spirit believers draw upon supernatural powers that belong essentially to the End of the Ages in order to conquer sin in their present lives (Hebrews 6:5). In this letter, as in his others addressed to churches he had founded and where he had preached, Paul assumes a knowledge of this concept. One wonders therefore on what basis he could assume it for Rome, where he had never preached. Perhaps he knew from correspondence with his protégés, Priscilla and Aquila.

Thus, when Paul begins in chapter 12 to speak of the way believers should live, in a real sense he is describing eschatological life, life such as will be fully experienced upon the return of Jesus by all humans on earth. The way believers who are walking by the Spirit live in the world today gives to the world around us a foretaste of what life in the eternal kingdom of God will be like, when how only the most godly of believers live today will be how everyone will live.

The moral, ethical and spiritual setting in which believers now live is the "already" aspect of the Last Days. But the geographical and political setting in which believers now live is the "not yet"—it is "the present (evil) age" (Gal. 1:3-4), which inevitably colors the specific responses to public life around us that Paul's instructions in these chapters contain (see ch. 13). In 13:11-14 Paul uses the imagery of “night” and “darkness” for the present evil age in which we live, and reminds the Roman Christians that “the night is nearly over; the day [i.e., the coming of Jesus] is almost here.”

Since this was one of Paul’s core beliefs, it is not unique to the letter to the Romans, but appears in other letters as well. In the other letters Paul uses different language to describe it. In Ephesians he describes our present eschatological state as living “in the heavenly places” (Eph 1:3, 20; 2:6; 3:10; 6:12), which means the Kingdom of God realized internally in believers, but not yet realized in the earth, as it will be when Jesus returns. In Philippians 3:20-21 he calls it “our citizenship (Greek politeuma) [which] is in heaven, from where we also await the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” The “not yet” coming to earth of the awaited Savior is an “already” reality in believers’ lives through life “in the heavenlies,” where also our citizenship exists.

The present state of believers—experiencing inwardly the eschatological kingdom—yet living in the present evil age reminds me of the recurring remark of the panphobic detective Monk in the popular TV series: “It’s a jungle out there.” But we mustn’t think that Paul wished Christians to stay holed up in their holy bunker, isolated from the world, while awaiting the coming of the Savior. His own example gives the lie to that misconception. Like Jesus, his Lord, Paul was extremely outgoing and friendly. He was always seeking to make the acquaintance of unbelievers in the cities of the Mediterranean area. It was the sinful practices and beliefs of the unbelieving world—not the people—that he wanted Christians to insulate themselves against (see 1 Cor 5:9-12).

Endnotes

1 In 64 B.C. the Senate had prohibited all collegia on principle because of the danger they posed to the state as private institutions; in 58 B.CE. collegia were permitted again (during the First Triumvirate); in 56 B.C. the Senate again dissolved one specific class of collegia, political clubs.