The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (118 page)

Some of the most influential theologians and Christian leaders in church history were converted to Christianity while studying this book. In the summer of 386, Aurelius Augustinus, professor of rhetoric at Milan, was weeping in the garden of his friend Alypius as he struggled with the choice over whether to embrace the Christian faith. He heard a child in a nearby house singing “
Tolle, lege! Tolle, legel”
(“Take up and read! Take up and read!”). He rushed to a bench where there lay a scroll of the letter to the Romans, picked it up, began to read the powerful words of Rom 13:13—14, and immediately resolved to follow Christ. He later noted, “I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.”
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One commentator aptly stated, “What the
church and the world owe to this influx of light which illuminated Augustine's mind as he read these words of Paul is something beyond our power to compute.”
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Also while reading Romans, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor of biblical theology at the University of Wittenberg, discovered that the “righteousness of God” was not God's justice that motivated him to punish the wicked.

Finally by the mercy of God, as I mediated day and night, I paid attention to the context of the words, “In it the justice of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is just shall live.’” Then I began to understand that the justice of God is that by which the just lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. This, then, is the meaning: the justice of God is revealed by the gospel, viz. the passive justice with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “the just one lives by faith.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of all Scripture showed itself to me.
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Luther's dramatic discovery would forever change the course of history by sparking the Protestant Reformation.

The book warrants detailed study both by believers and unbelievers. Unbelievers should study it because of the amazing impact that it has had on the course of world history. Believers should study it because, as the seventeenth-century English Puritan Thomas Draxe claimed, Romans is “the quintessence and perfection of saving doctrine.”
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All who study the book should be prepared to be changed by it. F. F. Bruce said it well:

There is no saying what may happen when people begin to study the letter to the Romans. What happened to Augustine, Luther, Wesley and Barth launched great spiritual movements which have left their mark in world history. But similar things have happened, much more frequently to very ordinary men and women as the words of this letter came home to them with power. So, let those who have read thus far be prepared for the consequences of reading farther: you have been warned!
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HISTORY

Author

The letter to the Romans claims to have been written by Paul. Historically, NT scholarship has been so certain of Paul's authorship of the book that it has served as an important standard for evaluating the claim of Paul's authorship in other letters. Charles Hodge, a commentator in the mid-nineteenth century, surveyed the strong internal and external evidence for Paul's authorship and concluded: “There is…no book in the Bible, and there is no ancient book in the world, of which the authenticity is more certain than that of this epistle.”
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In the late nineteenth century, Paul's authorship of Romans was disputed by some, but their arguments were deemed unconvincing by the large majority of scholars. C. E. B. Cranfield rightly commented: “The denial of Paul's authorship of Romans by such critics as E. Evanson, B. Bauer, A. D. Loman and R. Steck is now rightly relegated to a place among the curiosities of NT scholarship. Today no responsible criticism disputes its Pauline origin.”
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Haif a century ago, C. H. Dodd confidently stated: “The authenticity of the Epistle to the Romans is a closed question.”
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The question of authorship was closed because the internal evidence for Paul's authorship, particularly the language, style, and theology of the book, was so compelling. Moreover, all ancient sources who mention the author of Romans identify him as the apostle Paul. These include Marcion's
Apostolicon
as quoted by Tertullian (c. 160—225), the Muratorian Canon (later second century), the canons of the Council of Laodicea (363—364), as well as the writings of Athanasius (c. 296-373) and Amphilochus (c. 340-395).
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Although the question of Paul's authorship has been settled, two related issues are worthy of discussion.

First, some scholars have suggested that Paul's role as author needs to be redefined. Romans 16:22 demonstrates that Paul used Tertius as an amanuensis or personal secretary to pen the letter to the Romans. O. Roller showed that an author who used an amanuensis could approach his task in a number of different ways. Sometimes authors dictated their work to the amanuensis who penned the material
verbatim
either in longhand or in shorthand in preparation for a final longhand edition. At other times, an author summarized his ideas to the amanuensis, and the latter took responsibility for the wording and form in which the ideas were expressed in writing. Roller argued that Paul used Tertius's services in the latter manner.
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Roller's work has been heavily criticized by
other scholars.
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Several lines of evidence strongly suggest that Paul dictated the letter to Tertius. The language and style of Romans is very similar to Paul's other letters. If Tertius were responsible for the wording of Romans, one could only account for the high degree of similarity between Paul's letters by claiming that Tertius was responsible for the wording of Paul's other letters as well. But no evidence exists that Tertius served as Paul's amanuensis for letters other than Romans. The degree of similarity between Romans and Paul's other letters is best explained by assuming that Paul dictated Romans. Moreover, some features of the letter to the Romans such as the frequent use of the conjunction “for”
(gar)
, even in contexts in which it appears to be unnecessary, support the claim that Romans was a dictated text.
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E. R. Richards, who argued that most of Paul's letters were not transcribed
verbatim
by an amanuensis since Paul rarely had access to a secretary who knew shorthand, acknowledged the possibility that Tertius knew shorthand and that the initial draft of Romans was a product of
verbatim
dictation, since “the book of Romans demonstrates more oratorical features than Paul's other letters.”
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A second related issue is that some scholars have questioned the unity of the letter, suggesting that it is a patchwork of two or three letters or sermons.
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Very few scholars have been convinced of the validity of these theories. R. Hays insightfully commented: “Such theories belong in a museum of exegetical curiosities rather than in a serious discussion of the theological coherence of Romans. These hypotheses demonstrate nothing more than the inability of their authors to tolerate dialectical complexity”
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More serious are the suggestions that Paul's letter originally concluded at the end of chap. 14 or at the end of chap. 15 and that the final chapters were added some time later either by Paul or someone else. These suggestions are based in part on manuscript evidence. The papyrus p
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, which dates to around 200, places the concluding doxology (Rom 16:25—27) at the end of chap. 15. Although the manuscript contains chap. 16, some scholars believe that the placement of the doxology indicates the letter may have circulated without the final chapter. Some Greek manuscripts, old Latin manuscripts, and early manuscripts of the Vulgate and other texts place the doxology at the end of chap. 14. Tertullian (c. 160—225) referred to chap. 14 as the conclusion of the letter, which may imply that chaps. 15—16 were not present in the texts of Romans available to him.
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These placements of the doxology imply that chaps. 15—16 or chap. 16 alone was missing in some early manuscript traditions. This raises two possibilities. Either chaps. 15—16 or chap. 16 was added to an original letter containing 14 or 15 chapters, or this original material was at some early point deleted from manuscripts of the letter.

K. Lake, largely followed by J. Knox, argued that the 14-chapter version was original and was written as a circular letter intended for numerous congregations. Later Paul added the Roman address and chap. 15 for the benefit of the congregation in Rome specifically.
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Lake thought that chap. 16 was a letter originally addressed to the Ephesians that was later appended to Romans. T. W. Manson suggested that Paul originally addressed chaps. 1—15 to the Roman congregation but that he later added chap. 16 and sent chaps. 1—16 to the Ephesian congregation.
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The theory that Romans originally consisted of only 14 chapters has been most decisively refuted by H. Gamble.
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He pointed out that although a few late manuscripts omit the address to the Romans in 1:7, no manuscript addresses the letter to a place other than Rome. The 14-chapter form of the letter also broke the unity of the treatment of the strong and weak and makes the ending unusually abrupt. Gamble offered a strong defense of the Pauline authorship and original Roman destination of chap. 16.
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He demonstrated that to claim that Romans originally ended with chap. 15 was to deprive the letter of a formal epistolary conclusion, a feature without parallel among Paul's other letters. Gamble's arguments were sufficiently persuasive to convince J. Fitzmyer, who in an earlier commentary adopted Manson's view that chap. 16 was a letter originally addressed to the Ephesians, to abandon that hypothesis and affirm the original unity of Rom 1:1—16:23.
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Several scholars have argued that the last chapter or two of an original 16-chapter letter were removed either accidentally or intentionally. F. J. A. Hort and M.-J. Lagrange suggested that the last two chapters were removed in order to make the letter more suitable for reading in public worship.
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C. W. Emmet and H. J. Frede suggested that the final pages of an early codex were lost and that this gave some early scribes the impression that Romans originally ended at that point.
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H. Gamble argued that the final two chapters were eliminated by some scribes out of a concern for “catholic generalization,” a desire
to make the letter more directly applicable to a wider audience.
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W. Sanday and A. C. Headlam, C. E. B. Cranfield, J. D. G. Dunn, D. J. Moo, and T. R. Schreiner have adopted the view of Origen (c. 185—254), who claimed that the shortest form of the letter was the result of removal of the two final chapters by Marcion or one of his disciples.
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Cranfield suggested that Marcion would have objected to the final section's heavy concentration of OT quotations as well as the statements in Rom 15:4,8 and may have wished to delete references to the church in Rome in retaliation for their rejection of him.
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The one difficulty with this increasingly popular explanation is the evidence that Tertullian (c. 160-225) probably only knew the shorter form of the letter. Since Tertullian would not likely have knowingly accepted Marcion's mutilated version of the letter, his claim that chap. 14 constitutes the conclusion of the letter suggests that the loss of chaps. 15—16 may have preceded the time of Marcion (c. 150). If manuscripts before the time of Marcion lacked the two final chapters, the explanation of Emmet and Frede seems most plausible. The fact that the shorter form of the letter ends the letter in the middle of a discussion strongly suggests that the shorter form was more likely the result of an accident than intentional editorial work by one who wished to adapt the letter for public reading or a more general audience.

Compelling evidence confirms the historic claim that the apostle Paul is the true author of all 16 chapters of the letter to the Romans. Except for a few radical critics in the last two centuries, no one has seriously questioned Paul's authorship of Romans. A. M. Hunter was correct when he humorously quipped: “No one outside Bedlam seriously doubts that Romans was written by St. Paul.”
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Date

Romans 15 contains important details about Paul's travel plans that are helpful in dating the composition of the letter. Romans 15:25 indicates that Paul was about to begin or had just begun his journey to Jerusalem to deliver the relief offering to the impoverished believers there. Romans 15:19,23 show that Paul viewed his work in the regions between Jerusalem and Illyricum as complete. Paul had determined to carry the gospel to Spain (Rom 15:24,28) and would pass through Rome on his trip from Jerusalem to Western Europe. Paul had already completed the collection of the relief offering in Macedonia and Achaia (Rom 15:26).

These details readily coalesce with details in Acts 20. Acts 19:21 records that Paul resolved to pass through Macedonia and Achaia on his way to Jerusalem from Ephesus.
Paul traveled through Macedonia to Greece where he stayed for three months (Acts 20:1—3). He likely stayed in Corinth during most of this period during which he wrote the letter to the Romans. While in Corinth, Paul discovered a plot that had been devised by his Jewish opponents that led to a change in his travel plans. Rather than sailing from the port in Cenchrea near Corinth to Syria as he originally planned, he reversed course and traveled back through Macedonia, sailed to Troas, Miletus, Cos, Patara, and then to Tyre, Ptolemais, and Caesarea to travel overland to Jerusalem.

Paul's third missionary journey probably extended from around 51 to the winter of 54—55. The key factors for dating this journey are the dates of Paul's stay in Corinth during the second missionary journey that are established by the Delphi Inscription and the probable date of Paul's arrest in Jerusalem that can be calculated based on the Roman tribune's statement in Acts 21:38 and the ascension of Festus. Paul probably wrote the letter to the Romans in the winter of 54-55.
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