Romans - Outside In

[mikesw]

We are back on for tonight at 7:00 PM. We have two sessions scheduled for this month and will wrap up through Romans 3 by the end of next week. Tonight we cover Romans 2:17-3:8 and discuss common Judaism as it relates to the situation in Rome. Next week we will examine Paul's use of his own scriptures (the Jewish scriptures, or the Christian Old Testament).

In early January, I want to do a session on Contextualization - how we apply what we learned in the first six sessions. As stated by Soren Kierkegaard concerning the Bible- "It is I to whom it is speaking, it is I about whom it is speaking." (From For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself, quoted in Vanhoozer's new book, Mere Christian Hermeneutics). It is all well and good to understand the text within its own context, which is what we are striving to do, but we need to bring it into our own lives for application. That will be the final session for a few months.

It will probably be after the first week of January to let people settle into the new year.

After that, I have some deliverables due plus a trip planned to Turkiye (I am still adjusting to this spelling), so we will pick this back up about mid-year 2025.

For those curious, two of those deliverables are on Romans 9, which is always a fun chapter to discuss.

I have moved on from finishing a draft on Rom 2:1-16 to starting on vv 17-3:2. This forms sort of a shadow of the juridical parable of 1:18-2:1. In both cases Paul, appearing to speak as a teacher of bad news, lets the gentiles think he is exposing bad behavior of Jews. Then in 3:1-2 he turns this around by presenting a positive point.
It became apparent that idea of 2:17-29 being directed to Jews is not well-founded. If we substitute "Jew" with "physician" a different scenario could be given that shows how a negative assessment could be portrayed of a group not present in the audience.

If you call yourself a physician, as a healer of the sick and one who understands the human body and is full of wisdom how to lead a healthy life, do you go out to help on off-hours? If you tell others to eat healthy, are you drinking yourself sick at night? If you help free a person from sickness, do you kill them with debt?

This could be developed better to mimic the dynamics of Rom 2:17-24 in allowing the audience to fill in the answers according to the audience's mindset even though no physician is in the audience. Paul's use of conditional questions allows gentiles to assume Paul has a negative view of Jews in agreement with their rejection. However, Paul gives ambiguous points about Jews and Christian gentiles in vv 25-29. It appears negative to the person who only finds Jews as failing but is positive or neutral when expecting Jews are obeying the law or, in vv 28-29, where a Jew has become a follower of Jesus.
In 3:1-2, Paul asserts a positive sense that cannot be denied by gentiles who accept the scriptural testimony of who the Messiah would be.

Another point about the conditional interrogatory in a broad sense of 2:17-24 is that the if-clause consists of vv 17-20 and then vv 21-24 creates a synthesis of questions that act as a self-evaluation of the figurative Jew being put on display before the readers. The brief sense reads as "if you call yourself a Jew, are you consistent to that designation?"

The purpose for this passage has been rather obscure, especially since many view already see gentile sin exposed in 1:18-32 and Jewish sin exposed in 2:1-16 such that any further condemnation of Jewish sin would be redundant. The apparent reason in my reading is that Paul lets the gentiles vent against Jews even though the real problem was the non-Christian Jews that left a bad image of Jews in the eyes of the gentiles. Paul then is introducing the problem of behavior of those Jews in verses 25-27 while giving a subtle affirmation about Jewish Christians in verses 28-29.

 

[mikesw]

Oops. I needed to clarify the worst wording -- "This could be developed better to mimic the dynamics of Rom 2:17-24"

I meant that this example application of v 17-20, when reworded for a physician could be developed better. The parallel idea would be the idea that someone is speaking about the troubled reputation of a physician. No physician would need to be among the audience hearing this parable. At the same time, there is no real accusation made, only possible issues raised as challenges for the physician to answer (if one were there).

 

[Swordman]

Oops. I needed to clarify the worst wording -- "This could be developed better to mimic the dynamics of Rom 2:17-24"

I meant that this example application of v 17-20, when reworded for a physician could be developed better. The parallel idea would be the idea that someone is speaking about the troubled reputation of a physician. No physician would need to be among the audience hearing this parable. At the same time, there is no real accusation made, only possible issues raised as challenges for the physician to answer (if one were there).

Rewording for a physician may be a good way of developing applications. That is one of the challenges I want to cover in our meeting in January - how do we move the principles of the text to our own context?

Michael Gorman suggests that the individual who Paul has in mind is a Jew. As I said in the session, I tend to disagree. (Having trained under Gorman, we agree more than we disagree, but this is one area of disagreement.) Some scholars see this person as a proselyte, as I suggested. There are a number of reasons for this. There is the direct address in the second person ("you"). This is the way Paul addresses the Gentiles in Romans. In the next chapter (3), when speaking of unfaithful Jews (those who do not believe Jesus is the Messiah), Paul uses the third person (v. 3). When he identifies with them, he uses the first person ("we" or "us").

Like Witherington, I tend to see proselytism as a process, very much like that of the Essenes, which took years of living the community lifestyle before formal entry into the community. (Josephus uses the verbal form of "proselytize") in his description of this. Others see a proselyte as a Gentile who has already been circumcised. In my understanding, circumcision makes one a Jew. Proselytes are those who are in process of becoming a Jew. So I think the "teacher," as I have called him, is a proselyte who has left the Jewish community for the Gentile church. Whether he is circumcised or not is an open question, but he claims to know the law. But the example of King Izates (in Josephus) gives a good example of a proselyte who knows the law and seeks to follow it with his whole heart, but (at least before he met Eliezar) was uncircumcised. Viewing his story from a Jewish perspective (not my own Gentile perspective), I would see him as an uncircumcised proselyte at that point in time, with the law written on his heart.

As a note, I made a mistake in identifying Izates' kingdom of Adiabene last week. That was a client kingdom of the Parthians (remnants of the Persians), not the Romans. The Parthians were a rival to the Roman Empire in the first century, and (like today) fought for control over regions of the middle east.

 

[Swordman]

Just a reminder. Our final session for 2024 is tonight at 7:00 PM EST. We will be covering intertextuality - reading the text within the text.