One of the biggest trends in scholarship surrounding Paul’s work, and especially Romans, since the last decades of the twentieth century has been the question of the extent to which Paul is writing with an anti-imperial agenda. Certainly this represents a huge shift from the customary readings of the Reformation that see Romans as a theological critique of works-based religion. While this trend is connected to the so-called ‘New Perspective’ on Paul, it also represents a slight shift from this movement’s initial emphasis; for while the ‘classic’ New Perspective challenged how we think about salvation and particularly Paul’s understanding of Judaism, this second wave insists that Paul’s argument is significantly, and perhaps even primarily, political in nature.
Rather than rehash the debates, today I’d like to look at the key terminology found here at the very start of Romans, and explore why the question of Paul’s political motivations is tricky. We’ll see that, while on the one hand Paul’s words are deeply rooted in the Jewish Scriptures and can be understood in a rich and completely satisfying way from that perspective alone, on the other hand, a lot of that very same terminology was also a critical part of Rome’s imperial propaganda and value system. So let’s take a look.
Text
Romans 1.1-7 is a dense text, filled with a lot of ideas and technical language. Let’s remind ourselves of the text (translation mine), bolding the key terms we’ll look at today, most of which will resonate through the whole letter:
[1.1] Paul, a slave of Jesus the Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for God’s gospel, [2] which He proclaimed in advance through his prophets in the holy scriptures [3] concerning his Son, descended from the seed of David according to the flesh, [4] declared to be God’s Son with power according to the Spirit of Holiness by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord, [5] through whom we have received grace and the mission to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, [6] among whom you yourselves are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
[7] To all of God’s beloved in Rome who have been called to be saints:
Grace to you, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Explore
In this section we’ll look at the bolded terms and see if we can assess the claims that Paul is using deliberately and provocatively anti-imperial language.
(For the Experience end Encounter sections related to this passage, see the previous post.)
Slave of Jesus Christ
The very first thing Paul says after his name is to identify himself as a slave, specifically “a slave of Jesus Christ.” The language of service in describing religious commitment was common in the ancient world. Even the briefest look at the Old Testament, for example, shows Abraham, Moses, and David all called the “servant/slave” (’ebed) of God (Genesis 26.24; Deuteronomy 34.5; Psalm 18), and Psalm 34 ends with the rousing claim that “YHWH redeems the life of his servants” (Psalm 34.22).
Yet despite the solid religious and biblical basis for this use of enslavement imagery, this is not quite the open-and-shut case as one might think. For, Paul is writing here to the city of Rome itself, where the term “Slave of Caesar” had a technical meaning, used by important figures in the imperial court (Jewett (2013) 9; Eberhart).* While I’m reluctant to think Paul’s usage is a specific reference to this title, it’s worth considering, especially in light of the rest of the terminology we’ll look at today.
If nothing else, right off the bat, we see just how richly storied the language Paul uses is. Even if he’s not making a direct challenge to the Emperor here, the idea of slavery was so fundamental to Roman society that the metaphor could be leveraged in different ways, and could have very different connotations to different readers.
Apostle
In common usage, the word apostle (apostolos) referred to someone sent on a formal mission, such as an ambassador or military envoy, to officially represent and act on behalf of the one who sent them (Gorman; Witherington 34f). While the Old Testament is full of such figures, whether sent by human kings or God, there is no technical term there equivalent to the idea of ‘apostle’. In fact, despite its dozens of uses of the verb apostello (’I send away’), the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the Scriptures that functioned as ‘the Bible’ for diaspora Jews and which the New Testament quotes almost exclusively), only uses the noun form apostolos once. So it would seem the early Christian adoption of this word as the technical term to refer to those commissioned by Jesus to spread his message does have primarily political rather than religious origins (Eberhart; Gorman; Tonstad 83).
Gospel
The term ‘gospel’ (evangelion) was another military word that took on a new life as a proper noun in early Christianity. In the common sense, a gospel was an official report of good news from the battlefield, extending in the Roman era even to the triumphal entry of a returning army (Keesmaat & Walsh 16; Eberhart; Gorman). In the Roman context, while during the Republic, any victorious general could hold a triumph, with the advent of the Empire, it became the purview of the Emperor alone. So here, if nowhere else — and in what is possibly the most important term for Paul and the early Christians — Paul does seem to be making a direct claim in opposition to the Emperor (Tonstad 9). He has dedicated his life to a triumphant proclamation that does not belong to Caesar (and is therefore illegal according to the new custom) but rather to God.
In terms of content, Paul’s gospel offers a very different story from the one Roman society told. Whereas the whole idea of a Triumph was that, as Eberhart put it, “peace and security had been established through military victory,” the Triumph about which Paul writes is about a new, transforming way of life brought about by one whose earthly life had been crushed by the mechanisms of Roman peace and security (Tonstad 9; cf. Keesmaat & Walsh 17; Eberhart).
God’s Son
It’s become common in recent decades to say that, curiously enough, while the biblical expression “Son of Man” may have hinted at belief in Jesus’ divinity, “Son of God” did not. And certainly, it must be said that looking at the Bible alone, this is true. The expression “son of God” simply referred to someone who followed faithfully in God’s ways (Nanos). But if we look at how biblical royal ideology developed into messianic expectation in Apocalyptic Judaism, the matter becomes more complicated.
At its most basic level, Israel itself was understood to be God’s son (Exodus 4.22; Hosea 11.1). But as royal ideology developed, that sonship became increasingly connected to the figure of the king as the people’s representative or ‘Israel in microcosm’ (Psalm 2.7; 2 Samuel 7.8-16). The king was to rule justly as God’s chosen son, and, as the understanding of God’s power and authority grew, so did the purview of the potential of Israel’s king’s reign (e.g., Psalm 2.7-8). Over the centuries, this was joined together with the proto-messianism of the Prophets into Apocalyptic Judaism, in which the heavenly enthronement of the messianic king became a significant motif (Kirk 42; Rock 143; Schreiner 45). By the late Second Temple Period, this came to its full fruition. In the Qumran community, for example, the “Son of God” was one of the titles of the messianic figure who would smite Israel’s enemies and usher in God’s everlasting reign of peace (Rock 143). Even if this was not a divine figure exactly, he was a figure operating with divine power and authority over the whole world.
While the situation in Judaism was complicated, there were no such complications in Rome, where “son of a god” was used as an explicit imperial title, first under Augustus and later reaffirmed by Nero, who was Emperor at the time Paul was writing (Nanos; Rock 137; Eberhart). Here it signified the Emperor’s legitimate claims to rulership over the whole world. The deification of emperors is a strange phenomenon to our sensibilities, but whereas divinity in the Jewish sense was about ontology — that Creator / creature distinction that could not be breached — in Greco-Roman culture it was primarily about power. And so they imagined their ancestors and mighty heroes as demigods (literally sons of gods). The legendary figure Herakles (Hercules in Latin), for example, came to be worshiped as a god in many places in the Mediterranean world. The jump from this idea to the deification of imperial power, while certainly always controversial in Rome, was not a big conceptual leap (Rock 137).
So, while Paul almost certainly drew from his own Jewish traditions in referring to Jesus as “God’s Son,” this was a loaded term in both Judaism and Greco-Roman cultures. In the former, it was associated with apocalyptic ideas that had a tendency to boil over violently; in the latter, it was a direct challenge — intentional or not — to the Emperor’s claims to divinity and the right to global domination (Nanos; Eberhart; Gorman).
Christ (Messiah)
I’ve addressed Second Temple messianism quite a bit here over the years, so won’t go into it in detail. But what matters here is that, while the idea arose within Jewish religion, it was always inherently political. To call Jesus the Messiah is to call him God’s true, anointed king, who would not only reign justly within the blessings of God’s Law, but also defeat all of Israel’s enemies (Rock 146; Gorman). (This royal connection is heightened even more by the explicit reference to King David in the passage (Kim 16).) And so, while yes early Christianity had to re-frame its messianism in light of Jesus’ earthly death, this title still posed a direct challenge to the emperor and his empire (Rock 144; Eberhart). It’s not for nothing that the charge that got Jesus killed was that he claimed to be the King of the Jews.
Two of the hallmarks of the envisioned messianic age in Jewish apocalypticism were the resurrection of the dead and the pouring out of God’s Spirit upon the faithful, both of which Paul references here. Both speak to God’s power and authority given to the chosen king. By rising from the dead, Jesus demonstrated that Rome’s authority has limits and cannot contain his power (Kirk 43; Rock 140; Schreiner 45; Eberhart; Gorman). And since one of the primary significations of the Holy Spirit was empowerment to complete a task, the Spirit’s involvement here is further indication of the authority and power Paul claims for Jesus (Rock 139; Barrett 20f)). So again, even as Paul isn’t trafficking in imperial ideology by calling Jesus the Messiah, he’s making big claims to it that have big political consequences.
Lord
The title Kyrios, ‘Lord’, is among the most interesting to parse in Greek. It can mean anything from ‘mister’ as a simple form of address to referring to the ‘master’ of a house to the emperor himself. Among Greek-speaking Jews of Paul’s day, it was even more complex, since it was the preferred gloss for the unpronounceable divine name (a tradition our English-language Bibles follow, albeit in all-caps). So in theory the title could mean anything from “Mister Jesus” to “Jesus is YHWH,” and anything in between. But as famed New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said it best: “Kyrios Kaisar [Caesar is Lord] was the formula which said it all” (Wright (2014) 100; cf. Rock 156). To make the claim that Jesus is Lord as Paul does here means that the Emperor is not.
The Obedience of Faith
Paul defines his ministry as being oriented to cultivating “the obedience of faith” among the Gentiles. Much has been written about what this means — especially among Protestants with a theological presupposition that a) obedience = works and b) works are the opposite of faith. But as we’ve seen time and time again here over the years, that completely misunderstands what faith meant in the first-century context.
The fundamental thing to remember about this is that Roman society was entirely built on the social institution of patronage. No one was a ‘free agent’, but everyone was embedded in a complex hierarchy of relationships of rights and responsibilities. And fides (‘faith/faithfulness’) was the glue that held this system together. If you were fidus, it meant that you lived up to your responsibilities, both to those above you in the hierarchy (up to the emperor and the gods) and to those below.
While this patronage system was decidedly Roman, the concept of faith it demonstrates was also true of the Greek- and Hebrew-language equivalents to fides. In Hebrew, ‘mn means ‘steadfastness, stability, trustworthiness’; and the Greek pistis meant ‘faithfulness, trustworthiness, confidence, and credibility’. In fact, while we call the relationship between Israel and God a ‘covenant’, scholars have long pointed out that the form of the covenant passages explicitly mimics Ancient Near Eastern political treaties and quite literally sets up Israel as a vassal kingdom under God’s sovereign authority. This means that the whole theological lens of the Old Testament is analogous to the patron-client relationships that grounded Roman culture. For Israel to be faithful meant not that it ‘believed in’ YHWH, but that they lived up to the responsibilities as his vassals; for YHWH to be faithful similarly meant that he lived up to his responsibilities to them.
With this understanding of what faith meant in Paul’s world, ‘the obedience of faith’ is not a difficult concept at all. It’s accepting what one’s faith-relationship (in this case, to Jesus) entails. And this will be one of the major themes of the letter as a whole.
So, while faith is a hugely important concept in the Scriptures, once again, it was also a hugely important concept in Roman society. It connects to the fundamental question of what we owe to whom. And once again, if we owe our ultimate allegiance to Jesus, it calls all our other allegiances, most especially to the empire and emperor, into question.
Grace and Peace
The section ends with Paul’s wish of grace and peace to his readers. In doing this he plays creatively with the typical greetings of both Gentile and Jewish audiences. The standard greeting in Greek was the appropriate form of the verb khairein, which literally means ‘to rejoice’. But in the way typical of greetings, it often simply meant ‘hello’. But here, Paul switches to a (distantly) related noun, kharis, ‘grace’. It’s a play on words that turns a common greeting into somehting notable.
While as Christians we focus on the idea of grace as an unmerited gift, much like ‘faith’, the actual story is a bit more complicated. In the patronage system mentioned above, ‘graces’ were the benefits a patron would give to his clients — think money, housing, employment, and status. These gifts were ‘unmerited’ in that the client could not repay in kind, but were to be responded to by the client’s faithfulness: his trustworthiness, loyalty to the patron, and public acknowledgement of the patron’s generosity (Nanos; Gorman; Eberhart). In other words, grace assumes the existence of a good-faith relationship in which both parties are living up to their responsibilities to the other.
This playing with the standard Greek greeting would likely have triggered readers to read the Jewish greeting as likewise meaningful: peace no longer as a simply greeting, but a prayer for the peaceful and peaceable reign of God’s Kingdom. This type of peace is the presence of whole and healthy good-faith relationships and is the complete opposite to the imperial Pax Romana, the Roman so-called ‘peace’, won by violence, authoritarianism, and conquest that was the heart of Rome’s (Kim 17; Witherington).
Challenge
The Explore section looked at several key pieces of terminology deployed in the introduction to Romans in order to assess the extent to which Paul is challenging Rome’s political authority. We saw that some of the language (’Gospel’, ‘apostle’) has its origins in Greco-Roman society, some (’Messiah/Christ’) was quintessentially Jewish, and most (’Son of God’, ‘Lord,’ ‘faith,’ ‘grace,’ ‘peace’) was deeply meaningful in both contexts, albeit in different ways.
So, is Paul writing as a faithful Jew on religious themes? Or is he writing a politically-charged letter challenging the imperial order?
Well, as should be obvious, the question represents a false dichotomy. Judaism was inherently political. The Law established the terms of Israel’s life as YHWH’s vassal kingdom. And, as we’ve seen, the apocalyptic Judaism of the Second Temple period was a religious challenge to political oppression. So the whole weight of Paul’s Jewish inheritance was political. Big questions of power, authority, and allegiance can never be apolitcal (Eberhart; Keesmaat & Walsh).
It’s also helpful to bring in intersectionality here. Jews within the Roman Empire had a nuanced relationship with it (Eberhart, Keesmaat & Walsh). They ran businesses, and took advantage of Rome’s social and education systems, roads, and trading networks. Some, like Paul himself, were even citizens, with all the rights and responsibilities that entailed. But that didn’t make them any less a minority, marginalized, and oppressed people. There’s a double consciousness that operates in such communities, whether ancient or in our own time. Just as a first-generation Canadian will be fluent in English or French, while often speaking another language at home, so too do different, sometimes competing, narratives function in people’s hearts and minds.
Would Paul have been conscious of the ‘double identity’ of the words he uses here in Romans and elsewhere? I’m not sure. They were storied words in both his Roman and Jewish identities, and, intentional or not, they played off of and into both sets of narratives.
Expand
Paul’s world, like our own, was a storied world, filled with competing narratives and meaning-making systems. And much of the language he used here in Romans would have reverberated strongly with both Jewish religious and Roman imperial narratives, albeit in different ways. Understanding this expands our awareness by keeping us from getting too bogged down in one set of ideas. It also helps to remind us of Paul’s intersectional identity, having a lot of privilege as an educated, free, male, citizen, but also inherently marginalized as belonging to a religious minority and a conquered and oppressed people.
As it happens, recognizing the slipperiness and multi-layered meaning of Paul’s vocabulary is also growth-oriented for us, since it prevents the kind of fixed attitude that makes growth impossible.
Conclusions
While Paul’s language was primarily drawn from his Jewish inheritance, it unquestionably resonated deeply with the language of Roman imperial propaganda and social norms. It focuses on themes of power, authority, and allegiance. As such, whether he intended it or not, it is political, as he offers Jesus of Nazareth as the legitimate alternative to the Emperor’s false claims (Eberhart; Rock; Keesmaat & Walsh; Allison).
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 