Lecture 17: The Roman Gods, the New Testament Letter, and the Occasion of Romans

The lecture, section by section

1. The gods of the Greeks and the Romans

   Both cultures deified the forces around them into a multiplicity of gods, the Romans through household deities adopted by families, the Greeks through cities that claimed a patron, so that to be a loyal Ephesian was to worship Diana at her temple. When Rome conquered Greece, the Roman names were laid over the Olympian deities, Aphrodite becoming Venus, until by the New Testament era the pantheons had blended. The working theology was simple: you cannot have too many gods on your side, so wherever you traveled you honored the god of that place and hoped for honor in return. Religion was duty and ritual, not intimacy; the Olympian gods were distant, and no one expected a personal relationship with them.

2. The emperor cult

   With the empire came a new object of devotion. The emperor was acclaimed as the patron of all his subjects and the embodiment of the spirit of all the gods they worshiped; Julius and Augustus were deified after death, while Caligula, Nero, and Domitian demanded worship in their lifetimes. Temples to the emperor let a subject worship every god of the empire at once by honoring Caesar, and at least an annual rite there was expected of all. The Jews alone were exempt, offering instead a sacrifice in Jerusalem for Caesar's blessing while the temple stood, and prayers afterward; and as long as Christianity was seen as a Jewish sect, it sheltered under that exemption. When the shelter fell away, after Nero and after AD 70, Christians who would not appear at the temples were counted atheists, enemies of the gods; the offer to place a statue of Jesus among the idols only deepened their horror.

3. Mystery religions, and the Gnostic spirit

   Alongside the public cults grew the mystery religions, eastern faiths whose rites and secrets were disclosed only to initiates. They flourished because the official religion was impersonal: people wanted a relationship with a god and an experience of it. Rome, suspicious of anything closed to outsiders, outlawed and harried the mysteries, and by the second and third centuries classed Christianity among them, indeed as the most dangerous of them, since Christians alone refused the emperor cult outright. To a student's question Essex distinguishes Gnosticism: not so much a religion as a spirit of special knowledge granted to the spiritually attuned, a cultural current that touched many faiths; the developed heresy we call Gnosticism, with its demiurge and emanations, was its later synthesis with Christianity.

4. The letter: presence of an absent writer

   From Romans to Revelation, God's chosen form shifts from narrative to letter, a thoroughly familiar instrument: the Jerusalem church wrote to Antioch in Acts 15, the Roman commander wrote to the governor in Acts 23, and the risen Christ himself communicates by letter in Revelation, where one reads and many hear. The recovered papyri show what a private letter was for: it took the place of the personal presence of the absent writer, saying what he would say if he stood there. First Corinthians 5 is the perfect specimen: absent in body but present in spirit, Paul has already judged the offender as though present, and expects the assembled church to carry out his determination. Hence the letters carry full apostolic authority; in Second Thessalonians, the one who disobeys the letter is to be noted and shamed, for refusing the letter is refusing the apostle.

5. The form, the length, and the amanuensis

   The letters follow the flexible convention of the day: an opening naming sender and addressees with a greeting and a thanksgiving or prayer that glides into the body, and a closing of summary and greetings, with Paul a master of bending each element to his purpose. But the New Testament letters burst the form's usual size. Papyri letters run about a page, the length of Second and Third John, Philemon, or Jude, because scribes cost money and carriers had to be found; Paul's great letters required sheets glued together, rolled, sealed, and delivered by his own disciples, Tychicus carrying Ephesians and Colossians. The physical writer was an amanuensis taking dictation: Tertius, who wrote Romans, greets the church in his own voice in chapter 16. And because forged letters existed, as Second Thessalonians warns, Paul closed each letter with lines in his own large hand, the authenticating autograph. The whole chain, sender speaking, secretary writing, carrier walking, reader voicing, congregation hearing, gives the letters their spoken quality: hearing them read, the church heard Paul.

6. Occasional, not tractate

   Some first-century authors used the letter form as a wrapper for philosophical tracts meant for anyone, anywhere. The New Testament letters are not that: they are occasional, called forth by something that had happened among the recipients, time-specific and place-specific, though debates linger over Ephesians and First John, where Essex will argue for definite occasions too. The gospels are the more tractate-like documents, general in orientation even when addressed to a Theophilus. The hermeneutical consequence orders the whole course: the contemporary reader reads the text through the historical occasion, asks what it said to the original hearers, and only then draws the principles; which is why these lectures dwell so long on background.

7. The shape of the collection

   The Pauline letters come down to us in a meaningful order. Romans through Galatians are the soteriological letters, justification by faith and the sanctified life. Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians carry the union-with-Christ emphasis, in Christ, in him, and a Christological weight the first four letters assume rather than argue. First and Second Thessalonians are the eschatological letters, conduct in light of the Lord's return. First and Second Timothy, Titus, and Philemon bear the ecclesiological emphasis, written to church leaders, Philemon among them as a host of the church in his house. The non-Pauline letters are bound by the summons to endurance: Hebrews through First Peter against persecution from outside, Second Peter through Jude against false teachers within, both streams flowing on into Revelation.

8. The life behind the letters

   The letters anchor into Paul's story: the zealous persecutor, advanced in Judaism beyond his contemporaries, converted sovereignly on the Damascus road, an event Acts records three times and Paul revisits throughout his letters; the early preaching in Damascus and Jerusalem; the decade back home in Tarsus until Barnabas fetched him to Antioch; the three missionary journeys, out of which the first letters emerge; the arrest and the voyage to Rome, from which four letters come; and the release, renewed ministry, and final imprisonment that produce the letters to Timothy and Titus. Every canonical letter sits somewhere on that line, and placing it there is half of understanding it.

9. The lost letters, and the closed canon

   Paul wrote more than thirteen letters: two further letters to Corinth are mentioned in the Corinthian correspondence, and Colossians directs an exchange with a letter to Laodicea, which some identify with Ephesians, though Essex does not. So what if a genuine Pauline letter were unearthed? It would be fascinating, a runaway bestseller, and not the twenty-eighth book of the New Testament. One could likely never prove authenticity, since forgeries circulated in Paul's own lifetime; and even if one could, canonicity was never a function of mere authorship, for God's word is settled, and the Spirit preserved in the canon the letters with continuing relevance for the whole church age. Meanwhile, Essex notes, people who would devour a lost letter have not read the ones we have.

10. The occasion of Romans: Paul's side

    The occasion is reconstructed from the letter itself. Paul says more about himself here than in any letter, because he is personally unknown to most of the believers at Rome, and what he stresses is his unique apostleship to the Gentiles, which is his warrant for writing to a Gentile church at all. He has longed for years to come but was hindered, needed to the east; now, with Christ preached from Jerusalem around to Illyricum, the pioneer work there is done, and his eyes are on Spain, with Rome to become for the west what Antioch was for the east, a praying, sending, helping base. But first Jerusalem, carrying the Gentile churches' gift, and he asks the Romans to agonize in prayer over a double apprehension: that he be delivered from the disobedient in Judea, and that the gift, and the Gentile representatives bearing it, be accepted by the saints. If God answered, he hoped to reach Rome in eight months; in the event, arrest and shipwreck made it three years.

11. The readers: a mature church divided

    The letter addresses a predominantly Gentile body, I am speaking to you who are Gentiles, that also contains many Jewish believers, you who bear the name Jew, Abraham our forefather according to the flesh, I speak to those who know the law, until 15:7 gathers both: accept one another, for Christ became a servant to the circumcision and for the Gentiles to glorify God for his mercy. Strikingly, Paul never addresses the church at Rome, only the believers there, the one named church meeting in Priscilla and Aquila's house: a cluster of house congregations. And they are mature: their faith is spoken of everywhere, they are full of goodness and knowledge, able to admonish one another, and Paul has written only to remind them on some points. History explains the fracture: the Edict of Claudius expelled the Jews in AD 49, leaving a Gentile-led church; after Claudius died in 54 the Jewish believers filtered back to find themselves a minority in the church they once led. Arrogant Gentiles, addressed in chapter 11, and proud Jews, addressed in chapter 2, admonish their own kind well enough; the accepting of one another across the line is what is not happening.

12. Why write now: Corinth's shadow, and Spain's hope

    Paul writes from Corinth at the end of the third journey, about AD 57, with Phoebe of Cenchreae apparently carrying the letter west as he turns east. Why not wait and settle it in person? Because he has just lived through Corinth, where outsiders manipulated an existing division, I am of Paul, I of Apollos, into schism and false teaching, and he knows any division can be so exploited: hence 16:17, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions contrary to the teaching you learned. The remedy lies chiefly with the strong, the Gentile majority of chapters 14 and 15, who must bear with the weak. So the letter boldly reminds a knowing church of the gospel they already possess, presses the reminder across the Jew-Gentile boundary, and aims at one outcome: that with one accord and one voice they may glorify the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and be the united base from which the gospel goes on to Spain.

1. First-century religion was duty without intimacy, and the mystery religions grew in that vacuum. Where do you see the same hunger for a personal, experienced relationship with God at work today, and how does the gospel answer it differently than the mysteries did?

2. A letter established the presence of an absent writer with full authority. What does that mean for how a congregation should listen when Scripture is read aloud in worship?

3. Rome was a mature church that needed reminding, not informing, and the reminder had to cross a Jew-Gentile boundary. What truths does your church know well but apply only inside comfortable boundaries?