So far in this surprisingly long study of the introductory verses to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, we’ve looked at Roman letter-writing and the book’s author, and explored why determining the extent to which Paul intended the letter to be political is difficult. Today we’ll turn to the letter’s recipients, which it turns out is similarly not as straightforward as one might think.
Text
To remind ourselves, in the introductory greetings, Paul refers to the letter’s recipients as follows: “To all of God’s beloved in Rome who have been called to be saints” (1.7a). But in order to understand Paul’s audience, we must also turn to chapter 16:
[16.1] I recommend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae, [2] so that you may welcome her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a benefactor of many, including myself.
[3] Greet Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in Christ Jesus — [4] they risked their necks for my life, and not only I am I thankful for them, but all the Gentile churches are too. — [5] and the church in their house too. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first in Asia for Christ. [6] Greet Mary, who has worked very hard for you. [7] Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me, who are prominent among the apostles, and who were in Christ before I was. [8] Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. [9] Greet Urbanus, our coworker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys. [10] Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ. Greet those who belong to the household of Aristobulus. [11] Greet my relative Herodion. Greet those in the Lord who belong to the house of Narcissus. [12] Greet Tryphaena and Tryphosa, labourers for the Lord. Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord. [13] Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother (and mine). [14] Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers and sisters who are with them. [15] Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them.
Experience & Encounter
My experience in reading 1.7 is largely gratitude that 16.3-15 exists to flesh out Paul’s audience more. But that section is overwhelming in the sheer number of individuals Paul mentions. It makes me curious to know who all these people were, and why Paul chose the words he did to describe them.
Explore
In order to get a better handle on the contents of the letter, it’s important to sort out, as much as can be known, Paul’s intended audience and the circumstances behind the letter’s writing. These are the two main questions that will guide today’s study.
Rome’s Jewish Community
Because the faith of Jesus (it’s really too early to speak of ‘Christianity’ before the second century) was at the time Paul was writing primarily a Jewish movement, in order to better understand its beginnings in Rome, we need first to step back and look at the city’s Jewish population.
While it is likely there were some diaspora Jews working as merchants or traders in Rome for a long time, it’s thought that the Jewish community in Rome dates largely to prisoners of war brought into the city after Pompey’s defeat of Judea in 63 BCE (Eberhart). By the time Paul was writing just over a century later, they had established themselves well, attaining not only freedom but even in many cases Roman citizenship, and building a community of upwards of 50,000 people across the river in what is now Trastevere (Tonstad 50; Eberhart, quoting Philo On the Embassy to Gaius 153-158). Philo and Josephus agree that under the Emperor Augustus, Jews were granted full freedom to practice and teach their religion (Philo 156; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVI.162-165).
It seems that in the mid-first-century CE that peace was disrupted — and there’s reason to believe it was division over Jesus that might have been responsible. According to the second-century historian Suetonius, the Emperor Claudius had the Jewish community expelled from Rome starting in around 41 CE due to public disturbances cased “on account of a certain Chrestus” (Divus Claudius 25).^ Luke tells us in Acts 18.2 that Prisca and Aquila (mentioned here in Romans 16.3) were living in Corinth because of this decree. (While Cassius Dio (2nd-3rd Cs) denied this expulsion happened, he agrees that Claudius had removed religious protections for Roman Jews, which could have had some to leave the city to escape persecution, expulsion or no (60.6.6).) By the time of Paul’s writing in the late 50s, Claudius had died and many of those who had fled Rome had returned.
The Roman Churches
From the way Paul writes about his Roman audience in chapter 16, it’s clear he’s not addressing a singular church community, but several (Gaventa, Eberhart). It’s likely these communities met in the homes of wealthy benefactors or in shops, and represented small circles of largely those within a household (Eberhart; Harrison 1). The Roman household, however, was a larger unit that our ‘family’, including within it adopted heirs, clients within Rome’s extensive patronage system, enslaved persons, and freedmen associated with the family, along with those related by blood. This alone indicates that the churches of Rome were ethnically and socio-economically diverse — an idea supported by the recurrence of such themes in the Epistle.
The list of names in Romans 16 provides a fascinating glimpse into this diversity. For our purposes it will suffice to mention some of the major themes:
- Many of the names are commonly associated with enslaved persons or freedmen (Gaventa; Eberhart; Hanks 602)
- Only a small number are obviously Jewish in origin and many are names more commonly found in the East than in Italy (Gaventa)
- The list includes a high proportion of women, including several in positions of leadership (Paul provides some with a title or role, while referring to others using language he elsewhere reserves for apostolic labours; in fact, he is more likely to describe women with leadership language than the men in the list) (Hanks 604; Gaventa; Eberhart)
- There is a surprisingly small number of couples (only six names among the twenty-six are associated with a spouse) (Hanks 604)
It’s interesting to note that this diversity here encompasses the kinds of diversity described in Paul’s claim in Galatians 3.28 that “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Eberhart adds that these pairs also bear a strong resemblance to the contrasts made in the daily prayer of thanksgiving described in the Talmud, in which a man would thank God for not making him a gentile, a woman, or one uneducated (Eberhart). While not an exact parallel, it goes to show how counter-cultural the nascent Christian community really was in breaking down barriers.
Circumstance of Writing
Now we get to a trickier question: Why was Paul writing this diverse group of Christ-followers in the imperial capital? Scholars have been significantly divided on this. The traditional Protestant view has been that he was writing to convince Jewish believers to fully welcome and uphold the integrity of Gentile believers (Eberhart; Gaventa). A more nuanced version of this posits that Judaizing missionaries were sowing division withing a predominantly Gentile church, which turns Romans into essentially an expansion of Galatians, which was explicitly written for this reason (Tonstad 50; Harrison 7-8). In recent decades, however, many have argued (quite rightly) that the thrust of the argument in Romans seems to be the opposite: not to get Jewish Christians to respect Gentile converts, but to get Gentiles to acknowledge their debt to their Jewish siblings in Christ (Gaventa; Nanos; Harrison 7-8). There’s also the recent movement towards seeing Romans as an anti-Imperial text (Harrison 8). But while, as we’ve seen, Paul uses a lot of language that mimics imperial propaganda, it’s difficult to see Romans as being about that. Still others ignore these themes entirely and argue that Paul’s primary reason for writing is to secure the Romans’ financial and logistical aid for his hoped-for Spanish mission (Jewett (2007) 945-8; Hanks 604; Harrison 8).
The first and third of these supposed purposes connect the writing of the letter to struggles in the community following the return of the exiled Jews to Rome following Claudius’s death (Tonstad 50; Eberhart). They craft a narrative that goes something like this: The Jewish Christ-followers who had founded the Jesus-movement in Rome returned from exile to find the church thriving, but dominated by Gentiles, and not feeling especially welcome. Because Paul is good friends with two of these returnees and had previously heard wonderful things about the church in Rome, Paul writes because he is distressed at this division. It’s a compelling narrative that explains a lot of the letter’s contents, but it hasn’t been convincing to everyone (Harrison 8-9; Stott 34).
For me, this is where understanding the espitolary form can help out a lot. In accordance with standard Roman letter-writing, the thesis statement of the letter is found in 1.16-17. It reads:
[1.16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. [17] For in it God’s justice is revealed, from faith, to faith; as it is written: “The just one will live by faith.”
We’ll look at these two verses in great detail next week, but for now it’s enough to say that Paul was writing to uphold God’s justice (or righteousness) in saving both Jews and Gentiles alike. With this in mind it seems best to say that, irrespective of the immediate circumstances or any ulterior motives he may have about his own missionary plans, Paul is writing primary to help a once-solid community now divided along ethnic and religious lines come together and find common cause with one another. (If that common cause happens to unite around his mission to Spain, all the better.)
The advantage of this framing is that it doesn’t rely on a specific narrative. Whether or not the Claudian expulsion happened, whether or not there were Judaizing missionaries sowing division, it still works. There were few divisions more hard-and-fast in the first century than that of Jew and Gentile. Second Temple Judaism was all about resisting assimilation by maintaining Jewish cultural distinctives, and generally portrayed Gentiles as godless sinners; but non-Jews saw their Jewish neighbours as strange, foreign, and suspicious (Gaventa). So it seems clear that no matter what the circumstances, building a community that encompassed both groups on equal footing was going to be a struggle.
Challenge
This step is all about question of who isn’t being seen or heard in a given text. In this case, as wonderful as Paul’s message of unity may be, it automatically brings up questions of power, and of ‘who wins’ and who might possibly ‘lose’ in the situation. The Roman situation outlined above is particularly complex, and involves a lot of intersectional identities.
First, you have Paul, a Roman citizen, writing to a group that likely includes some citizens but also many currently or formerly enslaved persons; moreover, he identifies as a slave himself in his greeting. How might the community in Rome have received this? We’ll never know but it’s worth pondering: Would they be pleased that he’s casting off his privilege to speak to them as equals? Or would they see it as pandering? As Marianne Bjelland Kartzow correctly notes, “As it were, all believers were slaves to God, but some were more slaves than others” (Eberhart).
Secondly, you have Paul, a man in leadership in a patriarchal society, writing to a group that includes some men, but apparently more women, and in which the women seem to have a significant amount of authority. Confusing this even more, he sends as his representative a wealthy and powerful woman, Phoebe.
Third, Paul writes as a member of a conquered people on the distant fringe of a large multinational empire to the capital city. Moreover, Paul uses a lot of language in Romans that mimics Imperial propaganda but serves to undermine it.
Fourth, and most importantly for the letter, Paul is a Jewish man writing to a group that contains some fellow Jews, but seems to be predominantly Gentile. At the same time, he has made a lot of enemies among his own people for championing the welcome of Gentiles into the Jesus movement. As I wrote about this dynamic as it plays out in Ephesians:
As lovely as this image of the things dividing humanity between haves and have nots being canceled may be, it leaves big questions about how the resulting community is to function. This was of particular relevance in the first-century situation, where the two groups were not on equal footing. Whereas from Paul’s perspective, the Jewish Christians had all the privilege — the stories, the patriarchs, the status as God’s people, the Law, and the Promise were all theirs — and so Gentile believers needed to be defended as legitimately belonging without becoming Jewish, there was also a socio-political reality that the Law protected the Jewish community — small, marginalized, and periodically persecuted by the state — from being absorbed into the mainstream culture. Paul’s perspective, which insisted that everyone now had full access to God just as they were, ‘in Christ’, rightly won the day; but it had the unintended consequence of setting in motion a long sequence of events that eventually led to the schism between Christianity and Judaism, as Christianity’s Jewish origins and character were increasingly pushed aside.
The letter also addresses the flipside of this issue. In Rome, a Gentile majority seems to look down on the Jewish origins of their faith. As much as Paul may want to defend Gentile Christians from those who won’t include them as they are, he also needs to defend the dignity, honour, and centrality of the movement’s inherent Judaism.
These are complex social dynamics, and we’ll have to see how well Paul handles them as the letter goes on.
Expand
This study has told us a lot about the community Paul is addressing: it is diverse, with its membership and even leadership crossing many important social, cultural, and economic divides of the first century. And yet as much as we can glean about the early Roman churches here, a lot remains out of reach to us. We don’t have a clear understanding of the circumstances Paul is trying to address. But what seems fair is to say that he’s writing to a group of people who don’t have much in common, and who may even have good, longstanding reasons not to trust each other, to say nothing of finding common cause with.
This means that, in a real way, while the specific situations may be different, Paul is writing to us and our divided church too. The Church today in our own cities, to say nothing about the world, is likewise divided by social, cultural, and economic divides of gender, race, and wealth. As such, the interpretation of the text that has emerged in this study calls us to growth in faithfulness by expanding out conceptions of who we consider to be ‘us’ or ‘in’.
Summary & Conclusions
Paul is writing to a diverse community in Rome. Sadly, however, this diversity has led to division, division which Paul is writing to encourage them to overcome for the sake of their shared faith in Jesus so that they may live out their vocation as ‘saints’, as God’s holy ones.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
^ There are a few reasons why this is widely accepted to be a reference to Christ despite the different spelling: First, it’s a largely negative comment so unlikely to have been added by a later Christian interpolator. Second, in common speech, Chrestos and Christos would have sounded remarkably similar and there are written examples of Latin-speaking Christians using the former spelling. And third, Chrestos in Greek meant ‘useful’ and was used as a given name, especially for enslaved persons, making the misunderstanding even more understandable.
Matthew Root 