Letter to the Romans – Part One

LET’S KNOW THE BIBLE

A cordial greeting to our viewers.

With this conversation, we begin a new series of presentations of biblical books. We have already seen the Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, now we will consider the letters of the Apostle Paul. In the New Testament, the collection of the Pauline letters occupies a large part. There are 14 texts related to the apostle.

The first of the letters presented to us by the canon of the New Testament is the Letter to the Romans, the longest, the most substantial of the Pauline writings. With the Letter to the Romans, we want to begin the knowledge of the apostle of the Gentiles, a convinced Jew, practicing Pharisee, committed to the study of the law, a doctor of the law. Saul of Tarsus was born between 5 and 10 A.D. In Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, today in southern Turkey, but he grew up in Jerusalem in the school of Rabbi Gamaliel, one of the great figures of the Pharisee school. He was trained in the strictest observance of the Jewish laws.

Perhaps he knew Jesus during his earthly life, but only in passing, meeting him sometimes in the temple. One like Paul could be the teacher of the law, who asked Jesus about the commandments, about the most important of the commandments or other similar matters, but the meeting with Jesus did not occur. during the Master’s earthly life, but after his resurrection.

Paul, in the beginning, hated with all his strength the preaching of the apostles; he considered them stupid, ignorant, gullible people who had followed an impostor. He was inflamed in defending the Jewish traditions, fighting them with all his strength, a fierce persecutor. Today we could even call him a fundamentalist, if not a terrorist. He was a religious man, but with wrong religious views. So attached to his own ideas that he became violent in the name of his faith and the defense of his opinions. He persecuted the apostles, organized the murder of Stephen, even wanted to assault other Christian disciples who were abroad, in Damascus, for example.

And it was on the road to Damascus that the Lord Jesus entered his life with great force. On that occasion, Saul of Tarsus met the risen Jesus, and his life changed. It was a moment that made him realize that Jesus was right and, therefore, that he was wrong. He needed a few years to refocus the situation because it was a total change. He had to rethink his whole doctrine from scratch. A Pharisee converting to the gospel message, a doctor of the law who becomes a disciple of Christ, had to change his perspective completely. However, that theological, cultural and scriptural richness that he knew so well will help him become a disciple of Christ, the Doctor of the Gentiles, to be the first great theologian of the Christian tradition.

After a few years of his shocking vocation, Paul was reclaimed by Barnabas, who introduced him into the community of Antioch and initiated him into the Christian ministry, and Paul began to train others, to transmit his experience. From Antioch, his mission was opened to the world and began first with Barnabas and Mark, then with Silas, Timothy and Luke, apostolic journeys to found new communities and in several cities of Cyprus, Anatolia and Greece, Paul gave birth to Christian groups that multiplied and strengthened in the faith.

We can date his conversion to the year 36. And we can date the composition of the Letter to the Romans to the year in the winter between the years 57 and 58. This means that more than twenty years have passed since that dazzling moment on the road to Damascus. Paul is a man of more than 50 years, mature and who for more than twenty years dedicated himself to preach the Gospel of Christ with many problems because he encountered much resistance, especially from those Christians who came from the Jewish world. We must not forget, because it is a fundamental element, that Paul is a Jew. A convinced Jew and expert in Jewish doctrine, belonging to the most conservative current of the Jewish tradition.

Now, this mentality has matured from the perspective of Christ. He did not deny Judaism or, we could say, the Old Testament, the revelation of God to the people of Israel, but he understood that the revelation of Jesus Christ completed, fulfilled, brought to a definite fulfillment what had been said in the past; not something else, but the fulfillment of the promise. Therefore, Paul still considers himself perfectly Jewish, because he met the one who fulfills the promises to the people of Israel.

However, not all had his ability to understand that the new was not a total reversal, but a definitive clarification and, therefore, Paul had to confront and even fight with people who could not understand, who did not have his critical capacity to deepen their understanding and, therefore, they were blocked by certain situations and certain options. Several times he had the opportunity to face these situations.

In Jerusalem, about the year 49, a council was convened, a meeting of the apostles with Paul and Barnabas to discuss the line to follow. The pillars of the Church, Peter, James and John, shook hands with Paul and Barnabas and gave them carte blanche to continue the work with that kind of ministry, recognizing that they were right, they could continue that way because it was the right line. Paul had never been to Rome. Rome was the capital of the empire, the largest city in the ancient world, the pole of attraction of all cultures and all movements.

It was almost inevitable that the apostles of Christ would also tend to the center, the fundamental point of civilization in the ancient Mediterranean, So, it is logical that Paul wanted to reach the capital of the empire and also bring there the message of Christ, but when Paul wrote to the Romans, in Rome there was already a Christian community there; he did not found it. The letter to the Romans is not the first that Paul wrote; the canon collected them in order of length, not in chronological order.

Paul had written until then only to communities he had founded, that is, to people he knew well, to solve particular situations, to deal with particular cases that arose at that very moment. With the Letter to the Romans, on the other hand, we find ourselves in a situation a little different because the addressees are not completely known to Paul And, above all, the Christian community of Rome was not founded by him. We don’t know who founded it, but when Paul writes in the year 57, he says that for a long time in Rome there was Christian preaching and groups of Christians. They were probably simple believers, what today we would call laity, maybe a couple, Andronicus and Julia, who brought the Gospel to the capital of the empire, starting from the same places where the Romans of the empire lived, beginning with the Jewish synagogues. There were many Jews in Rome, and it was the Jews of Rome who welcomed the preaching of Jesus, recognized as Christ.

Numerous Jews in the capital became Christians. Some synagogues became Christian and created arguments in their midst, disputes, and separations. Domestic communities are born, called in Latin “Domus ecclesiae,” that is, houses of the Church, whereby Church we understand the people, the people who gather in a house. It’s a private house, a house that belongs to some wealthy person that has a spacious building with some rooms that he puts at the disposal of the community; there they have their celebrations, they gather for Sunday mass, almost certainly celebrated on Saturday night, on the night between Saturday and Sunday. It becomes the occasion of a typical supper during which the memory of the paschal supper of Jesus Christ is remembered in his mystery of death and resurrection; and during that meeting, the animator, the apostle, explains the scriptures, forms the people to a more and more intense communion with the Lord Jesus.

Groups are created. In Rome there are different communities of Christians; today we would call them parishes, but they were not yet organized in this sense. They were organized by houses, and there were as many people as they could fit in a private house, 50 – 60. It’s hard to imagine a meeting of more people in a private setting. These groups meet in the houses of some available people and form the different units of the Christian group. It becomes easy to imagine that these groups could argue about some issues on which they did not completely agree.

The core group is composed of Jews, but in the meantime, many non-Jews have joined them so that mixed communities are formed that have different opinions. In this regard, there are some who are more conservative and believe that the law of Moses must be observed in all its details; Others, on the other hand, are in favor of going beyond the letter and application of the Mosaic law; according to them, it does not include the observance of all the particular decrees given the mentality which Christ opened, which has overcome certain taboos, e.g., the distinction of meat between pure and impure. These divergent opinions can produce disagreements or, at least, arguments.

Although Paul does not know the community as a whole, he does know many Christians living in Rome, and this is shown by the last chapter of the letter to the Romans, chapter 16, which is a list of names, a splendid text in which there is no theology but simply a series of greetings with which the apostle shows how many people he knows in the capital of the empire, and it is a good way to underline the relationships he has with the people; with gentleness and delicacy, the apostle enters into their lives, proposing his Gospel.

He writes this letter to the Romans to introduce himself to prepare his own journey to the capital; and he also writes to deal with the discussions that were taking place in the various Christian groups in Rome. He writes in a period of tranquility; the previous year had been for Paul a very tiring and heavy year, full of problems, annoyances, fears, even upheavals and disagreements. Now the storm has passed.

Paul arrives in the city of Corinth towards the end of the year 57; it is a beautiful city by the sea, the weather is excellent, and the apostle spends the winter there as a guest in the house of a certain Gaius, he says, and dictates this letter to a scribe named Thersus. We have a lot of information, even in details; they are minor aspects, but they are interesting because they help us to understand how these letters were born from life and the concrete reality of the people. In the house of Gaius, during that winter, Paul is reasoning, and I imagine him walking around, dictating to the scribe Thersus his reflections, and trying to summarize his own position concerning the law, showing the difference between the mentality of the Pharisee and the Christian mentality.

In the background, Paul is talking about himself, narrating his own conversion, the change that took place in his mind because he was the first one who had to make this change. The mentality of the Pharisee is the mentality of the religious person who is convinced of conquering salvation, the eternal reward by doing good works. By his own strength, by the effort of his own will the religious person thinks that he can get good results. Paul was like this when he was young; he had grown up in this rigid mentality, and when he met Christ, he suffered a ‘catastrophe,’ as said in apocalyptic language, a change from this way to this way; his mentality changed; from a Pharisee, he became an apocalyptic; he became a Christian, that is to say, he understood that nothing can be obtained without the intervention of God.

It is not the good will, the personal effort, the observance of man’s law that wins salvation. Salvation is a free gift of God. Paul understood that all his previous efforts would have been in vain without Christ. Only by leaning on the grace of Christ did he understand that his life became fruitful, and in the end, he kept on doing what he had done before, but he changed his perspective; he realized that morality was not the cause but the effect. He realized that at the origin was the event of grace operated by the person of Jesus Christ. It is the human person who encounters Christ, is transformed, and becomes capable of living in a new way.

This is the Gospel that Paul proclaims and in the first part, when after greeting the community of Rome the apostle presents the subject of his writing he says, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, first of the Jew and then of the Greek.” The righteousness of God is revealed in that, from faith to faith as it is written, “the just shall live by faith.”

Thus, in this opening formula, Paul compares the two great themes of righteousness and faith. The Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, is salvation wrought by God. Why does Paul say that he is not ashamed of the Gospel? Because in the end, to accept the Gospel means to recognize that I can’t do it alone, therefore, I could be ashamed to say: alone I can’t, I am structurally bad and I cannot do good in my own strength; to admit that I need someone else to save me, and this might humiliate me, therefore, I might be ashamed of this Good News.

Paul says: ‘I am not ashamed; I acknowledge that salvation comes from another; it is the power of God that saves. That saves everyone who believes. It is important that ‘to everyone’ without distinction of race or precedence in history, Jew or Greek, every person needs to be saved, and salvation comes to all based on faith, it is a continuous passage from faith to faith, from trust to trust. The righteousness of God is thus revealed. The righteous shall live by faith. Who is righteous? The one who does works? Paul says, quoting an Old Testament prophet, as if to say that it had already been said, that the righteous is by faith, is the one who trusts in God, who entrusts himself to him, and who allows himself to be saved. He that trusts in God shall live.

This is the great theme of the letter to the Romans. In the following meetings, we will discuss and deepen this topic.