Introduction: Romans and the Voice of Paul

The Speaking Voice and the Written Text

It is easier to place the writing of Paul's Letter to the Church at Rome in the general outline of Paul's ministry than to give it a precise date. It is "overwhelmingly probable" (Barrett 1967: 3; cf. Dunn 1988: xliv) that Romans was written from Corinth during the three months Paul stayed there before he left Greece for a third visit to Jerusalem (Acts 20:3, cf. 15:25). He was hoping to visit Rome but first wanted to deliver personally the collection he had been making for poor Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. With regard to actual dates, this period in Paul's life can be correlated with the second half of the 50s CE, in a winter sometime between 55 and 59 CE (cf. Cranfield 1975-76: 14; Fitzmyer 1993: 87; Wolter 2014/2019 : 1.29-30).

If we can rely on the authenticity of the last chapter-and I can see no convincing argument to deny it (see below, commentary on chapter 16)-the letter was most probably written in the house of Gaius, a man rich enough to have a house that could hold a gathering of the separate house-churches in Corinth-perhaps 40-50 persons in total-and so sufficiently wealthy to employ a highly-trained secretary, Tertius (16:22). Here we come to the point where time and location has a direct bearing on the nature of the text. In Paul's Letter to the Romans, we may not only read his words but hear his voice. While hearing the "voice of the author" is a metaphor for recognizing the style and themes of the writer of any book or document, in this case it goes further. Paul's letters were all dictated to a scribe, but in Romans it is likely that this was more than a mechanical dictation, syllable by syllable, as was probably the case with his other epistles, when he was using literate but unskilled scribes (Weima 1992: 301; Richards 2004: 92-3, 207-8). Such is the complexity and length of Romans that dictation by syllable would have been an extremely difficult task, probably impossible within the time-span available (Elmer 2008: 51, 59). The secretary on this occasion, "Tertius" (16:22), bearing a Latin name that marks him out as either a slave or a freedman, must have been, exceptionally among other scribes used by Paul, a professional.

The "loan" of Tertius to Paul gave him the opportunity to use a viva voce ("living voice") dictation, taken down in shorthand, so that Paul is composing as he goes along and thinking aloud. Thus we can hear Paul's "living voice," and the voice has a persuasive tone, including several instances of the "diatribe," or an argument that Paul is conducting with an imaginary opponent (see for example 2:1-5, 17-29, 3:27-4:2, 9:19-21; 11:17-24). While this is a style of philosophical dispute that can be employed in a text originating in a purely written form, it fits well within the drama of a spoken discourse, so underlining the originally oral nature of the text and Paul's expectation that it would be read aloud to its recipients.

Commentators vary in the way that they hear Paul's voice. Adolf Deissmann gives us a vivid description of Paul's secretary Tertius, "whose swift pen was scarcely able to record the eloquent flow of Paul's dictation upon the coarse papyrus leaves" (1909: 348); this picture is in line with his general conclusion that Paul "was not a literary man," that he "wrote with complete absolute abandon" and that his thoughts in the letters "were dashed down under the influence of a hundred various impressions and were never calculated for systematic presentation" (1910: 240-1). On the other hand, Jeffrey Weima counters Deissmann with the judgment that "Paul's letters provide overwhelming evidence of the foresight, care, and precision with which they were written" (2016: 4). I take a middle way between these judgments. In Romans Paul does appear to write with foresight, and he has a mind that connects one theme with another in intricate ways; while he does often "dash down" a thought, as Deissmann puts it, we can sense that it arises from a pre-existing more systematic account in his mind, and it stands in a context of working his way toward resolving issues that trouble him.

However, Weima's word "precision" needs to be qualified. The structure of the letter, I suggest, is less the careful articulation of a system, and more a set of variations played on themes that Paul holds dear, in which catchwords are introduced and repeated with increasing meaning. While Stanley Porter calls this process "lexical patterning" or a "semantic chain" (2015: 35), an often extempore appearance makes it more like the style we know as a modern jazz "riff." Paul is dictating out loud, and so he is performing his text, developing key words and ideas, remembering-not always accurately-those he has already used, adding thoughts that he might have mentioned earlier, and sometimes even correcting his previous expression (see section 4 below). All this is in the service of seeking to persuade his audience to a point of view-his "gospel"-of which he knows the outline but which he is himself in process of refining.

The Need for Persuasion

Romans was written at the crossroads of Paul's missionary vocation. On the one hand it was a key moment in the planning of his mission. Paul intended to extend his missionary activity to Spain, by way of Rome, where he hoped to gain support for his mission (spiritual and financial) in a short stay (15:22-24). This would follow his immediate plan to visit Jerusalem, taking "the offering of the Gentiles" for the support of the church there (15: 25-8).

On the other hand, Paul is writing at a significant moment in his tension with the mother-church at Jerusalem. There seems to have been a stronger and weaker form of Judaizing that Paul was opposing. The stronger was that Gentiles must be circumcised and keep the Jewish food laws; the weaker was that Christian Jews must continue to keep the food laws as a mark of the covenant and therefore had to avoid table-fellowship with Gentiles. On the second count, Paul appears to have lost the argument with the church in Jerusalem (Gal 2:11-14), and thus visiting the Jerusalem church with the "offering of the Gentiles" was intended to retore unity in the church (Dunn 1988: xlii).

With these two situations in mind-his plans for mission and his dispute with some representatives of Judaism-Paul's strategy was to present himself to these largely unknown congregations in Rome as the "Apostle to the Gentiles" (in fact, their Apostle, commissioned by God for their benefit, 1:1-6), and to present the gospel that he preached, which is appropriate for the Gentiles. At the same time, he could counter calumnies that had been circulating about him (6:1). It used to be thought that Paul's aim was to set out his understanding of the gospel in a thorough way, in preparation for his visit to Rome, so that the recipients would have some familiarity with what Paul was going to teach. Now commentators perceive an intent grounded more in a social context-the aim of convincing Gentile Christians, who appear to be in the majority in the Roman Christian community (see section 3), to take a generous approach to a Jewish Christian minority and to allow for more diversity in lifestyle and worship than they were inclined to accept. As the "Gentile Apostle" he is arguing, apparently against Christian-Jewish skepticism, that Gentiles can enter the church as Gentiles, without adopting Jewish obligations; but from this position he is also urging the Gentiles in Rome to be accepting of Jewish Christians. On a wide canvas, they are to understand that God has not written off the Jewish people from salvation; and on a narrower issue they are to accept that Jews who want to observe circumcision and the Jewish food laws can be true Christian disciples. Paul in this letter is taking a highly nuanced approach to the observation of the Jewish religious law: Gentiles have been liberated from it, Jews (like himself) may share this liberation, but Jews may (not must) still observe its provisions and be obedient to Christ.

He wants, then, to persuade the Roman Gentile and Jewish Christians of two linked things: to accept and support his project for mission to Gentiles in Europe, and to accept each other in their diverse expressions of faith in Christ. Though he has powerful theological arguments for this project of reconciliation, he tends to present them in a way that appears to be more "off the cuff" than a prepared polemic. In so far as he is also exploring a quite developed theology, his style seems to allow some openness and flexibility in doctrine as well. As one commentator suggests, he wants both to clarify the essence of the gospel in his own mind, and to work out its implications for Jewish and Gentile Christian relations (Stuhlmacher 1994: 27). We may say that in the language Paul is using he is aiming to link the Roman congregation with himself and with Jerusalem; the letter has a whole cast of participants, whose relations in the text correspond to actual social...