Romans Intro (Part 1)

Romans — Steve Gregg

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Romans Intro (Part 1)

RomansSteve Gregg

In this discussion, the insights offered by Paul in the book of Romans are acknowledged as valuable and worthy of close examination. Written in an impersonal, didactic style, Romans became Paul's greatest work and has had a profound impact on the Christian faith. Paul addresses the issue of division within the church, emphasizing the need for unity and mutual respect - including the tolerance of differing cultural practices, without judgment or condemnation.

Transcript

All right, today we begin our study in the book of Romans. And as I do with every book that I teach, we have at least a lecture, sometimes two, of introduction to the material before we start going through it verse by verse. And we will go through it verse by verse.

Romans is a book, very valuable to go through in that way, because sometimes in a single verse, there will be so many phrases and words that are pregnant with deep meaning because it is such a compact statement of Paul's theological insights. And when I speak of Paul's theological insights, I just want to say something about Paul and the mind of Paul. Not everyone is as enamored with Paul as I am.

He's one of my great heroes all my life. Paul's been one of my heroes, and I've been trying to get inside of his head since I was young, in my teens anyway. And when I read Paul, I'm not only interested in the theology, I'm not only interested in the flow of thought, though those are very important things.

I want to know what's in there, even sometimes he may not be saying. Why did he choose this word instead of some other word that might have worked as well? Why did he say it in this phrase when it seems like you could say the same thing in a different way? And obviously, whenever anyone writes or speaks, the choice of words, the choice of phraseology is intentional, unless it's not, in which case it's accidental. And I suppose it's not impossible that Paul might have just picked certain words on certain occasions that weren't well thought out, but I seriously doubt it.

Now, I want to make it very clear, too, that while I believe in the evangelical view that the scriptures are inspired, I don't believe they're inspired in such a way as to take away from the personality or the favored vocabulary of the particular writers. I mean, God illuminated them, but they wrote as themselves. They wrote as people.

They weren't like prophets. I mean, when Isaiah or Jeremiah spoke, they said, thus saith the Lord, and they spoke as God's mouthpiece, speaking of God in the first person. The New Testament writers didn't do that.

The New Testament writers were not prophets. They were apostles. And as apostles, their method was somewhat different.

They didn't speak as oracles. They wrote according to their understanding that God had given them. And in Paul's case, through revelation, very strongly revealed he had been caught up in the third heaven, and there were things he couldn't tell us.

He said they were unlawful to repeat that he had learned. There were other things that he could repeat, and he had several occasions in the book of Acts record that Jesus actually appeared to him, though Jesus had ascended to heaven before Paul was even a Christian. But a lot of times when I'm looking at what Paul wrote, I'm interested not only in what he said, but why he said it that way, because I'm trying to get at his mind.

Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2, he said, we have the mind of Christ. I don't suppose anyone had it more than he did. In my opinion, Paul understood Jesus like few others do.

And there are people who are critics of Paul, and they sometimes say that Paul and Jesus were at odds, that they taught separate doctrines, that the real founder of modern Christianity is not Jesus, but Paul, and that he perverted a simpler message that Jesus had or a different message that Jesus had. People who are into the Hebrew roots movement, sometimes they like to disparage Paul because he seemed to put down the keeping of the law, and there are Christians who think we should do that more, and who think that Jesus was more favorable toward keeping the law than Paul was, and so forth. You'll hear these kind of criticisms of Paul as you get around and read and hear, talk to people.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing true in those criticisms. I cannot think of any doctrine that Paul taught that was not also taught or implied in Jesus' teachings. And as far as the things that Jesus did teach, I don't know of any major doctrine Jesus taught that isn't repeated in Paul.

As near as I can tell, Paul imbibed the spirit of Christ as perfectly as any man probably ever has. Now, there's a reason why Jesus chose him, remember. I mean, when Jesus ascended into heaven, he could have just left well enough alone.

Instead, he came back to appear to this one man and said, I'm making you the apostle to the Gentiles. So we have to remember what an apostle is. An apostle is somebody who's officially sent as an emissary from some official.

Jesus is the official, the king of kings and lord of lords, and he officially sent Paul to be his spokesman and his representative to the Gentile world, which is, of course, the majority of the world. And Paul was chosen because he was the right man for the job. To suggest that he somehow corrupted the gospel of Christ or represented it differently than Jesus would want is to suggest that Jesus made a pretty big blunder.

Of all the humans he could have chosen, he picked the wrong guy who messed everything up. But those who say that often are saying that because they don't like Paul, not because they can really find real differences between Paul's teaching and Jesus' teaching. I don't find any.

And I've been searching Paul and Jesus in the scriptures for over 50 years and teaching them. And I've just really never been able to have any sympathy with those who say Paul changed things. Paul did have the mind of Christ, and he could even say, be followers of me as I am of Christ.

He said that in first Corinthians 11, one, meaning, you know, if you want to follow Christ, you actually could just follow me. And he didn't mean replace Christ with me. I want to be your guru.

He's just saying, if you want to know what it looks like to live like Christ, to think like Christ, to be like Christ, well, you can pretty much follow my example and you'll be safe there because I'm following Christ in that way. And therefore, when we come to Paul in any of his epistles, we're coming to a man that Jesus particularly entrusted to be the main revelatory theologian to the church outside of the Jewish church. And the Book of Romans is usually recognized as Paul's greatest work.

And the Book of Romans has really changed the world a great deal. It's largely responsible for the Reformation because Martin Luther, who was a Roman Catholic monk teaching the Book of Romans at a Catholic university, as he studied the Book of Romans, he came to understand that the just shall live by faith, which it says in the opening chapter. And this was different than what he had understood previously as a Roman Catholic.

And he began to rethink things according to what he found in the Book of Romans. And this caused a lot of problems between himself and the Catholic Church, eventually causing the Reformation take place. Romans is a very powerful book.

It does have parts. I have to say that no matter how many times you read through it, they're going to be difficult. Certain sections in chapter 5 are just hard to sort out.

The grammar, the subordinate clauses, the parenthetical sections. There are times when Paul's structure is complex enough that it will remain challenging no matter how much you study it. On the other hand, his flow of argument is largely very logical.

So much so that I've heard that some university courses in philosophy and logic use the Book of Romans as a model of logical progression of argument. And I don't know if they still do since the universities have become so secular. But when I was younger, I heard that that was sometimes the case.

So we should be able to follow his thought, although there are differences of opinion as to where his thought is going. And we're going to explore some interesting possibilities there. But before we actually dip into the book itself, I'd like to mention a few things.

For example, the venue to which the book is addressed. It is addressed to all who are in Rome who are called to be saints, Paul says. And so Rome is the venue.

And at the time that Paul lived, although he wrote letters to many churches in many cities, there was no city more influential or important than Rome. And it was actually a church that Paul had never visited. He had never been to Rome at this point.

He was actually planning a trip to Rome, as he mentions in chapter 15. And he would eventually come to Rome, but not under the conditions that he had anticipated. When he wrote the book, he was planning to go to Jerusalem briefly and then go to Rome and then go further west to Spain.

That was his plan. Instead, he ended up coming to Rome in chains because he was arrested in Jerusalem and he would not have even ended up in Rome, perhaps, if he had not appealed his case to Caesar, which as a Roman citizen, Paul was entitled to do. And therefore, at government expense, he was transported to Rome, but as a prisoner, which at the time that he wrote this book, he did not anticipate.

He did anticipate coming to Rome, but as a free man on his way further west. And he certainly, you know, did not know that it would be the way that he came there, but he did have Rome in his sights, even though he had not been there. And even though there had been a church there for some time, no one knows exactly whether he wrote this in the year 55 or 56 or 57, but right around that period of time in the mid to late 50s, Paul wrote this.

And the church in Rome had been there at least prior to 50 A.D. And we'll tell you why we know that a little later, but there's evidence of the church in Rome existing as early as 50 A.D. Rome was the cultural and trade center of the world, and therefore it was an area where ideas disseminated. They came in and they came out of Rome as sort of a hub because of all the metropolitan nature of the city, how people came from all over the world to do business and even to, like Paul, to appeal to Caesar for their court cases and things like that. And therefore, people with all different philosophies and religious views would end up there and the views would spread there.

Good and bad ideas would spread from Rome to other places. It was a strategic hub that Paul could not help but want to master and I should say capture for the gospel. Again, the gospel had been preached there already and he didn't preach it initially, but and he doesn't give any indication that he was planning to spend a lot of time in Rome, though I think he may have been.

He was planning to go through Rome to Spain, but he wanted to do some preaching in Rome, too. And he wrote to them to let them know how was the Rome Roman church planted without Paul. Remember, he was the great missionary to the Gentiles and Rome was a Gentile city.

So how come it got planted without him? Nobody knows exactly. The Roman Catholic Church has the tradition that Peter is the founder of the church in Rome and the first bishop of Rome, which is what is sort of foundational to their understanding of the primacy of the Roman bishop. Who is now called the Pope that they believe that Peter made his way from Jerusalem to Rome planted the church room apparently evangelized there and led the church there.

Now, some people think that that tradition has some merit. Others think not so much for one thing. I mentioned the church was in Rome already founded before 50 AD.

Peter we find was actually in Jerusalem in 50 AD at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. A council was convened in Jerusalem to decide the question of whether Gentile Christians needed to become proselytes to Judaism and be circumcised or not. The decision was eventually ruled in favor of Paul's view that the Gentiles do not need to come under the law, but that was not at all understood fully by the Jewish Christians before the council.

And so the council was held. Acts 15 records it and Peter was there. He was not leading the council, though, and one could argue that he had been previously in Rome and returned to Jerusalem for the council, but there's no no way to know if that is true.

We do know the church existed in Rome before that time. And because of that, someone planted the church in Rome before the Jerusalem Council. And if Peter was remaining in Jerusalem at least until 50 AD and was at the council because he resided in Jerusalem, then he's not likely to have been a bishop in the Church of Rome or having founded the church.

It seems unlikely to me that Peter would have traveled from Rome to Jerusalem just for the Jerusalem Council. It was an important council, but the decision wasn't ultimately made by Peter, but by James. And for that reason, Peter wouldn't necessarily even have to be there for the council in order for it to take place and traveling from Rome to Jerusalem would be not a small matter.

Hard to know whether Peter had been in Rome or not. My my own suspicions are probably not, and that would mean that the Roman Catholic tradition of him having founded the church in Rome is probably not correct. Now, other theories exist as to how the church in Rome came to be.

One of the ways could be that people who had been Jews who had come to Jerusalem for Pentecost. But who lived in Rome may have gotten saved when Peter preached on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. And then, of course, eventually gone home and with perhaps with other Roman Jews who had become Christians there and began to meet together and hold church and evangelize others.

This would be one way, because we do read in Acts chapter two. That of all the countries where pilgrims had come to Jerusalem from in in Acts chapter two, Rome was one of the places that specifically states they came from at least like 15 different locations. And Rome is in the list.

That means that on the day of Pentecost. Jews from all over the world came and many of them got saved. 3000 got saved on that day.

Some of them eventually went back to where they came from, because coming to Jerusalem was not a move, a relocation. It was simply a pilgrimage. And so when they would go back to Rome, they would go back as believers in Christ.

And among 3000 converts, there could have easily been scores, if not hundreds, who had come from Rome. And if they went back to Rome, then you'd have already a church in Rome based on their core. So that's a very reasonable suggestion for how the church could have begun in Rome.

Another possibility is that we know in Acts chapter seven, that Stephen was stoned in Jerusalem. And as a result of that persecution that erupted, Jewish Christians fled from Jerusalem to all parts of the empire. Many of them may well have gone to Rome and may have evangelized.

We read in Acts chapter 11, that those who fled from Jerusalem because of Stephen's martyrdom, went everywhere, preaching the gospel. Initially only to the Jews, but then eventually to Gentiles as well, we're told. And this could have resulted in the church of Rome being planted.

Paul doesn't really make any reference to how the church in Rome came to be. But he made it very clear that he did not do it. He had not been there.

And so, if the tradition that Peter started the church is true, then that answers it. However, I think it more likely, I should probably say, I think it very unlikely that anything else could be the case. That pilgrims from Rome to Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, certainly Christian Jews from Rome would have gone back.

And there would have been a church there of some description, almost immediately after Pentecost. It may have been added to by the efforts of people like Peter and other visiting missionaries. But I would think that you'd have some Christian representation in Rome almost immediately after Pentecost, when some of those Roman Jews would go back as converts and have home fellowships.

The church in Rome did meet in homes. In chapter 16, while Paul is sending greetings to the church at the end of the book, he mentions a number of groups in verses 3 through 5, Acts 16, 3 through 5. He says, Now, Priscilla and Aquila are known to us from the book of Acts. When Paul first came to Corinth in Acts 18, he met them.

They were tent makers by trade, living in Corinth. And he was a tent maker by trade, so he lived with them and they worked together. They either already were Christians when he met them or they became Christians.

We are not told whether he led them to the Lord or whether he found them already to be Christian. But they themselves had come from Rome earlier. And the circumstances of their coming from Rome is told to us in Acts chapter 18.

It says they did so. They had had to leave Rome because Claudius, the emperor of Rome, had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. It says that in Acts 18.

In verse 2, it says, Now, why did Claudius tell all the Jews to depart from Rome? Well, the Roman historian, Suetonius, says that there were riots in Rome or dissensions and strife in Rome caused by the Jews. And in the writings of Suetonius, it says, Now, Christus, we would spell C-H-R-E-S-T-U-S. So it's like Christus, like Christ, only with an E. Now, an E, I think in Latin, can be vocalized similarly to an I. And many scholars believe that Christus was really just a misspelling of Christus or Christ in the Greek.

It seems the best theory because there's no explanation of who Christus is and there's no famous person named Christus. But we do know that Christ, at the time that Suetonius wrote, was very famous. The church had spread throughout the Roman Empire by the time that Suetonius was writing.

And everybody would know who Christus was. The name of Christ was known throughout the empire. And to say that the Jews were kicked out of Jerusalem because of riots over Christus makes very good sense.

When we know that wherever the gospel went, it caused problems with the Jews. And the gospel usually was first preached among the Jews in any location. And some of the converts would be from the synagogue.

And the greatest opposition of those converts would be those in the synagogue who were not converted. And so you would have the gospel dividing the Jewish community. And we know from reading the book of Acts that the Jews were often quite violent in their opposition to their countrymen who became Christians.

And although it wasn't in Rome, Paul himself, obviously a Jew who had become a Christian, was often run out of town by the Jews and by their opposition. And so it's not hard to picture, and I think most scholars do, a situation in Rome that is not described in detail, but is alluded to by Suetonius, the Roman historian, that the Jews were causing riots over Christus in Rome. And this was about 49 AD.

And so he had banished all the Jews. The Romans couldn't distinguish between the Jews and the Christians because they both were monotheists. Romans didn't know any monotheists.

Monotheism, the belief in one God, was not widely held. Virtually all religions were polytheists. And Rome had a whole bunch of gods like the Greeks before them had.

The Jews were distinctive for only believing in one God. And that's what Jews were famous for. But the Christians also believed in only one God.

So they seemed like Jews, especially in view of the fact that the Christus they were talking about was a Jew himself, claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. And that the gospel of Christ was first spreading from the synagogues. That is to say, Christians would go into synagogues to preach.

So the core of the church in every town, even a Gentile town, was originally some Jews. So the Romans, they just weren't interested in that religious stuff. To them, Jews and Christians is all the same thing.

They're just all worshiping the same God. And so when Claudius knew there were riots in Rome over this matter, between probably the Christian Jews and the non-Christian Jews. And of course, if the Book of Acts is any representation, we could recognize the Christian Jews are not causing the riots.

They are being attacked. But it still would be disruptive. That Claudius, being a Roman and not having a real love for the Jews in general, because the Romans usually didn't, would just say, get all the Jews out of here.

Just send them out of Rome. They're just troublemakers. And so all the Jews were banished from Rome around 49 AD.

And we see the Book of Acts confirms this. Claudius had told all the Jews to leave Rome. And Priscilla and Aquila had been Jews in Rome who had to leave.

And they came to Corinth in Greece. And that's where Paul met them. But by the time he wrote Romans, Priscilla and Aquila have a church in Rome.

They have a church in their house in Rome. And he sends them greetings. We know of Priscilla and Aquila's other activities only slightly.

We know that when Paul left Corinth and went to Ephesus, they went with him to Ephesus. And although Paul didn't stay long in Ephesus the first time and went on further to Jerusalem, Priscilla and Aquila stayed in Ephesus. He probably left them behind to manage the infant church.

So Priscilla and Aquila had moved from Rome to Corinth. They met Paul there. They traveled with Paul to Ephesus.

That's eastward into Asia Minor. Paul went further east to Jerusalem and left Priscilla and Aquila in Ephesus. While Paul was gone, Apollos came to Ephesus.

And preached there. And Priscilla and Aquila encountered him and actually did some fine-tuning of his doctrinal understanding. And then he moved on to Corinth.

But they remained in Ephesus until Paul came back. And Paul spent something like three years in Ephesus then. But apparently, Claudius' death, which I think was in 54 A.D., allowed for the Jews who had been banished from Rome, if they wished to go back to Rome.

And most of them had family and homes there and so forth. So the Jews who had been banished by Claudius returned to Rome around 54 after his death. And that included Priscilla and Aquila.

So by the time Paul wrote this book, they had returned. Priscilla and Aquila were now back in Rome. And they had a church in their home.

But not only they. There would appear to be other possible home churches that Paul alludes to. He doesn't say they are home churches.

And we may not be wanting to be too dogmatic about it. But there is some indication in verse 10, Romans 16.10. He says, Greet apelles approved in Christ. Greet those who are of the household of Aristobulus.

Now the word household is in italics, which means it's not in the Greek. It's just of the blank of Aristobulus. Some people who are of the blank of Aristobulus.

One theory is that this is the fellowship in the home of Aristobulus. And very possibly so. Through chapter 16, Paul largely greets individuals.

But from time to time, he greets groups of individuals. Like those who are of the blank of Aristobulus. Possibly the house church.

Also in verse 11. He says, Greet Herodion, my countryman. Greet those who are of the blank of Narcissus, who are in the Lord.

Again, it could be the fellowship in the home of Narcissus. Some scholars think that is probable. I think it's probable myself.

Verse 14, he says, Greet Asynchronous, Phlegon, Hermus, Petrobus, Hermes, and the brethren who are with them. Now again, he's largely going through a long list in this chapter of individuals. But now he says, these people and the brethren who are with them.

Like there's some groupings. In a church the size of the church in Rome, we don't know how big the church was. And some think there may have only been a few hundred people in it.

But that would be too many to meet in one home. They didn't have church buildings in those days. And so they either had to meet in rented public places or in homes.

So there would be different congregations in Rome. But there's still only one church in Rome. And this is very important, different than the way we think of things in the modern world.

In the modern world, a town has lots of churches. And they're largely independent of each other. Three churches on one street might never communicate with each other.

In fact, if one church has a crisis, they may not say a word about it to the church a block down the street. Instead, they call denominational headquarters four states over. And say, can you help us out here? Notice there's not this unity of the local church that they had in the days of the apostles.

This disunity that we see all around us, where the churches are unrelated to each other in the same locality, is unheard of in the Bible. Well, not quite unheard of. Paul heard of it beginning in Corinth.

He said he'd heard that some were saying, I'm of Paul. Some were saying, I'm of Apollos. Some were saying, I'm of Cephas.

And some were saying, I'm of Christ. So Paul had heard of some movement in this direction. One church in Corinth is starting to divide into groups over favorite teachers or teachings.

And Paul said, what, is Christ divided? You know, it's like you turn Christ into pieces. You can't do that. Paul was aghast at the suggestion.

We're not aghast at it because we were born in an age where the church is corrupted to the point where what Paul was decrying has become established and accepted and no one thinks a thing of it anymore. What church do you go to? Well, it doesn't matter what church you go to very much. You belong to the one church.

And in every town, there's one church. There may be many congregations. And in the Church of Rome, there's only one church, the Church of Rome.

But there were many congregations. And, of course, that's a logistic necessity. Once you've got thousands of people or hundreds of people, and you don't have church buildings, you're meeting in homes, you're going to have to break into smaller groups.

But that doesn't mean they're politically isolated from each other. Like, you know, we do our thing, you do your thing, and we don't mess with each other. As I understand it, they thought in terms of one family, one church, just logistically had to meet in different homes.

And so we have these different groups of Christians that Paul greets. Notice, Paul thought that one letter would be read by all the Christians. They might be in different groups, but he expected they'd pass the letter around.

They had that much connection with each other. They didn't say, hey, Paul wrote us a letter. That's our letter.

No, for all the Christians. And he wrote to all who are in Rome who are called saints. So he assumed there was one body in that town, but apparently several gatherings, as necessity would be.

In verse 15 of chapter 16, he also says, Greet Philologus, excuse me, don't want to leave a syllable out of there. Not that it matters. Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympus and all the saints who are with them.

So there's another group of saints that are with these people. And we can't say with certainty, but it's looks like there's some evidence here. There were at least five groupings of Christians that Paul greeted as separate groups.

These people and those who are with them, these people and those with them, those who are of this household, those who are of that household, the house and the church of Priscilla and Aquila. Seems like there were perhaps five home groups or five subgroups within the church. But obviously, since he's greeting them all in one letter, he understood that they would be unified in such a way that they'd all share the same letter.

Just like all churches, they share the same Bible. But frankly, if the head of some denomination wrote a letter to his church in Temecula, the other churches in Temecula would pay little concern for him. He's not of their group, you know.

But Paul understood a certain unity in the church in the town as he would in every town. Paul was very concerned when that kind of unity began to show signs of being compromised in the church of Corinth. Now, that was not happening in Rome, even though there are different locations that are meeting.

There was no sign of that kind of division, but there was some problems of another kind of division. It would appear. And we're going to talk about that because understanding what was really going on in the church of Rome when Paul wrote will be very important for understanding some of the things and the reasons for those things that Paul wrote.

And some of them are not brought out in commentaries very much or in teachings that we often hear on Romans. But you can certainly read the book and see evidence that something was a problem. And it's not hard to figure out what it was if you're looking for it.

Now, before we talk about that, about the letter itself too much, we need to point out that Rome itself as a political entity had a history with Christianity. For one thing, and it wasn't very positive. The founder of Christianity was a Jew who had been condemned in a Roman court and crucified, a punishment that was reserved for people who are considered to be despicable criminals in the sites of Rome.

We have to remember that although we don't think of Jesus as a criminal, of course, we do. We do remember he died on a cross, but we sometimes forget that that was because he was condemned in notorious trial, condemned as a criminal, and he died among criminals. Now, Christians cling to the old rugged cross and cherish the old rugged cross.

But people who weren't Christians to them, a cross was just a shameful thing. You know, if you were killed on a cross, your reputation was shot. And Jesus, the founder of this movement, died on a cross as a criminal in the most despised, humiliating form.

The fact that anyone who had had that experience would ever be worshipped or promoted as a lord or king. And especially in Rome, where there actually was a king and a lord named Caesar and who had actually crucified this Jesus as a criminal. The idea that the worship of Jesus, a movement viewing him who is no longer around as not only the founder, but the permanent eternal ruler who had claims higher than the claims of Caesar.

The fact that that idea flew at all is just astonishing. I mean, how anyone could believe it, even in Jerusalem, where they didn't have any love for Caesar. Still, the Jewish court had condemned Jesus, too.

He was condemned by both the Jews and the Romans. And yet within seven weeks, Jesus is being promoted, or eight weeks, Jesus is being promoted as the Messiah in the preaching of the apostles. And I'm sure the idea never would have flown if not for something, a very inconvenient truth for the critics of Christianity.

And that is that Jesus' tomb was empty and no one could account for what had happened to the body, except for people preaching that he'd risen from the dead. They could account for it. And even that might have been not so persuasive, if not for the fact that they could back it up with the miraculous signs and wonders, which Jesus himself had been known to perform when he was here, and which the apostles said he was still performing through his body, which was them.

We have to, we should not in any way discount the role that signs and wonders and miraculous deeds played in the initial acceptance of the gospel in a place where it must have seemed highly improbably true. You know, that a man who was crucified as a criminal and had no better status than that, but is claimed to have risen from the dead, exalted to the right hand of God, ruling as king of kings and lord of lords above Caesar, commanding that we even die for him rather than submit to the worship of Caesar. I mean, in the first century, that just seemed like an idea that was doomed to failure, but it wasn't.

It succeeded spectacularly, but not without divine and supernatural instigation. You know, when people say they don't believe there ever was a Jesus, the skeptics sometimes say they think he was a myth, or that he never really claimed to be who, you know, who Christians say he was and so forth. He was just some kind of a peasant who went around and a philosopher, and later, maybe a century later or so, Christians made up all these claims that he was God or did miracles and things he never really did.

They never can account for very well how Christianity really got started. Its message and the acceptance of its message seems incredibly improbable unless there was something provable. And what couldn't be denied was, again, the resurrection of Christ was the best possible explanation for the empty tomb.

No other explanation worked. Some people were paid to float around the idea that his body was stolen, but that was not believable either, because once his resurrection was preached, those who had so-called stolen his body would soon have presented it as evidence that he hadn't risen from the dead. Anyone who would steal his body would know where it is, and they could have quashed Christianity right from day one, and we'd never have heard of Jesus today.

But they couldn't find the body. His enemies, or the disciples, of course, are said to have stolen it, but they didn't steal it because they didn't have the power. The place was guarded.

So people sometimes say the body was stolen, either by the disciples or by the Romans or by the Jews, but it just doesn't fit the facts, the way things went. So there's that and the miracles that caused even people as far away in Rome, even under the eyeball of Caesar, to change loyalties and come into the kingdom of God and follow Jesus Christ at the expense of Caesar, really. And it wasn't so much at his expense initially because there wasn't that much conflict until Caesar began later on asking people to worship him, and the Christians simply wouldn't do it, and that was something that did cause big problems.

So there was this strife in Rome between the Church and the Roman authorities. We see, in fact, that in Romans 13, Paul takes the time to do what he does not really much anywhere else in his writings except maybe briefly in the pastoral epistles, to give some instruction to the Church about its relationship with the government of Rome. And this is a famous passage only because it's one of the few that we can turn to in the New Testament that tell us anything about a Christian's relationship to the government.

And Paul says in Romans 13, let every soul be subject to the governing authorities for there's no authority except from God and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. And he goes on to talk about the need to be submitted to them. Now we're talking here in a situation where at this time Nero was the emperor, and the people Paul's writing to were living in Nero's town.

And not long after this, in all probability, Nero's going to start killing some of these Christian people, including Paul and Peter. Both of them died at the hands of Nero. So we can see that the town that Paul is writing to, being a political pagan center that was at odds with Christianity from the day they crucified Christ.

And eventually crucified even the author of this letter. Or didn't crucify him, they crucified Peter and they beheaded Paul. That this was a volatile situation.

And the Christians in Rome, of course, had once been banished. At least the Jewish Christians had been banished from Rome by Claudius Caesar. So there had been a history of friction between Christianity and Rome.

Though it is not that friction that becomes the main concern of this epistle, but another kind of friction. And that's what we come to next. What had happened and what was happening in the church when Paul wrote the book of Romans.

Now I want to say that if you read most older commentaries, and maybe modern ones too, on Romans, or if you hear most people teach on Romans, you're going to hear essentially that Romans is the one epistle of Paul that doesn't really have any particular pastoral or occasional nature to it. When I say occasional, when we use the word occasional to mean something that happens periodically, occasionally. But occasional means brought on by an occasion.

You know when Paul wrote to Corinth, there was an occasion for that. He'd received a letter from the Corinthians asking questions. There was some division in the church.

There was a need for church discipline. These occasions were the reason. They were the occasion of Paul writing to correct something.

Likewise, almost all of his epistles. Something is going on in Philippi. Something is going on in Colossae.

Something is going on in Thessalonica. Something is going on in Galatia. And Paul writes these letters to him to address those things on those occasions.

That is, those letters are occasioned by something in the church that Paul had to address. Now what I've heard most of my life, and what you'll often hear about Romans, is Romans is an exception. It's not occasional.

There's no particular occasion for it being written, except that Paul was coming to Rome, and he wanted to send ahead some notice of his coming, and what it was he taught. The common view in commentators is that Paul, because he was planning a trip through Rome to Spain, he thought, well, you know, maybe I can do some preaching while in Rome, and I'll give him a heads up. I'll give him a heads up that I'm coming, and what I'm likely to be talking about.

I'll give them an idea of what my gospel is. But because he didn't really know the church in Rome firsthand, he'd never been there, although he obviously knew a lot of people who were there, as he says in chapter 16, he greets a lot of them. These are people he'd met elsewhere, but who had moved to Rome.

And so he knew a lot of the Christians in Rome, but the church in Rome didn't really know him personally. So he decided to write the most impersonal, and most, you know, let's just say didactic letter, a teaching letter, that it's more like a treatise, a little bit like what Hebrews is to another audience. Hebrews, if you know it very well, does not appear to be an occasional, well, it is occasional.

It is occasional by the fact that some Jewish Christians were backsliding, and that Jerusalem was about to be destroyed, and they need to be warned, but it's written very largely like a treatise, and Romans and Hebrews are sometimes seen that way, that these letters are written more or less so that the church through the ages to come would have in a single document a succinct statement of the main concerns that Paul had in his preaching of the gospel, and that we have in Romans, therefore, more like a theology book than a personal letter, and it has been treated that way. It is read as if it's simply Paul's theology of salvation, and by grace, through faith, and ends with a few, you know, what should we say, practical instructions in chapters 12 and following, but mostly, most commentators do not look for any particular circumstance in the church of Rome that called forth the writing of the epistle, but there are people who see it differently, myself among them. I believe that like all of Paul's epistles, this too was occasioned by something in the church.

It was an occasional document, and remember, in 49 AD, Claudius had banished the Jews, including the Christian Jews, all Jews from Rome. That means that the only Christians left in Rome at that time were Gentile Christians. The church had, prior to that, been Jew and Gentile together in its early stages in Rome, like all churches.

Every church that Paul founded had some Jewish converts and some Gentile converts, but when Claudius banished all the Jews from Rome, that left no Jews in Rome, and that means no Jewish Christians either. So the church in Rome, after 49 AD, would have been entirely Gentile, and it was years, probably four years or so, maybe five, before the Jews started coming back to Rome after the death of Claudius. So for something like five years, the church in Rome had functioned as an entirely Gentile-oriented group.

Now when I say Gentile-oriented, of course the church had its own culture. It was not like the pagan culture, but it wasn't like the Jewish culture either. The Gentiles didn't keep all those dietary laws and those festivals and so forth that the Jews did, but a lot of the Christian Jews did.

A lot of the Christian Jews, although they worshipped Christ, they did like to maintain their culture. They liked to keep kosher. They liked to remember the festivals and so forth.

And so when the Jews came back to Rome after Claudius' death, the Christians coming back into the church, the Jewish Christians, found it to be, I think, not very much to their liking, in that all Jewish flavor had been expunged from the church and had been gone for years, and the Jewish Christians wanted to continue to do what they had done all along, probably keep Sabbath, probably eat kosher, and be more or less Jewish in culture. We know this was true in Jerusalem, and there's no reason to believe it wasn't true in other places where Jews were and became Christians. They had, you know, you're raised over a lifetime.

It's like if you're raised in a Catholic church, and even if you weren't converted in the Catholic church, if you left it and became secular for a while and then became a Christian, sometimes Christians want to go back into that kind of style of church, either the Catholic or another liturgical church, because that's what they're raised in. It just feels comfortable to them. Someone like me, never in the church like that.

When I visit a church like that, it makes my skin crawl. I don't like liturgical style of worship, but some people are raised with it, and that's just what they like, and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to worship God in a more liturgical way than I want to, and that's the problem they had in the Church of Rome, although it wasn't liturgical versus non-liturgical per se. It certainly wasn't Catholic.

There was no Catholic church yet, but it was Jew and Gentile culture, and the Jews, of course, were a bit more liturgical than the Gentiles were, and we can see evidence throughout the book that some strife between the Jews and Gentiles in the church had arisen. Now, you have to understand the mentality of the Jew. The Jerusalem Council had only happened a few years earlier, and at the Jerusalem Council, it was decided for the first time officially that Gentiles don't need to be circumcised.

Now, why would that even be an issue? Why would anyone even care about Gentiles being circumcised? Well, because Christianity was originally Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. The apostles were Jewish.

The 3,000 converts on the day of Pentecost were all Jewish. The next several thousand converts were all Jewish, too. The church was a megachurch in Jerusalem before there was a single Gentile in it.

I say a single Gentile. There might have been some Gentiles, but they would have been proselytes. Judaism had always allowed some Gentiles to come into it, but they had to become Jews.

They had to be circumcised. That's the main thing. And they had to keep the Jewish law.

So any Gentile could become a Jew, and that was true from the time of Moses on. In fact, it was true from the time of Abraham on, because God told Abraham, I want everyone in your family circumcised, and that's the sign of my covenant with you. He says, even the servants who are bought in your house, they can be circumcised.

And so Abraham circumcised himself and Ishmael and all his servants who were Gentiles. They weren't his family members. They were from other countries.

So right from the very beginning, people who had no blood relation to Abraham could be part of the covenant as long as they were circumcised, and the Jews understood that. Throughout the Old Testament, they didn't promote it very often, but it was nonetheless the case that some Gentiles wanted to become Jews. So they were circumcised.

It was always possible for a Gentile to be in the covenant, but they always had to be circumcised. They'd become Jewish. Now, when Jesus came along, he was Jewish.

His apostles were Jewish. All the thousands of initial converts were Jewish. There was never an issue of Gentiles coming in uncircumcised.

But when Paul began to evangelize the Gentiles, they were uncircumcised people. And as such, they remained uncircumcised because Paul didn't require them to be circumcised. He did not consider that he was bringing them into Judaism or into a Hebrew roots Christianity.

He was bringing them into a new covenant, a new order, a new creation, that the old order was temporary. It was a shadow, and that Christ was the fulfillment of it. So Paul saw no reason for the Gentiles to become Jews first, and then Christians, or Jews and Christians at the same time of their conversion.

But Paul was a radical in his day in that respect. Because again, most of the Christians, except the ones that Paul was converting, most of them were Jews. And when they began to hear that Paul was bringing Gentiles to the Jewish Messiah and bringing them into the same so-called body with the Jewish believers, but these Gentiles were not circumcised, this was very controversial.

Fortunately, Peter, who had a stronger influence than Paul in the Jerusalem church, received a vision about clean and unclean foods, and Jesus said, don't call unclean what I've cleansed. And then Peter was sent to Cornelius, an uncircumcised man, and watched him converted, watched the Holy Spirit come upon him. So Peter had come over to Paul's way of thinking.

But Peter was not spending his time evangelizing Gentiles generally. He was part of the Jewish church. So the controversy erupted and eventually was solved at the Jerusalem council, where Peter spoke up in Paul's favor, and eventually James also, who was more influential in the Jewish church at that time, supported Paul, and Paul's position was supported.

But that didn't change the fact that a lot of people probably still felt in their gut that uncircumcised is really something unclean. And so in the Church of Rome, we had these somewhat legalistic Jewish Christians, and we had, we might say Jewish Christians who weren't in a negative sense legalistic, but had sort of a preference toward a Jewish flavor to their life and worship. Whereas the Gentiles, who had come out of rank paganism, they didn't have any interest in, certainly circumcision, no one's interested in circumcision except Jews and people who want to be Jews.

But these people didn't want to be Jews. They were coming to Christ, not to Judaism, not to Moses. And they didn't have any particular fondness for the holy days and stuff, so the Gentiles were just saying, no, that's not for me.

And so in the church, there were some, as there are today in the church, some who think you should keep the Jewish Sabbaths. Some would say, that's not important. Some would think you should keep the Jewish festivals.

Others say, why? It's not interesting to me. And that's the kind of division, because what we find, if you turn to chapter 14, there's a very strong evidence that this was going on. Paul, in chapter 14 of Romans, does not say Jew and Gentile, though many times in the epistle prior to this, he talks about the Jew and the Gentile as if there's a bit of a problem between them.

He certainly is describing the Jew and Gentile without using those terms. In Romans 14, where he said, in verse 2, he said, One person believes that he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats only vegetables. Let not him who eats, that is, who eats all things, despise him who does not.

And let not him who does not judge him who eats, for God has received him. Who are you to judge another man's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand.

God is able to make him stand. He says, One person esteems one day above another. Another esteems every day alike.

Let each be fully convicted or convinced in his own mind. Now, what's he saying here? Some people in the church want to restrict their diet. Now, he says they eat only vegetables.

The Jewish kosher diet did not require that they eat only vegetables. It was not at all a vegetarian diet. But for the most part, in a pagan city like Rome, you could hardly guarantee that the meat you got had not been sacrificed to idols or had been drained properly of blood, as Jews want.

There were some kosher butchers, no doubt. But some people just thought, I'll just play it safe. I'll just avoid meat so I don't eat any unclean meat.

Others, or the same ones, probably decide to keep holy days. These are probably Jews wanting to continue some of the Jewish culture, even in their Christian walk. And Paul does not condemn them for that.

He says, let everyone be fully convinced in his own mind. Let them do it if they want to. But he says other people don't want to do those things.

They'll eat anything without any convictions against eating unclean foods. They don't keep holy days. They keep every day alike.

It's all the same to them. He says, therefore, you've got a bit of a cultural difference here in the church. Now, Paul could have said, and I believe he was probably on the Gentile side in his own convictions about this.

I think he could have said to the more legalistic Jews, listen, eat what you want. That's what he said to Timothy. Timothy said, anything God made is good to eat.

Don't let anyone restrict your diet. But here he doesn't say that. He doesn't say, eat whatever you want.

The people who are eating only vegetables, they're bad. They're uptight. Those people who keep holy days, listen, every day is alike.

Paul could have taken sides with one of those two, but instead he knew this was a volatile situation. These Jews were ingrained with these convictions and culture, and he didn't even know these people. He'd never even been there.

But he wanted them to be at peace with each other and not let these things divide. Now, he didn't say the church has to be uniform. Unity does not require uniformity.

People can be unified without doing the same thing or preferring the same thing, as long as no one's preferring to sin. Sin is not okay. But cultural things often, you can take them or leave them.

They can fit into your Christian life. And Paul's not saying the whole church has to conform to keeping one holy day or the whole church has to conform to not keeping a holy day. He says, everyone do what they're fully persuaded in their own mind to do.

In other words, there's liberty in Christ. I could tell you all how to conform to what I do and what I think, but that's not my place. There's liberty.

Just do what you're convinced to do. But the main thing he says in this situation in verse 3 is, do not let him who's eating, that is the person without the convictions, do not let him despise the one who does not eat. Now, despise means look down your nose at somebody.

And he says, and let not him who does not eat judge him who eats. Now, think about it. The person who's restricting their diet is the Jew.

What's he doing toward the person who's eating too many things for his preference? He's judging them. I don't eat unclean food. You eat unclean food.

And the tendency is for the Jewish person to judge that person. As you're eating unclean food, that's not okay. On the other side, the Gentile who thinks he's got the liberty to eat everything, and no doubt does, Paul seems to think so too.

He looks at the Jew as an uptight legalist and he kind of despises him. Doesn't judge him in quite the same way. He's not judging.

He's not saying it's wrong for you to eat clean food. But you're just kind of immature because you think you have to. You know, I don't, I'm a better person.

I'm more enlightened than you are. I mean, we've been doing it in this town this way for five years while you Jews were all gone. And now you're back and you're bringing all this kind of, this kind of silly legalism with you.

And so it would appear that the attitudes of disunity here were across the racial line. The Jews tending to judge the more libertine attitudes of the Gentiles. And the more libertine Gentiles look kind of thinking badly of the Jews as not respecting them.

Not, I mean, thinking you're uptight. You're not enlightened. You're not mature.

You're still in bondage to these things. Now, Paul himself, if they had been his own church like Galatia was, he might have said, you are in bondage to these things. Stop.

But see, Paul, when he wrote to Galatians was not talking to Jews who are keeping the law, but Gentiles that were starting to keep the law. And he was against that. Paul was against Gentiles being circumcised.

He was not necessarily against Jews being circumcised. That was none of his business. He felt let them be circumcised.

That's not his issue. They were circumcised from birth anyway. But the Gentiles, he would not allow to be circumcised in Galatia.

He felt like they were departing from the gospel. So it's clear that Paul, if Paul thought the Gentiles were starting to keep Holy Days in Rome, he would have rebuked them because he rebuked the Gentiles in Galatia who are starting to keep Holy Days. He said, I think I've labored in vain for you, with you, because you're keeping Holy Days.

But here the people keeping Holy Days are almost certainly the Jews. And Paul didn't criticize the Jews for that. That wasn't a problem to him if they wanted to do it.

What he was against is making Gentiles come into Judaism as part of coming into Christ. And he was against that. And so this is, I think, the problems that we find in the church.

As you read through the book of Romans, you're going to see a lot of evidence. Of course, I'll bring it out as we come to the passages where you can see that what the subtext is of what Paul is saying is this division between the Jews and Gentiles is a problem that we need to stop right now. And it does color his argument considerably.

Now, we're going to take a break here. And we'll finish our introduction when we come back. And then it'll be in our third section, we'll actually start getting into the first chapter.

So let's take a break.