Throughout the past two chapters, Paul has been slow building his argument that everyone stands in the same position before God. He started off by talking about the general state of affairs in the world, using traditional stories and tropes (1.18-32). But then moved on to attacking all kinds of religious hypocrisy: those who judge others while doing the very same things (2.1-11), those who teach the Law while breaking its commandments (2.12-24), and those who love the privilege of being God’s people without living out the ways of the covenant (2.25-29). While he’s destabilizing the Jewish-Gentile distinction here, that doesn’t make Jewish heritage less valuable: his people were entrusted with God’s words and so had a leg up on everyone else (3.1-8). But as we’ll see today, the problem is, according to Paul, that they didn’t take advantage of that privilege and sinned as much as anybody else.
Let’s look at the text.
Text
[9] What then? Are we better off? Not at all, for we have already argued that everyone, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin. [10] As it is written: “There is no one who is just, not even one; [11] there is no one who understands, non one who seeks God. [12] All have turned away, all together they become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, not even one.” [13] “Their throat is an open grave, they deceive with their tongues.” “Vipers’ venom is under their lips, [14] their mouths are full of curses and bitterness.” [15] “Their feet rush to shed blood; [16] affliction and suffering are in their paths, [17] and they have not known the pathways of peace.” [18] “There is no fear of the Lord before their eyes.”
[19] We know that whatever the Law says, it says to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole kosmos be accountable before God. [20] For “all flesh will be found to be unjust before Him” from the works of the Law, for through the Law comes knowledge of sins.
Experience
The first thing I noticed here is the repetition of the question of if Jews are better off. But it’s strange that whereas the answer earlier was “much, in every way!” here it is “Not at all!” It seems how we understand this discrepancy will be important for how we understand the section as a whole. I also noticed the expression “under sin.” So far, Paul has been talking about sins as actions. The phrasing here turns sin into some kind of power. That seems worth investigating. I also noticed that verses 10-18 are a long series of prooftexts. I’d like to know more about them and their contexts. Finally, I find the choice of ‘kosmos’ interesting here, since it seems like it could push the scope of God’s judgment beyond human or even animate life, but to the universe itself. Is that reading too much into it?
Encounter
The text paints a pretty sorry picture of humanity: “There is no one who is just, not even one.” The tenor of Paul’s argument has shifted. For the past couple chapters, the attention has been on humans bickering with each other. Now all the factions are lumped together into the one sad group: sinners facing divine judgment.
Explore
The study so far has raised some interesting questions for us to explore:
- Why does Paul repeat the question from 3.1 but give the opposite answer?
- What might we learn from the texts Paul quotes here?
- Is there anything to the idea of a cosmic scope of sin and salvation, including the transition from ‘sins’ to ‘sin’?
The Question of Advantage
As it happens, Paul doesn’t actually repeat the question from 3.1. He uses a different, though more-or-less synonymous, word and shifts the grammar around (SBL; Eberhart; Kruse 163). But in so doing, it turns out he also introduces a legitimate ambiguity into the text. For the form of the verb he uses here can be interpreted as either middle voice (’to excel’) or as passive voice (’to be exceeded’) (see Kruse 163 for an excellent discussion). In other words, in this form the verb is its own opposite.^ So not only do we need to unravel whether Paul chose a different word as a true synonym or a near-synonym that provides a different nuance, but we also have to figure out which sense of the word we find here Paul implied. This is honestly one of those exegetical difficulties that does not have a solution. There’s simply too much ambiguity in the text for us to resolve confidently from our cultural, linguistic, and temporal distance.
That said, with all due unconfidence, I think the best solution is to read as a middle voice with an intentional change in verb to provide nuance. Whereas 3.1 was asking if there’s any benefit (ti perisson ‘anything better’) in having the Law if Gentiles who don’t have the Law can follow it from their conscience, now he’s asking if the advantages he listed in response to that question ultimately leave them better off (proexometha ‘we exceed’) in their final status before God. Paul absolutely believes there are benefits in being Jewish, but having those benefits and using them are different things. And since the list of biblical texts that follows talk primarily about the unjust within Israel, it’s clear from Paul’s argument that many (and ultimately all) have failed to live up to their side of the covenant, rendering any advantages it might contain for them useless (Witherington 94).
The really good news for us exegetically is that since Paul’s ultimate point is that both Jews and Gentiles are in the same boat, sinners in need of God’s grace, getting this point wrong doesn’t matter. Are Jews better off than Gentiles? No. Are they disadvantaged? Also no.
Paul’s Use of the Scriptures
The bulk of this section is made up of a long list of quotations (known as a ‘catena’) from the Old Testament: Ecclesiastes 7.20; Psalm 14.2-3; Psalm 5.9 or 140.3; Psalm 10.7; Isaiah 59.7-8; and Psalm 36.1. At first glance, all of the texts selected demonstrate that human righteousness is impossible. What’s interesting is that not only are there other passages that claim that righteousness is possible, but many of these texts themselves suggest this within their original context (SBL; Nanos 320; Eberhart). For example, Ecclesiastes 7.20’s claim that there is no one righteous is undermined by 7.15, in which the teacher complains that “there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness.” Similarly, Psalm 5.9 refers to the wickedness of the psalmist’s enemies, but the poem ends in 5.14 by insisting that God blesses and favours the righteous (a category that not only exists in the psalmist’s mind, but also to which he implies he belongs) (Kruse 167ff). So in a real way this catena is a ‘bad faith argument’, intentionally misrepresenting the Scriptures to prove a point (Moo 202f; Kruse 167). As it happens, there is a scholarly consensus that this catena pre-existed Paul, and there are other Second Temple Jewish texts that deploy similar lists to make a similar pessimistic point about the state of humanity (Eberhart; Kruse 168). I think Moo is on the right track about this when he writes:
But Paul’s actual intention is probably more subtle; by citing texts that denounce the unrighteous and applying them, implicitly, to all people, including all Jews, he underscores the argument … that, in fact, not even faithful Jews can claim to be righteous’. (Moo 203; cf. Jewett (2006) 263f)
One can be ‘blameless’ before the Law — as Paul claimed himself to be (Philippians 3.6) — but this is only because the Law makes provisions for dealing with sins. It doesn’t mean that they don’t sin. And that is Paul’s point: that whether one has never heard of the Law, or is scrupulous in adhering to it, all are “under sin.” As Witherington concludes:
Paul has already established the accountability of Gentiles to God and silenced their pretensions to moral superiority in his first argument, but here he silences Jews, showing that they are condemned out of the very source they claim gives them an advantage over Gentiles. Thus is the whole world held guilty before God. (Witherington 95)
From the Mundane to the Cosmic
There is a movement here from talking about sins as specific actions to talking about sin as a spiritual principle or force (Matera 78; Witerington 94; Kruse 164). Paul will develop this further in chapters 6-8, so I won’t focus too much on it here. But it’s important to note the shift is happening. Once again we see Paul’s ready use of the concepts and language of Apocalyptic. That tradition understood the earth as we know it, including our lives upon it, to be a kind of spiritual battleground between forces of good and evil — in which evil has the upper hand now, holding us all captive to its power, but which God will eventually win. (For Christians, of course, that victory comes through Jesus.) This seems to be what Paul has in mind here with the expression ‘under sin’. No matter what we do, no matter how diligent we may be in trying to do the right thing, we will ultimately fall short because in the world as we know it, sin has us in bondage (Witherington 94; Eberhart; Matera 78).
Challenge
Anything I’d want to say for this step has already been covered in previous posts (e.g. the tricky intersectionality between Jewish religious privilege but political marginalization and Gentile religious disadvantage but political and cultural dominance; historic Christian abuse of Romans for antisemitic purposes, etc.).
Expand
For many posts now, we’ve been concluding that Paul is expanding his readers’ horizons of faith by breaking down human barriers and divisions. With this passage, he’s finally concluded that argument. In this there is no room on anyone’s part for self-righteousness or judgmentalism. No matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we may be, we all still fail to live up to the standards of God’s justice. And so we all stand in the same position before God. Seeing sin in the world should only make us look within and repent of the ways we too fall short. And recognizing our own sin should only make us look out at others with compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. That’s the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s Paul’s teaching here.
Summary & Conclusions
In today’s passage, Paul completes the argument he’s been building over the course of two chapters, placing everyone, ‘saint’ and ‘sinner’, ‘Jew’ and ‘Gentile’, into one category: ‘human’, and therefore finite and fallible and in need of God’s grace.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
^ These are called contronyms, and English has a bunch. For example: sanction, oversight, fast, cleave, and dust can all be their own opposites. Like here, we need to know the context in order to understand which sense is meant.
Matthew Root 