Bible Commentaries
Romans

A CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL COMMENTARY

ON

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

BY

THE REV.WILLIAM. SANDAY, D.D., LL.D., LITT.D., F.B.A.

Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford Chaplain in Ordinary to the King

AND THE

REV. ARTHUR C. HEADLAM, D.D.

Principal of King’s College, London

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PREFACE

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The commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans which already exist in English, unlike those on some other Books of the New Testament, are so good and so varied that to add to their number may well seem superfluous. Fortunately for the present editors the responsibility for attempting this does not rest with them. In a series of commentaries on the New Testament it was impossible that the Epistle to the Romans should not be included and should not hold a prominent place. There are few books which it is more difficult to exhaust and few in regard to which there is more to be gained from renewed interpretation by different minds working under different conditions. If it is a historical fact that the spiritual revivals of Christendom have been usually associated with closer study of the Bible, this would be true in an eminent degree of the Epistle to the Romans. The editors are under no illusion as to the value of their own special contribution, and they will be well content that it should find its proper level and be assimilated or left behind as it deserves.

Perhaps the nearest approach to anything at all distinctive in the present edition would be (1) the distribution of the subject-matter of the commentary, (2) the attempt to furnish an interpretation of the Epistle which might be described as historical.

Some experience in teaching has shown that if a difficult Epistle like the Romans is really to be understood and grasped at once as a whole and in its parts, the argument should be presented in several different ways and on several different scales at the same time. And it is an advantage when the matter of a commentary can be so broken up that by means of headlines, headings to sections, summaries, paraphrases, and large and small print notes, the reader may not either lose the main thread of the argument in the crowd of details, or slur over details in seeking to obtain a general idea. While we are upon this subject, we may explain that the principle which has guided the choice of large and small print for the notes and longer discussions is not exactly that of greater or less importance, but rather that of greater or less directness of bearing upon the exegesis of the text. This principle may not be carried out with perfect uniformity: it was an experiment the effect of which could not always be judged until the commentary was in print; but when once the type was set the possibility of improvement was hardly worth the trouble and expense of resetting.

The other main object at which we have aimed is that of making our exposition of the Epistle historical, that is of assigning to it its true position in place and time—on the one hand in relation to contemporary Jewish thought, and on the other hand in relation to the growing body of Christian teaching. We have endeavoured always to bear in mind not only the Jewish education and training of the writer, which must clearly have given him the framework of thought and language in which his ideas are cast, but also the position of the Epistle in Christian literature. It was written when a large part of the phraseology of the newly created body was still fluid, when a number of words had not yet come to have a fixed meaning, when their origin and associations—to us obscure—were still fresh and vivid. The problem which a commentator ought to propose to himself in the first instance is not what answer does the Epistle give to questions which are occupying men’s minds now, or which have occupied them in any past period of Church history, but what were the questions of the time at which the Epistle was written and what meaning did his words and thoughts convey to the writer himself.

It is in the pursuit of this original meaning that we have drawn illustrations somewhat freely from Jewish writings, both from the Apocryphal literature which is mainly the product of the period between 100 b.c. and 100 a.d., and (although less fully) from later Jewish literature. In the former direction we have been much assisted by the attention which has been bestowed in recent years on these writings, particularly by the excellent editions of the Psalms of Solomon and of the Book of Enoch. It is by a continuous and careful study of such works that any advance in the exegesis of the New Testament will be possible. For the later Jewish literature and the teaching of the Rabbis we have found ourselves in a position of greater difficulty. A first-hand acquaintance with this literature we do not possess, nor would it be easy for most students of the New Testament to acquire it. Moreover complete agreement among the specialists on the subject does not as yet exist, and a perfectly trustworthy standard of criticism seems to be wanting. We cannot therefore feel altogether confident of our ground. At the same time we have used such material as was at our disposal, and certainly to ourselves it has been of great assistance, partly as suggesting the common origin of systems of thought which have developed very differently, partly by the striking contrasts which it has afforded to Christian teaching.

Our object is historical and not dogmatic. Dogmatics are indeed excluded by the plan of this series of commentaries, but they are excluded also by the conception which we have formed for ourselves of our duty as commentators. We have sought before all things to understand St. Paul, and to understand him not only in relation to his surroundings but also to those permanent facts of human nature on which his system is based. It is possible that in so far as we may succeed in doing this, data may be supplied which at other times and in other hands may be utilized for purposes of dogmatics; but the final adjustments of Christian doctrine have not been in our thoughts

To this general aim all other features of the commentary are subordinate. It is no part of our design to be in the least degree exhaustive. If we touch upon the history of exegesis it is less for the sake of that history in itself than as helping to throw into clearer relief that interpretation which we believe to be the right one. And in like manner we have not made use of the Epistle as a means for illustrating New Testament grammar or New Testament diction, but we deal with questions of grammar and diction just so far as they contribute to the exegesis of the text before us. No doubt there will be omissions which are not to be excused in this way. The literature on the Epistle to the Romans is so vast that we cannot pretend to have really mastered it. We have tried to take account of monographs and commentaries of the most recent date, but here again when we have reached what seemed to us a satisfactory explanation we have held our hand. In regard to one book in particular, Dr. Bruce’s St. Paul’s Conception of Christianity, which came out as our own work was far advanced, we thought it best to be quite independent. On the other hand we have been glad to have access to the sheets relating to Romans in Dr. Hort’s forthcoming Introductions to Romans and Ephesians, which, through the kindness of the editors, have been in our possession since December last.

The Commentary and the Introduction have been about equally divided between the two editors; but they have each been carefully over the work of the other, and they desire to accept a joint responsibility for the whole. The editors themselves are conscious of having gained much by this co-operation, and they hope that this gain may be set off against a certain amount of unevenness which was inevitable.

It only remains for them to express their obligations and thanks to those many friends who have helped them directly or indirectly in various parts of the work, and more especially to Dr. Plummer and the Rev. F. E. Brightman of the Pusey House. Dr. Plummer, as editor of the series, has read through the whole of the Commentary more than once, and to his courteous and careful criticism they owe much. To Mr. Brightman they are indebted for spending upon the proof-sheets of one half of the Commentary greater care and attention than many men have the patience to bestow on work of their own.

The reader is requested to note the table of abbreviations on p. cx ff., and the explanation there given as to the Greek text made use of in the Commentary. Some additional references are given in the Index (p. 444 ff).

W. SANDAY.

A. C. HEADLAM.

Oxford, Whitsuntide, 1895.

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

We are indebted to the keen sight and disinterested care of friends for many small corrections. We desire to thank especially Professor Lock, Mr. C. H. Turner, the Revs. F. E. Brightman, W. O. Burrows, and R. B. Rackham. References have been inserted, where necessary, to the edition of 4 Ezra by the late Mr. Bensly, published in Texts and Studies, iii. 2. No more extensive recasting of the commentary has been attempted.

Oxford, Lent, 1896.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The demand for a new Edition has come upon us so suddenly in the midst of other work, that we have again confined ourselves to small corrections, the knowledge of which we owe to the kindness of many friends and critics. We have especially to thank Dr. Carl Clemen of Halle, not only for a useful and helpful review in the Theologische Literaturzeitung, No. 26, Nov. 7, 1896, p. 590, but also for privately communicating to us a list of misprints. We have also to thank the Rev. H. T. Purchas of New Zealand, Mr. John Humphrey Barbour of the U.S.A., and the Rev. C. Plummer for corrections and suggestions. We should like also to refer to an article in the Expositor (Vol. IV, 1896, p. 124) by the late Rev. J. Barmby, on The Meaning of the ‘Righteousness of God’ in the Epistle to the Romans, in which he works out more fully the opinions to which we referred on p. 24. We are glad again to express our obligations to him and our sense of the loss of one who was a vigorous and original worker both in Church History and in New Testament Exegesis.

We can only now chronicle the appearance of the first volume of the elaborate Einleitung in das N. T. (Leipzig, 1897) of Dr. Zahn, which discusses the questions relating to the Epistle with the writer’s accustomed thoroughness and learning, a new ‘improved’ edition of the Einleitung of Dr. B. Weiss, and an edition of the Greek text of the Pauline Epistles with concise commentary by the same author. Both these works have appeared during the present year. The volume of essays dedicated to Dr. B. Weiss on his seventieth birthday, Theol. Studien &c. (Göttingen, 1897), contains two papers which have a bearing upon the Epistle, Zur paulinischen Théodicée by Dr. Ernst Kühl, and Beiträge zur paulin. Rhetorik by Dr. Joh. Weiss. We should hope to take account of these and other works if at some future time we are permitted to undertake a fuller revision of our commentary.

W. S.

A. C. H.

Oxford, December, 1897.

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

Once more the call for a new edition has come upon us suddenly, and at a time when it would not be possible for either of us to devote much attention to it. But apart from this, it would be equally true of both of us that our thoughts and studies have of late travelled so far from the Epistle to the Romans that to come back to it would be an effort, and would require more leisure than we are likely to have for some years to come. We are well aware that much water has flowed under the bridge since we wrote, and that many problems would have to be faced afresh if a searching revision of our work were attempted.

As we cannot undertake this at present, it may be right that we should at least suggest to the reader where he may go for further information.

A very excellent and thorough survey of the whole subject will be found in the article ‘Romans’ in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible by Dr. A. Robertson. The corresponding article in the Encyclopaedia Biblica has not yet appeared. For more detailed exegesis the most important recent event is probably the appearance (in 1899) of the ninth edition of Meyer’s Commentary by Dr. B. Weiss, who has done us the honour to include systematic reference to our own work. In any revision of this it would be our first duty to give to the points on which Dr. Weiss differs from us renewed consideration. In English the most considerable recent commentary is Dr. Denney’s in the Expositor’s Greek Testament (1900). There is also a thoughtful and useful little commentary in the Century Bible by A. E. Garvie.

Perhaps the most conspicuous of the problems raised by the Epistle, which have been or are being carried on beyond the point at which we had left them, would be (i) the question as to the meaning of the ‘righteousness of God’ in 1:17, &c. Something was said on this subject in the New Testament portion of the article ‘God’ in Hastings’ Dictionary, ii. 210-12, where reference is made to an interesting tract by Dalman, Die richterliche Gerech-tigkeit im A. T. (Berlin, 1897), and to other literature. Something also was said in the Journal of Theological Studies, i. 486 ff., ii. 198 ff. And the question is again raised by Dr. James Drummond in the first number of the Hibbert Journal, pp. 83-95. This paper is to be continued; and the subject is sure to be heard of further. (ii) Another leading problem is that as to the relation of St. Paul to the Jewish Law, on which perhaps the most important recent contributions have been those by Sieffert (‘Die Entwicklungslinie d. paulin. Gesetzeslehre nach Deu_4 Hauptbriefen d. Apost.’) in the volume of Studies in honour of B. Weiss (Göttingen, 1897) and by P. Feine (Das gesetzesfreie Evangelium d. Paulus, Leipzig, 1899). (iii) A third deeply important question is being much agitated at the present time; viz. that as to the exact nature and significance of the ‘Mystical Union’ described in Rom_6 and 8. This is even more a question of Biblical and Dogmatic Theology than of Exegesis, and it is from this side that it is being discussed in such books as Dr. Moberly’s Atonement and Personality (1901), Mr. Wilfrid Richmond’s Essay on Personality as a Philosophical Principle (1900), and more incidentally in several works by Dr. W. R. Inge. (iv) Various questions raised in the Introduction are discussed in Dr. Moffatt’s Historical New Testament (Edinburgh. 1901).

Two more general subjects are receiving special attention at the present time. One of these is the historical position and character of New Testament Greek, on which much new light is thrown by the study of inscriptions and of the mass of recently discovered papyri. We associate these studies especially with the names of G. A. Deissmann, whose Bible Studies have recently been published in English (Edinburgh, 1901), A. Thumb, K. Dieterich, and others. It is the less necessary to go into details about these, as an excellent account is given of all that has been done in a series of papers by H. A. A. Kennedy in the Expository Times, vol. xii (1901). Dr. Kennedy was himself a pioneer of the newer movement in England with his Sources of New Testament Greek (Edinburgh, 1895). We ought not however to forget the still earlier work of Dr. Hatch, Essays in Biblical Greek (Oxford, 1889), which was really at the time in advance of similar research on the Continent.

The other subject might be described as the Rhetoric of the New Testament. A comprehensive treatment of ancient rhetorical prose in general has been undertaken by Prof. E. Norden of Breslau in Die antike Kunstprosa (Leipzig, 1898). Dr. Norden devotes pp. 451-510 to an analysis of style in the New Testament, and also pays special attention to the later Christian writers, both Greek and Latin. The ‘Rhetoric of St. Paul’ in particular is the subject of a monograph by Dr. Johannes Weiss in the volume dedicated to his father. Nor should we close this survey without a special word of commendation for The Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought by Mr. H. St. John Thackeray (London, 1900).

For the rest we must leave our book to take its place, such as it is, in the historical development of literature on the Epistle.

W. S.

A. C. H.

November, 1907.

INTRODUCTION

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§ 1. Rome in a. d. 58

It was during the winter 57-58, or early in the spring of the year 58, according to almost all calculations, that St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, and that we thus obtain the first trust-worthy information about the Roman Church. Even if there be some slight error in the calculations, it is in any case impossible that this date can be far wrong, and the Epistle must certainly have been written during the early years of Nero’s reign. It would be unwise to attempt a full account either of the city or the empire at this date, but for the illustration of the Epistle and for the comprehension of St. Paul’s own mind, a brief reference to a few leading features in the history of each is necessary1.

For certainly St. Paul was influenced by the name of Rome. In Rome, great as it is, and to Romans, he wishes to preach the Gospel: he prays for a prosperous journey that by the will of God he may come unto them: he longs to see them: the universality of the Gospel makes him desire to preach it in the universal city2. And the impression which we gain from the Epistle to the Romans is supported by our other sources of information. The desire to visit Rome dominates the close of the Acts of the Apostles: ‘After I have been there, I must also see Rome.’ ‘As thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome3.’ The imagery of citizenship has impressed itself upon his language4. And this was the result both of his experience and of his birth. Wherever Christianity had been preached the Roman authorities had appeared as the power which restrained the forces of evil opposed to it1. The worst persecution of the Christians had been while Judaea was under the rule of a native prince. Everywhere the Jews had stirred up persecutions, and the imperial officials had interfered and protected the Apostle. And so both in this Epistle and throughout his life St. Paul emphasizes the duty of obedience to the civil government, and the necessity of fulfilling our obligations to it. But also St. Paul was himself a Roman citizen. This privilege, not then so common as it became later, would naturally broaden the view and impress the imagination of a provincial; and it is significant that the first clear conception of the universal character inherent in Christianity, the first bold step to carry it out, and the capacity to realize the importance of the Roman Church should come from an Apostle who was not a Galilaean peasant but a citizen of a universal empire. ‘We cannot fail to be struck with the strong hold that Roman ideas had on the mind of St. Paul,’ writes Mr. Ramsay, ‘we feel compelled to suppose that St. Paul had conceived the great idea of Christianity as the religion of the Roman world; and that he thought of the various districts and countries in which he had preached as parts of the grand unity. He had the mind of an organizer; and to him the Christians of his earliest travels were not men of Iconium and of Antioch—they were a part of the Roman world, and were addressed by him as such2.’

It was during the early years of Nero’s reign that St. Paul first came into contact with the Roman Church. And the period is significant. It was what later times called the Quinquennium of Nero, and remembered as the happiest period of the Empire since the death of Augustus3. Nor was the judgement unfounded. It is probable that even the worst excesses of Nero, like the worst cruelty of Tiberius, did little harm to the mass of the people even in Rome; and many even of the faults of the Emperors assisted in working out the new ideas which the Empire was creating. But at present we have not to do with faults. Members of court circles might have unpleasant and exaggerated stories to tell about the death of Britannicus; tales might have been circulated of hardly pardonable excesses committed by the Emperor and a noisy band of companions wandering at night in the streets; the more respectable of the Roman aristocracy would consider an illicit union with a freedwoman and a taste for music, literature, and the drama, signs of degradation, but neither in Rome nor in the provinces would the populace be offended; more far-seeing observers might be able to detect worse signs, but if any ordinary citizen, or if any one acquainted with the provinces had been questioned, he would certainly have answered that the government of the Empire was good. This was due mainly to the gradual development of the ideas on which the Empire had been founded. The structure which had been sketched by the genius of Caesar, and built up by the art of Augustus, if allowed to develop freely, guaranteed naturally certain conditions of progress and good fortune. It was due also to the wise administration of Seneca and of Burrus. It was due apparently also to flashes of genius and love of popularity on the part of the Emperor himself.

The provinces were well governed. Judaea was at this time preparing for insurrection under the rule of Felix, but he was a legacy from the reign of Claudius. The difficulties in Armenia were met at once and vigorously by the appointment of Corbulo; the rebellion in Britain was wisely dealt with; even at the end of Nero’s reign the appointment of Vespasian to Judaea, as soon as the serious character of the revolt was known, shows that the Emperor still had the wisdom to select and the courage to appoint able men. During the early years a long list is given of trials for repetundae; and the number of convictions, while it shows that provincial government was not free from corruption, proves that it was becoming more and more possible to obtain justice. It was the corruption of the last reign that was condemned by the justice of the present. In the year 56, Vipsanius Laenas, governor of Sardinia, was condemned for extortion; in 57, Capito, the ‘Cilician pirate,’ was struck down by the senate ‘with a righteous thunderbolt.’ Amongst the accusations against Suillius in 58 was the misgovernment of Asia. And not only were the favourites of Claudius condemned, better men were appointed in their place. It is recorded that freedmen were never made procurators of imperial provinces. And the Emperor was able in many cases, in that of Lyons, of Cyrene, and probably of Ephesus, to assist and pacify the provincials by acts of generosity and benevolence1.

We may easily, perhaps, lay too much stress on some of the measures attributed to Nero; but many of them show, if not the policy of his reign, at any rate the tendency of the Empire. The police regulations of the city were strict and well executed2. An attack was made on the exactions of publicans, and on the excessive power of freedmen. Law was growing in exactness owing to the influence of Jurists, and was justly administered except where the Emperor’s personal wishes intervened3. Once the Emperor—was it a mere freak or was it an act of far-seeing political insight?— proposed a measure of free trade for the whole Empire. Governors of provinces were forbidden to obtain condonation for exactions by the exhibition of games. The proclamation of freedom to Greece may have been an act of dramatic folly, but the extension of Latin rights meant that the provincials were being gradually put more and more on a level with Roman citizens. And the provinces flourished for the most part under this rule. It seemed almost as if the future career of a Roman noble might depend upon the goodwill of his provincial subjects4. And wherever trade could flourish there wealth accumulated. Laodicea was so rich that the inhabitants could rebuild the city without aid from Rome, and Lyons could contribute 4,000,000 sesterces at the time of the great fire5

When, then, St. Paul speaks of the ‘powers that be’ as being ‘ordained by God’; when he says that the ruler is a minister of God for good; when he is giving directions to pay ‘tribute’ and ‘custom’; he is thinking of a great and beneficent power which has made travel for him possible, which had often interfered to protect him against an angry mob of his own countrymen, under which he had seen the towns through which he passed enjoying peace, prosperity and civilization.

But it was not only Nero, it was Seneca1 also who was ruling in Rome when St. Paul wrote to the Church there. The attempt to find any connexions literary or otherwise between St. Paul and Seneca may be dismissed; but for the growth of Christian principles, still more perhaps for that of the principles which prepared the way for the spread of Christianity, the fact is of extreme significance. It was the first public appearance of Stoicism in Rome, as largely influencing politics, and shaping the future of the Empire. It is a strange irony that makes Stoicism the creed which inspired the noblest representatives of the old régime, for it was Stoicism which provided the philosophic basis for the new imperial system, and this was not the last time that an aristocracy perished in obedience to their own morality. What is important for our purpose is to notice that the humanitarian and universalist ideas of Stoicism were already beginning to permeate society. Seneca taught, for example, the equality in some sense of all men, even slaves; but it was the populace who a few years later (a.d. 61) protested when the slaves of the murdered Pedanius Secundus were led out to execution2. Seneca and many of the Jurists were permeated with the Stoic ideas of humanity and benevolence; and however little these principles might influence their individual conduct they gradually moulded and changed the law and the system of the Empire.

If we turn from the Empire to Rome, we shall find that just those vices which the moralist deplores in the aristocracy and the Emperor helped to prepare the Roman capital for the advent of Christianity. If there had not been large foreign colonies, there could never have been any ground in the world where Christianity could have taken root strongly enough to influence the surrounding population, and it was the passion for luxury, and the taste for philosophy and literature, even the vices of the court, which demanded Greek and Oriental assistance. The Emperor must have teachers in philosophy, and in acting, in recitation and in flute-playing, and few of these would be Romans. The statement of Chrysostom that St. Paul persuaded a concubine of Nero to accept Christianity and forsake the Emperor has probably little foundation3. the conjecture that this concubine was Acte is worthless; but it may illustrate how it was through the non-Roman element of Roman society that Christianity spread. It is not possible to estimate the exact proportion of foreign elements in a Roman household, but a study of the names in any of the Columbaria of the imperial period will illustrate how large that element was. Men and women of every race lived together in the great Roman slave world, or when they had received the gift of freedom remained attached as clients and friends to the great houses, often united by ties of the closest intimacy with their masters and proving the means by which every form of strange superstition could penetrate into the highest circles of society1.

And foreign superstition was beginning to spread. The earliest monuments of the worship of Mithras date from the time of Tiberius. Lucan in his Pharsalia celebrates the worship of Isis in Rome; Nero himself reverenced the Syrian Goddess, who was called by many names, but is known to us best as Astarte; Judaism came near to the throne with Poppaea Sabina, whose influence over Nero is first traced in this year 58; while the story of Pomponia Graecina who, in the year 57, was entrusted to her husband for trial on the charge of ‘foreign superstition’ and whose long old age was clouded with continuous sadness, has been taken as an instance of Christianity. There are not inconsiderable grounds for this view; but in any case the accusation against her is an illustration that there was a path by which a new and foreign religion like Christianity could make its way into the heart of the Roman aristocracy2.

§ 2. The Jews in Rome3

There are indications enough that when he looked towards Rome St. Paul thought of it as the seat and centre of the Empire. But he had at the same time a smaller and a narrower object. His chief interest lay in those little scattered groups of Christians of whom he had heard through Aquila and Prisca, and probably through others whom he met on his travels. And the thought of the Christian Church would at once connect itself with that larger community of which it must have been in some sense or other an offshoot, the Jewish settlement in the imperial city.

(1) History. The first relations of the Jews with Rome go back to the time of the Maccabaean princes, when the struggling patriots of Judaea had some interests in common with the great Republic and could treat with it on independent terms. Embassies were sent under Jude 1:1 (who died in 160 b.c.) and Jonathan2 (who died in 143), and at last a formal alliance was concluded by Simon Maccabaeus in 140, 1393. It was characteristic that on this last occasion the members of the embassy attempted a religious propaganda and were in consequence sent home by the praetor Hispalus4.

This was only preliminary contact. The first considerable settlement of the Jews in Rome dates from the taking of Jerusalem by Pompey in b.c. 635. A number of the prisoners were sold as slaves; but their obstinate adherence to their national customs proved troublesome to their masters and most of them were soon manumitted. These released slaves were numerous and important enough to found a synagogue of their own6 , to which they might resort when they went on pilgrimage, at Jerusalem. The policy of the early emperors favoured the Jews. They passionately bewailed the death of Julius, going by night as well as by day to his funeral pyre7 ; and under Augustus they were allowed to form a regular colony on the further side of the Tiber8 , roughly speaking opposite the site of the modern ‘Ghetto.’ The Jews’ quarter was removed to the left bank of the river in 1556, and has been finally done away with since the Italian occupation.

Here the Jews soon took root and rapidly increased in numbers. It was still under the Republic (b.c. 59) that Cicero in his defence of Flaccus pretended to drop his voice for fear of them1. And when a deputation came from Judaea to complain of the misrule of Archelaus, no less than 8000 Roman Jews attached themselves to it2. Though the main settlement was beyond the Tiber it must soon have overflowed into other parts of Rome. The Jews had a synagogue in connexion with the crowded Subura3 and another probably in the Campus Martius. There were synagogues of Αὐγουστήσιοι and Ἀγριππήσιοι (i. e. either of the household or under the patronage of Augustus4 and his minister Agrippa), the position of which is uncertain but which in any case bespeak the importance of the community. Traces of Jewish cemeteries have been found in several out-lying regions, one near the Porta Portuensis, two near the Via Appia and the catacomb of S. Callisto, and one at Portus, the harbour at the mouth of the Tiber5.

Till some way on in the reign of Tiberius the Jewish colony flourished without interruption. But in a.d. 19 two scandalous cases occurring about the same time, one connected with the priests of Isis, and the other with a Roman lady who having become a proselyte to Judaism was swindled of money under pretence of sending it to Jerusalem, led to the adoption of repressive measures at once against the Jews and the Egyptians. Four thousand were banished to Sardinia, nominally to be employed in putting down banditti, but the historian scornfully hints that if they fell victims to the climate no one would have cared6.

The end of the reign of Caligula was another anxious and critical time for the Jews. Philo has given us a graphic picture of the reception of a deputation which came with himself at its head to beg for protection from the riotous mob of Alexandria. The half-crazy emperor dragged the deputation after him from one point to another of his gardens only to jeer at them and refuse any further answer to their petition1. Caligula insisted on the setting up of his own bust in the Temple at Jerusalem, and his opportune death alone saved the Jews from worse things than had as yet befallen them (a.d. 41).

In the early part of the reign of Claudius the Jews had friends at court in the two Herod Agrippas, father and son. But a mysterious notice of which we would fain know more shows them once again subject to measures of repression. At a date which is calculated at about a.d. 52 we find Aquila and Prisca at Corinth ‘because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome’ (Acts 18:2). And Suetonius in describing what is probably the same event sets it down to persistent tumults in the Jewish quarter ‘at the instigation of Chrestus2 ’ There is at least a considerable possibility, not to say probability, that in this enigmatic guise we have an allusion to the effect of the early preaching of Christianity, in which in one way or another Aquila and Prisca would seem to have been involved and on that account specially singled out for exile. Suetonius and the Acts speak of a general edict of expulsion, but Dio Cassius, who is more precise, would lead us to infer that the edict stopped short of this. The clubs and meetings (in the synagogue) which Caligula had allowed, were forbidden, but there was at least no wholesale expulsion3.

Any one of three interpretations may be put upon impulsore Chreste assidue tumultuantes. (i) The words may be taken literally as they stand. ‘Chrestus’ was a common name among slaves, and there may have been an individual of that name who was the author of the disturbances. This is the view of Meyer and Wieseler. (ii) Or it is very possible that there may be a confusion between ‘Chrestus’ and ‘Christus.’ Tertullian accuses the Pagans of pronouncing the name ‘Christians’ wrongly as if it were Chrestiani, and so bearing unconscious witness to the gentle and kindly character of those who owned it. Sed et cum perperam Chrestianus pronunciatur a vobis (nam nec nominis certa est notitia penes vos) de suavitate vel benignitate compositum est (Rev_3; cf. Justin, Apol. i. § 4). If we suppose some such very natural confusion, then the disturbances may have had their origin in the excitement caused by the Messianic expectation which was ready to break out at slight provocation wherever Jews congregated. This is the view of Lange and others including in part Lightfoot (Philippians, p. 169). (iii) There remains the third possibility, for which some preference has been expressed above, that the disturbing cause was not the Messianic expectation in general but the particular form of it identified with Christianity. It is certain that Christianity must have been preached at Rome as early as this; and the preaching of it was quite as likely to lead to actual violence and riot as at Thessalonica or Antioch of Pisidia or Lystra (Acts 17:5; Acts 14:19; Acts 13:50). That it did so, and that this is the fact alluded to by Suetonius is the opinion of the majority of German scholars from Baur onwards. It is impossible to verify any one of the three hypotheses; but the last would fit in well with all that we know and would add an interesting touch if it were true1.

The edict of Claudius was followed in about three years by his death (a.d. 54). Under Nero the Jews certainly did not lose but probably rather gained ground. We have seen that just as St. Paul wrote his Epistle Poppaea was beginning to exert her influence. Like many of her class she dallied with Judaism and befriended Jews. The mime Aliturus was a Jew by birth and stood in high favour2. Herod Agrippa II was also, like his father, a persona grata at the Roman court. Dio Cassius sums up the history of the Jews under the Empire in a sentence which describes well their fortunes at Rome. Though their privileges were often curtailed, they increased to such an extent as to force their way to the recognition and toleration of their peculiar customs3.

(2) Organization. The policy of the emperors towards the Jewish nationality was on the whole liberal and judicious. They saw that they had to deal with a people which it was at once difficult to repress and useful to encourage; and they freely conceded the rights which the Jews demanded. Not only were they allowed the free exercise of their religion, but exceptional privileges were granted them in connexion with it. Josephus (Ant. XIV. x.) quotes a number of edicts of the time of Julius Caesar and after his death, some of them Roman and some local, securing to the Jews exemption from service in the army (on religious grounds), freedom of worship, of building synagogues, of forming clubs and collecting contributions (especially the didrachma) for the Temple at Jerusalem. Besides this in the East the Jews were largely permitted to have their own courts of justice. And the wonder is that in spite of all their fierce insurrections against Rome these rights were never permanently withdrawn. As late as the end of the second century (in the pontificate of Victor 189-199 a.d.) Callistus, who afterwards himself became Bishop of Rome, was banished to the Sardinian mines for forcibly breaking up a Jewish meeting for worship (Hippol Refut. Haer. ix. 12).

There was some natural difference between the East and the West corresponding to the difference in number and concentration of the Jewish population. In Palestine the central judicial and administrative body was the Sanhedrin; after the Jewish War the place of the Sanhedrin was taken by the Ethnarch who exercised great powers, the Jews of the Dispersion voluntarily submitting to him. At Alexandria also there was an Ethnarch, as well as a central board or senate, for the management of the affairs of the community. At Rome, on the other hand, it would appear that each synagogue had its own separate organization. This would consist of a ‘senate’ (γερουσία), the members of which were the ‘elders’ (πρεσβύτεροι). The exact relation of these to the ‘rulers’ (ἄρχοντες) is not quite clear: the two terms may be practically equivalent; or the ἄρχοντες may be a sort of committee within the larger body1. The senate had its ‘president’ (γερουσιάρχης�Luke 4:20), inflicted scourging (Matthew 10:17), and acted as schoolmaster. The priests as such had no special status in the synagogue. We hear at Rome of wealthy and influential people who were called ‘father’ or ‘mother of the synagogue’; this would be an honorary title. There is also mention of a προστάτης or patronus, who would on occasion act for the synagogue in its relation to the outer world.

(3) Social status and condition. There were certainly Jews of rank and position at Rome. Herod the Great had sent a number of his sons to be educated there (the ill-fated Alexander and Aristobulus as well as Archelaus, Antipas, and Philip the tetrarch2 ). At a later date other members of the family made it their home (Herod the first husband of Herodias, the younger Aristobulus, and at one time Herod Agrippa I). There were also Jews attached in one way or another to the imperial household (we have had mention of the synagogues of the Agrippesii and Augustesii). These would be found in the more aristocratic quarters. The Jews’ quarter proper was the reverse of aristocratic. The fairly plentiful notices which have come down to us in the works of the Satirists lead us to think of the Jews of Rome as largely a population of beggars, vendors of small wares, sellers of lucifer matches, collectors of broken glass, fortune-tellers of both sexes. They haunted the Aventine with their baskets and wisps of hay1. Thence they would sally forth and try to catch the ear especially of the wealthier Roman women, on whose superstitious hopes and fears they might play and earn a few small coins by their pains2.

Between these extremes we may infer the existence of a more substantial trading class, both from the success which at this period had begun to attend the Jews in trade and from the existence of the numerous synagogues (nine are definitely attested) which it must have required a considerable amount and some diffusion of wealth to keep up. But of this class we have less direct evidence.

In Rome, as everywhere, the Jews impressed the observer by their strict performance of the Law. The Jewish sabbath was proverbial. The distinction of meats was also carefully maintained3. But along with these external observances the Jews did succeed in bringing home to their Pagan neighbours the contrast of their purer faith to the current idolatries, that He whom they served did not dwell in temples made with hands, and that He was not to be likened to ‘gold or silver or stone, graven by art and device of man.’

It is difficult to say which is more conspicuous, the repulsion or the attraction which the Jews exercised upon the heathen world. The obstinate tenacity with which they held to their own customs, and the rigid exclusiveness with which they kept aloof from all others, offended a society which had come to embrace all the varied national religions with the same easy tolerance and which passed from one to the other as curiosity or caprice dictated. They looked upon the Jew as a gloomy fanatic, whose habitual expression was a scowl. It was true that he condemned, as he had reason to condemn, the heathen laxity around him. And his neighbours, educated and populace alike, retaliated with bitter hatred and scorn.

At the same time all—and there were many—who were in search of a purer creed than their own, knew that the Jew had something to give them which they could not get elsewhere. The heathen Pantheon was losing its hold, and thoughtful minds were ‘feeling after if haply they might find’ the one God who made heaven and earth. Nor was it only the higher minds who were conscious of a strange attraction in Judaism. Weaker and more superstitious natures were impressed by its lofty claims, and also as we may believe by the gorgeous apocalyptic visions which the Jews of this date were ready to pour out to them. The seeker wants to be told something that he can do to gain the Divine favour; and of such demands and precepts there was no lack. The inquiring Pagan was met with a good deal of tact on the part of those whom he consulted. He was drawn on little by little; there was a place for every one who showed a real sympathy for the faith of Israel. It was not necessary that he should at once accept circumcision and the whole burden of the Mosaic Law; but as he made good one step another was proposed to him, and the children became in many cases more zealous than their fathers1. So round most of the Jewish colonies there was gradually formed a fringe of Gentiles more or less in active sympathy with their religion, the ‘devout men and women,’ ‘those who worshipped God’ (εὐσεβεῖς, σεβόμενοι, σεβόμενοι τὸν Θεόν, φοβούμενοι τὸν Θεόν) of the Acts of the Apostles. For the student of the origin of the Christian Church this class is of great importance, because it more than any other was the seed plot of Christianity; in it more than in any other the Gospel took root and spread with ease and rapidity2.

§ 3. The Roman Church

(I) Origin. The most probable view of the origin of the Christian Church in Rome is substantially that of the commentator known as Ambrosiaster (see below, § 10). This fourth-century writer, himself probably a member of the Roman Church, does not claim for it an apostolic origin. He thinks that it arose among the Jews of Rome and that the Gentiles to whom they conveyed a knowledge of Christ had not seen any miracles or any of the Apostles3. Some such conclusion as this fits in well with the phenomena of the Epistle. St. Paul would hardly have written as he does if the Church had really been founded by an Apostle. He clearly regards it as coming within his own province as Apostle of the Gentiles (Romans 1:6, Romans 1:14 f.); and in this very Epistle he lays it down as a principle governing all his missionary labours that he will not ‘build upon another man’s foundation’ (Romans 15:20). If an Apostle had been before him to Rome the only supposition which would save his present letter from clashing with this would be that there were two distinct churches in Rome, one Jewish-Christian the other Gentile-Christian, and that St. Paul wrote only to the latter. But not only is there no hint of such a state of things, but the letter itself (as we shall see) implies a mixed community, a community not all of one colour, but embracing in substantial proportions both Jews and Gentiles.

At a date so early as this it is not in itself likely that the Apostles of a faith which grew up under the shadow of Jewish particularism would have had the enterprise to cast their glance so far west as Rome. It was but natural that the first Apostle to do this should be the one who both in theory and in practice had struck out the boldest line as a missionary; the one who had formed the largest conception of the possibilities of Christianity, the one who risked the most in the effort to realize them, and who as a matter of principle ignored distinctions of language and of race. We see St. Paul deliberately conceiving and long cherishing the purpose of himself making a journey to Rome (Acts 19:21; Romans 1:13; Romans 15:22-24). It was not however to found a Church, at least in the sense of first foundation, for a Church already existed with sufficient unity to have a letter written to it.

If we may make use of the data in ch. 16—and reasons will be given for using them with some confidence—the origin of the Roman Church will be fairly clear, and it will agree exactly with the probabilities of the case. Never in the course of previous history had there been anything like the freedom of circulation and movement which now existed in the Roman Empire1. And this movement followed certain definite lines and set in certain definite directions. It was at its greatest all along the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and its general trend was to and from Rome. The constant coming and going of Roman officials, as one provincial governor succeeded another; the moving of troops from place to place with the sending of fresh batches of recruits and the retirement of veterans; the incessant demands of an ever-increasing trade both in necessaries and luxuries; the attraction which the huge metropolis naturally exercised on the imagination of the clever young Orientals who knew that the best openings for a career were to be sought there; a thousand motives of ambition, business, pleasure drew a constant stream from the Eastern provinces to Rome. Among the crowds there would inevitably be some Christians, and those of very varied nationality and antecedents. St. Paul himself had for the last three years been stationed at one of the greatest of the Levantine emporia. We may say that the three great cities at which he had spent the longest time—Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus—were just the three from which (with Alexandria) intercourse was most active. We may be sure that not a few of his own disciples would ultimately find their way to Rome. And so we may assume that all the owners of the names mentioned in ch. 16 had some kind of acquaintance with him. In several cases he adds some endearing little expression which implies personal contact and interest: Epaenetus, Ampliatus, Stachys are all his ‘beloved’; Urban has been his ‘helper’; the mother of Rufus had been also as a mother to him; Andronicus and Junia (or Junias) and Herodion are described as his ‘kinsmen’—i. e. perhaps his fellow-tribesmen, possibly like him natives of Tarsus. Andronicus and Junias, if we are to take the expression literally, had shared one of his imprisonments. But not by any means all were St. Paul’s own converts. The same pair, Andronicus and Junias, were Christians of older standing than himself. Epaenetus is described as the first convert ever made from Asia: that may of course be by the preaching of St. Paul, but it is also possible that he may have been converted while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. If the Aristobulus whose household is mentioned is the Herodian prince, we can easily understand that he might have Christians about him. That Prisca and Aquila should be at Rome is just what we might expect from one with so keen an eye for the strategy of a situation as St. Paul. When he was himself established and in full work at Ephesus with the intention of visiting Rome, it would at once occur to him what valuable work they might be doing there and what an excellent preparation they might make for his own visit, while in his immediate surroundings they were almost superfluous. So that instead of presenting any difficulty, that he should send them back to Rome where they were already known, is most natural.

In this way, the previous histories of the friends to whom St. Paul sends greeting in ch. 16 may be taken as typical of the circumstances which would bring together a number of similar groups of Christians at Rome. Some from Palestine, some from Corinth, some from Ephesus and other parts of proconsular Asia, possibly some from Tarsus and more from the Syrian Antioch, there was in the first instance, as we may believe, nothing concerted in their going; but when once they arrived in the metropolis, the free-masonry common amongst Christians would soon make them known to each other, and they would form, not exactly an organized Church, but such a fortuitous assemblage of Christians as was only waiting for the advent of an Apostle to constitute one.

For other influences than those of St. Paul we are left to general probabilities. But from the fact that there was a synagogue specially assigned to the Roman ‘Libertini’ at Jerusalem and that this synagogue was at an early date the scene of public debates between Jews and Christians (Acts 6:9), with the further fact that regular communication would be kept up by Roman Jews frequenting the feasts, it is equally clear that Palestinian Christianity could hardly fail to have its representatives. We may well believe that the vigorous preaching of St. Stephen would set a wave in motion which would be felt even at Rome. If coming from such a source we should expect the Jewish Christianity of Rome to be rather of the freer Hellenistic type than marked by the narrowness of Pharisaism. But it is best to abstain from anticipating, and to form our idea of the Roman Church on better grounds than conjecture.

If the view thus given of the origin of the Roman Church is correct, it involves the rejection of two other views, one of which at least has imposing authority; viz. (i) that the Church was founded by Jewish pilgrims from the First Pentecost, and (ii) that its true founder was St. Peter.

(i) We are told expressly that among those who listened to St. Peter’s address on the Day of Pentecost were some who came from Rome, both born Jews of the Dispersion and proselytes. When these returned they would naturally take with them news of the strange things which were happening in Palestine. But unless they remained for some time in Jerusalem, and unless they attended very diligently to the teaching of the Apostles which would as yet be informal and not accompanied by any regular system of Catechesis, they would not know enough to make them in the full sense ‘Christians’; still less would they be in a position to evangelize others. Among this first group there would doubtless be some who would go back predisposed and prepared to receive fuller instruction in Christianity; they might be at a similar stage to that of the disciples of St. John the Baptist at Ephesus (Acts 19:2 ff.); and under the successive impact of later visits (their own or their neighbours’) to Jerusalem, we could imagine that their faith would be gradually consolidated. But it would take more than they brought away from the Day of Pentecost to lay the foundations of a Church.

(ii) The traditional founder of the Roman Church is St. Peter. But it is only in a very qualified sense that this tradition can be made good. We may say at once that we are not prepared to go the length of those who would deny the connexion of St. Peter with the Roman Church altogether. It is true that there is hardly an item in the evidence which is not subject to some deduction. The evidence which is definite is somewhat late, and the evidence which is early is either too uncertain or too slight and vague to carry a clear conclusion1. Most decisive of all, if it held good, would be the allusion in St. Peter’s own First Epistle if the ‘Babylon’ from which he writes (1 Peter 5:13) is really a covert name for Rome. This was the view of the Early Church, and although perhaps not absolutely certain it is in accordance with all probability. The Apocalypse confessedly puts ‘Babylon’ for Rome (Revelation 14:8; Revelation 16:19, &c.), and when we remember the common practice among the Jewish Rabbis of disguising their allusions to the oppressor2 , we may believe that Christians also, when they had once become suspected and persecuted, might have fallen into the habit of using a secret language among themselves, even where there was less occasion for secresy. When once we adopt this view, a number of details in the Epistle (such as the mention of Silvanus and Mark, and the points of contact between 1 Peter and Romans) find an easy and natural explanation3.

The genuine Epistle of Clement of Rome (c. 97 a.d.) couples together St. Peter and St. Paul in a context dealing with persecution in such a way as to lend some support to the tradition that both Apostles had perished there4 ; and the Epistle of Ignatius addressed to Rome (c. 115 a.d.) appeals to both Apostles as authorities which the Roman Church would be likely to recognize5 ; but at the utmost this proves nothing as to the origin of the Church. When we descend a step later, Dionysius of Corinth (c. 171 a.d.) does indeed couple the two Apostles as having joined in ‘planting’ the Church of Rome as they had done previously that of Corinth6. But this Epistle alone is proof that if St. Paul could be said to have ‘planted’ the Church, it could not be in the sense of first foundation; and a like consideration must be taken to qualify the statements of Irenaeus7. By the beginning of the third century we get in Tertullian8 and Caius of Rome9 explicit references to Rome as the scene of the double martyrdom. The latter writer points to the ‘trophies’ (τὰ τρόπαια10 ) of the two Apostles as existing in his day on the Vatican and by the Ostian Way. This is conclusive evidence as to the belief of the Roman Church about the year 200. And it is followed by another piece of evidence which is good and precise as far as it goes. Two fourth-century documents, both in texts which have undergone some corruption, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (ed. Duchesne, p. 84) and a Depositio Martyrum in the work of Philocalus, the so-called ‘chronographer of the year 354,’ connect a removal of the bodies of the two Apostles with the consulship of Tuscus and Bassus in the year 258. There is some ambiguity as to the localities from and to which the bodies were moved; but the most probable view is that in the Valerian persecution when the cemeteries were closed to Christians, the treasured relics were transferred to the site known as Ad Catacumbas adjoining the present Church of St. Sebastian1. Here they remained, according to one version, for a year and seven months, according to another for forty years. The later story of an attempt by certain Orientals to steal them away seems to have grown out of a misunderstanding of an inscription by Pope Damasus (366-384 a.d.)2.

Here we have a chain of substantial proof that the Roman Church fully believed itself to be in possession of the mortal remains of the two Apostles as far back as the year 200, a tradition at that date already firmly established and associated with definite well-known local monuments. The tradition as to the twenty-five years’ episcopate of St. Peter presents some points of resemblance. That too appears for the first time in the fourth century with Eusebius (c. 325 a.d.) and his follower Jerome. By skilful analysis it is traced back a full hundred years earlier. It appears to be derived from a list drawn up probably by Hippolytus3. Lipsius would carry back this list a little further, and would make it composed under Victor in the last decade of the second century4 , and Lightfoot seems to think it possible that the figures for the duration of the several episcopates may have been present in the still older list of Hegesippus, writing under Eleutherus (c. 175-190 a.d.)5.

Thus we have the twenty-five years’ episcopate of St. Peter certainly believed in towards the end of the first quarter of the third century, if not by the beginning of the last quarter of the second. We are coming back to a time when a continuous tradition is beginning to be possible. And yet the difficulties in the way of bringing St. Peter to Rome at a date so early as the year 42 (which seems to be indicated) are so great as to make the acceptance of this chronology almost impossible. Not only do we find St. Peter to all appearance still settled at Jerusalem at the time of the Council in a.d. 51, but we have seen that it is highly improbable that he had visited Rome when St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Church there. And it is hardly less improbable that a visit had been made between this and the later Epistles (Phil., Col., Eph., Philem.). The relations between the two Apostles and of both to the work of missions in general, would almost compel some allusion to such a visit if it had taken place. Between the years 58 or 61-63 and 170 there is quite time for legend to grow up; and Lipsius has pointed out a possible way in which it might arise6. There is evidence that the tradition of our Lord’s command to the Apostles to remain at Jerusalem for twelve years after His Ascension, was current towards the end of the second century. The travels of the Apostles are usually dated from the end of this period (i.e. about 41-42 a.d.). Then the traditional date of the death of St. Peter is 67 or 68; and subtracting 42 from 67 we get just the 25 years required. It was assumed that St. Peter’s episcopate dated from his first arrival in Rome.

So far the ground is fairly clear. But when Lipsius goes further than this and denies the Roman visit in toto, his criticism seems to us too drastic1. He arrives at his result thus. He traces a double stream in the tradition. On the one hand there is the ‘Petro-pauline tradition’ which regards the two Apostles as establishing the Church in friendly co-operation2. The outlines of this have been sketched above. On the other hand there is the tradition of the conflict of St. Peter with Simon Magus, which under the figure of Simon Magus made a disguised attack upon St. Paul3. Not only does Lipsius think that this is the earliest form of the tradition, but he regards it as the original of all other forms which brought St. Peter to Rome4 : the only historical ground for it which he would allow is the visit of St. Paul. This does not seem to us to be a satisfactory explanation. The traces of the Petro-pauline tradition are really earlier than those of the Ebionite legend. The way in which they are introduced is free from all suspicion. They are supported by collateral evidence (St. Peter’s First Epistle and the traditions relating to St. Mark) the weight of which is considerable. There is practically no conflicting tradition. The claim of the Roman Church to joint foundation by the two Apostles seems to have been nowhere disputed. And even the Ebionite fiction is more probable as a distortion of facts that have a basis of truth than as pure invention. The visit of St. Peter to Rome, and his death there at some uncertain date5 , seem to us, if not removed beyond all possibility of doubt, yet as well established as many of the leading facts of history.

(2) Composition. The question as to the origin of the Roman Church has little more than an antiquarian interest; it is an isolated fact or series of facts which does not greatly affect either the picture which we form to ourselves of the Church or the sense in which we understand the Epistle addressed to it. It is otherwise with the question as to its composition. Throughout the Apostolic age the determining factor in most historical problems is the relative preponderance of the Jewish element or the Gentile. Which of these two elements are we to think of as giving its character to the Church at Rome? Directly contrary answers have been given to the question and whole volumes of controversy have grown up around it; but in this instance some real advance has been made, and the margin of difference among the leading critics is not now very considerable.

Here as in so many other cases elsewhere the sharper statement of the problem dates from Baur, whose powerful influence drew a long train of followers after him; and here as so often elsewhere the manner in which Baur himself approaches the question is determined not by the minute exegesis of particular passages but by a broad and comprehensive view of what seems to him to be the argument of the Epistle as a whole. To him the Epistle seems to be essentially directed against Jewish Christians. The true centre of gravity of the Epistle he found in chaps. 9-11. St. Paul there grapples at close quarters with the objection that if his doctrine held good, the special choice of Israel—its privileges and the promises made to it—all fell to the ground. At first there is no doubt that the stress laid by Baur on these three chapters in comparison with the rest was exaggerated and one-sided. His own disciples criticized the position which he took up on this point, and he himself gradually drew back from it, chiefly by showing that a like tendency ran through the earlier portion of the Epistle. There too St. Paul’s object was to argue with the Jewish Christians and to expose the weakness of their reliance on formal obedience to the Mosaic Law.

The writer who has worked out this view of Baur’s most elaborately is Mangold. It is not difficult to show, when the Epistle is closely examined, that there is a large element in it which is essentially Jewish. The questions with which it deals are Jewish, the validity of the Law, the nature of Redemption, the principle on which man is to become righteous in the sight of God, the choice of Israel. It is also true that the arguments with which St. Paul meets these questions are very largely such as would appeal specially to Jews. His own views are linked on directly to the teaching of the Old Testament, and it is to the Old Testament that he goes in support of them. It is fair to ask, what sort of relevance arguments of this character would have as addressed to Gentiles.

It was also possible to point to one or two expressions in detail which might seem to favour the assumption of Jewish readers. Such would be Romans 4:1 where Abraham is described (in the most probable text) as ‘our forefather according to the flesh’ (τὸν προπάτορα ἡμῶν κατὰ σάρκα). To that however it was obvious to reply that in 1 Corinthians 10:1 St. Paul spoke of the Israelites in the wilderness as ‘our fathers,’ though no one would maintain that the Corinthian Christians were by birth Jews. There is more weight—indeed there is real weight—in the argument drawn from the section, Romans 7:1-6, where not only are the readers addressed as�

It is a minor point, but also to some extent a real one, that the exhortations in chs. 13, 14 are probably in part at least addressed to Jews. That turbulent race, which had called down the interference of the civil power some six or seven years before, needed a warning to keep the peace. And the party which had scruples about the keeping of days is more likely to have been Jewish than Gentile. Still that would only show that some members of the Roman Church were Jews, not that they formed a majority. Indeed in this instance the contrary would seem to be the case, because their opponents seem to have the upper hand and all that St. Paul asks for on their behalf is toleration.

We may take it then as established that there were Jews in the Church, and that in substantial numbers; just as we also cannot doubt that there was a substantial number of Gentiles. The direct way in which St. Paul addresses the Gentiles in ch. 11:13 ff. (ὑμῖν δὲ λέγω τοῖς ἔθνεσιν κ.τ.λ.) would be proof sufficient of this. But it is further clear that St. Paul regards the Church as broadly and in the main a Gentile Church. It is the Gentile element which gives it its colour. This inference cannot easily be explained away from the passages, Romans 1:5-7, Romans 1:13-15; Romans 15:14-16. In the first St. Paul numbers the Church at Rome among the Gentile Churches, and bases on his own apostleship to the Gentiles his right to address them. In the second he also connects the obligations he is under to preach to them directly with the general fact that all Gentiles without exception are his province. In the third he in like manner excuses himself courteously for the earnestness with which he has written by an appeal to his commission to act as the priest who lays upon the altar the Church of the Gentiles as his offering.

This then is the natural construction to put upon the Apostle’s language. The Church to which he is writing is Gentile in its general complexion; but at the same time it contains so many born Jews that he passes easily and freely from the one body to the other. He does not feel bound to measure and weigh his words, because if he writes in the manner which comes most naturally to himself he knows that there will be in the Church many who will understand him. The fact to which we have already referred, that a large proportion even of the Gentile Christians would have approached Christianity through the portals of a previous connexion with Judaism, would tend to set him still more at his ease in this respect. We shall see in the next section that the force which impels the Apostle is behind rather than in front. It is not to be supposed that he had any exact statistics before him as to the composition of the Church to which he was writing. It was enough that he was aware that a letter such as he has written was not likely to be thrown away.

If he had stayed to form a more exact estimate we may take the greetings in ch. 16 as a rough indication of the lines that it would follow. The collection of names there points to a mixture of nationalities. Aquila at least, if not also Prisca1 , we know to have been a Jew (Acts 18:2). Andronicus and Junias and Herodion are described as ‘kinsmen’ (συγγενεῖς) of the Apostle: precisely what this means is not certain—perhaps ‘members of the same tribe’—but in any case they must have been Jews. Mary (Miriam) is a Jewish name; and Apelles reminds us at once of Iudaeus Apella (Horace, Sat. I. v. 100). And there is besides ‘the household of Aristobulus,’ some of whom—if Aristobulus was really the grandson of Herod or at least connected with that dynasty—would probably have the same nationality. Four names (Urbanus, Ampliatus, Rufus, and Julia) are Latin. The rest (ten in number) are Greek with an indeterminate addition in ‘the household of Narcissus.’ Some such proportions as these might well be represented in the Church at large.

(3) Status and Condition. The same list of names may give us some idea of the social status of a representative group of Roman Christians. The names are largely those of slaves and freedmen. In any case the households of Narcissus and Aristobulus would belong to this category. It is not inconceivable, though of course not proveable, that Narcissus may be the well-known freedman of Claudius, put to death in the year 54 a.d., and Aristobulus the scion of the house of Herod. We know that at the time when St. Paul wrote to the Philippians Christianity had penetrated into the retinue of the Emperor himself (Philippians 4:22). A name like Philologus seems to point to a certain degree of culture. We should therefore probably not be wrong in supposing that not only the poorer class of slaves and freedmen is represented. And it must be remembered that the better sort of Greek and some Oriental slaves would often be more highly educated and more refined in manners than their masters. There is good reason to think that Pomponia Graecina, the wife of Aulus Plautius the conqueror of Britain, and that in the next generation Flavius Clemens and Domitilla, the near relations and victims of Domitian, had come under Christian influence1. We should therefore be justified in supposing that even at this early date more than one of the Roman Christians possessed a not inconsiderable social standing and importance. If there was any Church in which the ‘not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble,’ had an exception, it was at Rome.

When we look again at the list we see that it has a tendency to fall into groups. We hear of Prisca and Aquila, ‘and the Church that is in their house,’ of the household of Aristobulus and the Christian members of the household of Narcissus, of Asyncritus, &c. ‘and the brethren that are with them,’ of Philologus and certain companions ‘and all the saints that are with them.’ It would only be what we should expect if the Church of Rome at this time consisted of a number of such little groups, scattered over the great city, each with its own rendezvous but without any complete and centralized organization. In more than one of the incidental notices of the Roman Church it is spoken of as ‘founded’ (Iren. Adv. Haer. III. i. 1; iii. 3) or ‘planted’ (Dionysius of Corinth in Eus. H. E. II. xxv. 8) by St. Peter and St. Paul. It may well be that although the Church did not in the strict sense owe to these Apostles its origin, it did owe to them its first existence as an organized whole.

We must not however exaggerate the want of organization at the time when St. Paul is writing. The repeated allusions to ‘labouring’ (κοπιᾶν) in the case of Mary; Tryphaena and Tryphosa, and Persis—all, as we observe, women—points to some kind of regular ministry (cf. for the quasi-technical sense of κοπιᾶν 1 Thessalonians 5:12; 1 Timothy 5:17). It is evident that Prisca and Aquila took the lead which we should expect of them; and they were well trained in St. Paul’s methods. Even without the help of an Apostle, the Church had evidently a life of its own; and where there is life there is sure to be a spontaneous tendency to definite articulation of function. When St. Paul and St. Peter arrived we may believe that they would find the work half done; still it would wait the seal of their presence, as the Church of Samaria waited for the coming of Peter and John (Acts 8:14).

§ 4. The Time and Place, Occasion and Purpose, of the Epistle

(1) Time and Place. The time and place at which the Epistle was written are easy to determine. And the simple and natural way in which the notes of both in the Epistle itself dovetail into the narrative of the Acts, together with the perfect consistency of the whole group of data—subtle, slight, and incidental as they are—in the two documents, at once strongly confirms the truth of the history and would almost alone be enough to dispose of the doctrinaire objections which have been brought against the Epistle.

St. Paul had long cherished the desire of paying a visit to Rome (Romans 1:13; Romans 15:23), and that desire he hopes very soon to see fulfilled; but at the moment of writing his face is turned not westwards but eastwards. A collection has been made in the Greek Churches, the proceeds of which he is with an anxious mind about to convey to Jerusalem. He feels that his own relation and that of the Churches of his founding to the Palestinian Church is a delicate matter; the collection is no lightly considered act of passing charity, but it has been with him the subject of long and earnest deliberation; it is the olive-branch which he is bent upon offering. Great issues turn upon it; and he does not know how it will be received1.

We hear much of this collection in the Epistles written about this date (1 Corinthians 16:1 ff.; 2 Corinthians 8:1 ff.; 2 Corinthians 9:1 ff.). In the Acts it is not mentioned before the fact; but retrospectively in the course of St. Paul’s address before Felix allusion is made to it: ‘after many years I came to bring alms to my nation and offerings’ (Acts 24:17). Though the collection is not mentioned in the earlier chapters of the Acts, the order of the journey is mentioned. When his stay at Ephesus was drawing to an end we read that ‘Paul purposed in the spirit, when he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem, saying, After I have been there, I must also see Rome’ (Acts 19:21). Part of this programme has been accomplished. At the time of writing St. Paul seems to be at the capital of Achaia. The allusions which point to this would none of them taken separately be certain, but in combination they amount to a degree of probability which is little short of certainty. The bearer of the Epistle appears to be one Phoebe who is an active, perhaps an official, member of the Church of Cenchreae, the harbour of Corinth (Romans 16:1). The house in which St. Paul is staying, which is also the meeting-place of the local Church, belongs to Gaius (Romans 16:23); and a Gaius St. Paul had baptized at Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:14). He sends a greeting also from Erastus, who is described as ‘oeconomus’ or ‘treasurer’ of the city. The office is of some importance, and points to a city of some importance. This would agree with Corinth; and just at Corinth we learn from 2 Timothy 4:20 that an Erastus was left behind on St. Paul’s latest journey—naturally enough if it was his home.

The visit to Achaia then upon which these indications converge is that which is described in Acts 20:2, Acts 20:3. It occupied three months, which on the most probable reckoning would fall at the beginning of the year 58. St. Paul has in his company at this time Timothy and Sosipater (or Sopater) who join in the greeting of the Epistle (Romans 16:21) and are also mentioned in Acts 20:4. Of the remaining four who send their greetings we recognize at least Jason of Thessalonica (Romans 16:21; cf. Acts 17:6). Just the lightness and unobtrusiveness of all these mutual coincidences affixes to the works in which they occur the stamp of reality.

The date thus clearly indicated brings the Epistle to the Romans into close connexion with the two Epistles to Corinthians, and less certainly with the Epistle to Galatians. We have seen how the collection for the Churches of Judaea is one of the links which bind together the first three. Many other subtler traces of synchronism in thought and style have been pointed out between all four (especially by Bp. Lightfoot in Journ. of Class. and Sacr. Philol. iii [1857], p. 289 ff.; also Galatians, p. 43 ff., Exo_2). The relative position of 1 and 2 Corinthians and Romans is fixed and certain. If Romans was written in the early spring of a.d. 58, then 1 Corinthians would fall in the spring and 2 Corinthians in the autumn of a.d. 571. In regard to Galatians the data are not so decisive, and different views are held. The older opinion, and that which would seem to be still dominant in Germany (it is maintained by Lipsius writing in 1891), is that Galatians belongs to the early part of St. Paul’s long stay at Ephesus, a.d. 54 or 55. In England Bp. Lightfoot found a number of followers in bringing it into closer juxtaposition with Romans, about the winter of a.d. 57-58. The question however has been recently reopened in two opposite directions: on the one hand by Dr. C. Clemen (Chronologie der paulinischen Briefe, Halle, 1893), who would place it after Romans; and on the other hand by Mr. F. Rendall in The Expositor for April, 1894 (p. 254 ff.), who would place it some years earlier.

Clemen, who propounds a novel view of the chronology of St. Paul’s life generally, would interpose the Council of Jerusalem (which he identifies with the visit of Act_21 and not with that of Act_15) between Romans, which he assigns to the winter of a.d. 53-54, and Galatians, which he places towards the end of the latter year1. His chief argument is that Galatians represents a more advanced and heated stage of the controversy with the Judaizers, and he accounts for this by the events which followed the Council (Galatians 2:12 ff.; Galatians 1:6 ff.). There is, however, much that is arbitrary in the whole of this reconstruction; and the common view seems to us far more probable that the Epistle to the Romans marks rather the gradual subsidence of troubled waters than their first disturbing. There is more to be said for Mr. Rendall’s opinion that Galatians was written during the early part of St. Paul’s first visit to Corinth in the year 51 (or 52). The question is closely connected with the controversy reopened by Professor Ramsay as to the identity of the Galatian Churches. For those who see in them the Churches of South Galatia (Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe) the earlier date may well seem preferable. If we take them to be the Churches of North Galatia (Pessinus, Ancyra, and Tavium), then the Epistle cannot be earlier than St. Paul’s settlement at Ephesus on his third journey in the year 54. The argument which Bishop Lightfoot based on resemblances of thought and language between Galatians and Romans rests upon facts that are indisputable, but does not carry with it any certain inference as to date.

(2) Occasion. If the time and place of the Epistle are clear, the occasion of it is still clearer; St. Paul himself explains it in unmistakable language twice over. At the beginning of the Epistle (Romans 1:10-15) he tells the Romans how much he has longed to pay them a visit; and now that the prospect has been brought near he evidently writes to prepare them for it. And at the end of the Epistle (ch. 15:22-33) he repeats his explanation detailing all his plans both for the near and for the more distant future, and telling them how he hopes to make his stay with them the most important stage of his journey to Spain. We know that his intention was fulfilled in substance but not in the manner of its accomplishment. He went up to Jerusalem and then to Rome, but only after two years’ forcible detention, and as a prisoner awaiting his trial.

(3) Purpose. A more complicated question meets us when from the occasion or proximate cause of the Epistle to the Romans we pass to its purpose or ulterior cause. The Apostle’s reasons for writing to Rome lie upon the surface; his reasons for writing the particular letter he did write will need more consideration. No doubt there is a providence in it. It was willed that such a letter should be written for the admonition of after-ages. But through what psychological channels did that providence work?

Here we pass on to much debated ground; and it will perhaps help us if we begin by presenting the opposing theories in as antithetical a form as possible.

When the different views which have been held come to be examined, they will be found to be reducible to two main types, which differ not on a single point but on a number of co-ordinated points. One might be described as primarily historical, the other primarily dogmatic; one directs attention mainly to the Church addressed, the other mainly to the writer; one adopts the view of a predominance of Jewish-Christian readers, the other presupposes readers who are predominantly Gentile Christians.

Here again the epoch-making impulse came from Baur. It was Baur who first worked out a coherent theory, the essence of which was that it claimed to be historical. He argued from the analogy of the other Epistles which he allowed to be genuine. The circumstances of the Corinthian Church are reflected as in a glass in the Epistles to the Corinthians; the circumstances of the Galatian Churches come out clearly from that to the Galatians. Did it not follow that the circumstances of the Roman Church might be directly inferred from the Epistle to the Romans, and that the Epistle itself was written with deliberate reference to them? Why all this Jewish-sounding argument if the readers were not Jews? Why these constant answers to objections if there was no one to object? The issues discussed were similar in many respects to those in the Epistle to the Galatians. In Galatia a fierce controversy was going on. Must it not therefore be assumed that there was a like controversy, only milder and more tempered, at Rome, and that the Apostle wished to deal with it in a manner correspondingly milder and more tempered?

There was truth in all this; but it was truth to some extent one-sided and exaggerated. A little reflexion will show that the cases of the Churches of Corinth and Galatia were not exactly parallel to that of Rome. In Galatia St. Paul was dealing with a perfectly definite state of things in a Church which he himself had founded, and the circumstances of which he knew from within and not merely by hearsay. At Corinth he had spent a still longer time; when he wrote he was not far distant; there had been frequent communications between the Church and the Apostle; and in the case of 1 Corinthians he had actually before him a letter containing a number of questions which he was requested to answer, while in that of 2 Corinthians he had a personal report brought to him by Titus. What could there be like this at Rome? The Church there St. Paul had not founded, had not even seen; and, if we are to believe Baur and the great majority of his followers, he had not even any recognizable correspondents to keep him informed about it. For by what may seem a strange inconsistency it was especially the school of Baur which denied the genuineness of ch. 16, and so cut away a whole list of persons from one or other of whom St. Paul might have really learnt something about Roman Christianity.

These contradictions were avoided in the older theory which prevailed before the time of Baur and which has not been without adherents, of whom the most prominent perhaps is Dr. Bernhard Weiss, since his day. According to this theory the main object of the Epistle is doctrinal; it is rather a theological treatise than a letter; its purpose is to instruct the Roman Church in central principles of the faith, and has but little reference to the circumstances of the moment.

It would be wrong to call this view—at least in its recent forms —unhistorical. It takes account of the situation as it presented itself, but looks at another side of it from that which caught the eye of Baur. The leading idea is no longer the position of the readers, but the position of the writer: every thing is made to turn on the truths which the Apostle wished to place on record, and for which he found a fit recipient in a Church which seemed to have so commanding a future before it.

Let us try to do justice to the different aspects of the problem. The theories which have so far been mentioned, and others of which we have not yet spoken, are only at fault in so far as they are exclusive and emphasize some one point to the neglect of the rest. Nature is usually more subtle than art. A man of St. Paul’s ability sitting down to write a letter on matters of weight would be likely to have several influences present to his mind at once, and his language would be moulded now by one and now by another.

Three factors may be said to have gone to the shaping of this letter of St. Paul’s.

The first of these will be that which Baur took almost for the only one. The Apostle had some real knowledge of the state of the Church to which he was writing. Here we see the importance of his connexion with Aquila and Prisca. His intercourse with them would probably give the first impulse to that wish which he tells us that he had entertained for many years to visit Rome in person. When first he met them at Corinth they were newly arrived from the capital; he would hear from them of the state of things they left behind them; and a spark would be enough to fire his imagination at the prospect of winning a foothold for Christ and the Gospel in the seat of empire itself. We may well believe—if the speculations about Prisca are valid, and even without drawing upon these—that the two wanderers would keep up communication with the Christians of their home. And now, very probably at the instance of the Apostle, they had returned to prepare the way for his coming. We cannot afford to lose so valuable a link between St. Paul and the Church he had set his heart on visiting. Two of his most trusted friends are now on the spot, and they would not fail to report all that it was essential to the Apostle to know. He may have had other correspondents besides, but they would be the chief. To this source we may look for what there is of local colour in the Epistle. If the argument is addressed now to Gentiles by birth and now to Jews; if we catch a glimpse of parties in the Church, ‘the strong’ and ‘the weak’; if there is a hint of danger threatening the peace and the faith of the community (as in ch. 16:17-20)—it is from his friends in Rome that the Apostle draws his knowledge of the conditions with which he is dealing.

The second factor which helps in determining the character of the Epistle has more to do with what it is not than with what it is: it prevents it from being as it was at one time described, ‘a compendium of the whole of Christian doctrine.’ The Epistle is not this, because like all St. Paul’s Epistles it implies a common basis of Christian teaching, those παραδόσεις as they are called elsewhere (1 Corinthians 11:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 2 Thessalonians 3:6), which the Apostle is able to take for granted as already known to his readers, and which he therefore thinks it unnecessary to repeat without special reason. He will not ‘lay again’ a foundation which is already laid. He will not speak of the ‘first principles’ of a Christian’s belief, but will ‘go on unto perfection.’ Hence it is that just the most fundamental doctrines—the Divine Lordship of Christ, the value of His Death, the nature of the Sacraments—are assumed rather than stated or proved. Such allusions as we get to these are concerned not with the rudimentary but with the more developed forms of the doctrines in question. They nearly always add something to the common stock of teaching, give to it a profounder significance, or apply it in new and unforeseen directions. The last charge that could be brought against the Epistle would be that it consisted of Christian commonplaces. It is one of the most original of writings. No Christian can have read it for the first time without feeling that he was introduced to heights and depths of Christianity of which he had never been conscious before.

For, lastly, the most powerful of all the influences which have shaped the contents of the Epistle is the experience of the writer. The main object which he has in view is really not far to seek. When he thought of visiting Rome his desire was to ‘have some fruit’ there, as in the rest of the Gentile world (Romans 1:13). He longed to impart to the Roman Christians some ‘spiritual gift,’ such as he knew that he had the power of imparting (1:11; 15:29). By this he meant the effect of his own personal presence, but the gift was one that could be exercised also in absence. He has exercised it by this letter, which is itself the outcome of a πνευματικὸν χάρισμα, a word of instruction, stimulus, and warning, addressed in the first instance to the Church at Rome, and through it to Christendom for all time.

The Apostle has reached another turning-point in his career. He is going up to Jerusalem, not knowing what will befall him there, but prepared for the worst. He is aware that the step which he is taking is highly critical and he has no confidence that he will escape with his life1. This gives an added solemnity to his utterance; and it is natural that he should cast back his glance over the years which had passed since he became a Christian and sum up the result as he felt it for himself. It is not exactly a conscious summing up, but it is the momentum of this past experience which guides his pen.

Deep in the background of all his thought lies that one great event which brought him within the fold of Christ. For him it had been nothing less than a revolution; and it fixed permanently his conception of the new forces which came with Christianity into the world. ‘To believe in Christ,’ ‘to be baptized into Christ,’ these were the watchwords; and the Apostle felt that they were pregnant with intense meaning. That new personal relation of the believer to his Lord was henceforth the motive-power which dominated the whole of his life. It was also met, as it seemed, in a marvellous manner from above. We cannot doubt that from his conversion onwards St. Paul found himself endowed with extraordinary energies. Some of them were what we should call miraculous; but he makes no distinction between those which were miraculous and those which were not. He set them all down as miraculous in the sense of having a direct Divine cause. And when he looked around him over the Christian Church he saw that like endowments, energies similar in kind if inferior to his own in degree, were widely diffused. They were the characteristic mark of Christians. Partly they took a form which would be commonly described as supernatural, unusual powers of healing, unusual gifts of utterance, an unusual magnetic influence upon others; partly they consisted in a strange elation of spirit which made suffering and toil seem light and insignificant; but most of all the new impulse was moral in its working, it blossomed out in a multitude of attractive traits— ‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance.’ These St. Paul called ‘fruits of the Spirit.’ The act of faith on the part of man, the influence of the Spirit (which was only another way of describing the influence of Christ Himself1 ) from the side of God, were the two outstanding facts which made the lives of Christians differ from those of other men.

These are the postulates of Christianity, the forces to which the Apostle has to appeal for the solution of practical problems as they present themselves. His time had been very largely taken up with such problems. There had been the great question as to the terms on which Gentiles were to be admitted to the new society. On this head St. Paul could have no doubt. His own ruling principles, ‘faith’ and ‘the Spirit,’ made no distinction between Jew and Gentile; he had no choice but to contend for the equal rights of both—a certain precedence might be yielded to the Jews as the chosen people of the Old Covenant, but that was all.

This battle had been fought and won. But it left behind a question which was intellectually more troublesome—a question brought home by the actual effect of the preaching of Christianity, very largely welcomed and eagerly embraced by Gentiles, but as a rule spurned and rejected by the Jews—how it could be that Israel, the chosen recipient of the promises of the Old Testament, should be excluded from the benefit now that those promises came to be fulfilled. Clearly this question belongs to the later reflective stage of the controversy relating to Jew and Gentile. The active contending for Gentile liberties would come first, the philosophic or theological assignment of the due place of Jew and Gentile in the Divine scheme would naturally come afterwards. This more advanced stage has now been reached; the Apostle has made up his mind on the whole series of questions at issue; and he takes the opportunity of writing to the Romans at the very centre of the empire, to lay down calmly and deliberately the conclusions to which he has come.

The Epistle is the ripened fruit of the thought and struggles of the eventful years by which it had been preceded. It is no merely abstract disquisition but a letter full of direct human interest in the persons to whom it is written; it is a letter which contains here and there side-glances at particular local circumstances, and at least one emphatic warning (ch. 16:17-20) against a danger which had not reached the Church as yet, but any day might reach it, and the full urgency of which the Apostle knew only too well; but the main theme of the letter is the gathering in of the harvest, at once of the Church’s history since the departure of its Master, and of the individual history of a single soul, that one soul which under God had had the most active share in making the course of external events what it was. St. Paul set himself to give the Roman Church of his best; he has given it what was perhaps in some ways too good for it—more we may be sure than it would be able to digest and assimilate at the moment, but just for that very reason a body of teaching which eighteen centuries of Christian interpreters have failed to exhaust. Its richness in this respect is due to the incomparable hold which it shows on the essential principles of Christ’s religion, and the way in which, like the Bible in general, it pierces through the conditions of a particular time and place to the roots of things which are permanent and universal.

§ 5. The Argument

In the interesting essay in which, discarding all tradition, he seeks to re-interpret the teaching of St. Paul directly from the standpoint of the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold maps out the contents of the Epistle as follows:—

‘If a somewhat pedantic form of expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness, we may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the Romans—the chapters which convey Paul’s theology, though not … with any scholastic purpose or in any formal scientific mode of exposition—of these eleven chapters, the first, second, and third are, in a scale of importance, fixed by a scientific criticism of Paul’s line of thought, sub-primary; the fourth and fifth are secondary; the sixth and eighth are primary; the seventh chapter is sub-primary; the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the contents of the separate chapters themselves this scale must be carried on, so far as to mark that of the two great primary chapters, the sixth and eighth, the eighth is primary down only to the end of the twenty-eighth verse; from thence to the end it is, however, eloquent, yet for the purpose of a scientific criticism of Paul’s essential theology only secondary’ (St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 92 f.).

This extract may serve as a convenient starting-point for our examination of the argument: and it may conduce to clearness of apprehension if we complete the summary analysis of the Epistle given by the same writer, with the additional advantage of presenting it in his fresh and bright manner:—

‘The first chapter is to the Gentiles—its purport is: You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews—its purport is: No more have you, though you think you have. The third chapter assumes faith in Christ as the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith the sanction of the Old Testament and of the history of Abraham. The fifth insists on the causes for thankfulness and exultation in the boon of righteousness through faith in Christ; and applies illustratively, with this design, the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-important question: “What is that faith in Christ which I, Paul, mean?”—and answers it. The seventh illustrates and explains the answer. But the eighth down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops and completes the answer. The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense of safety and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter’s thesis—so hard to a Jew, so easy to us—that righteousness is not by the Jewish law; but dwell with hope and joy on a final result of things which is to be favourable to Israel’ (ibid. p. 93).

Some such outline as this would be at the present stage of investigation generally accepted. It is true that Baur threw the centre of gravity upon chapters 9-11, and held that the rest of the Epistle was written up to these: but this view would now on almost all hands be regarded as untenable. The problem discussed in these chapters doubtless weighed heavily on the Apostle’s mind; in the circumstances under which he was writing it was doubtless a problem of very considerable urgency; but for all that it is a problem which belongs rather to the circumference of St. Paul’s thought than to the centre; it is not so much a part of his fundamental teaching as a consequence arising from its collision with an unbelieving world.

On this head the scholarship of the present day would be on the side of Matthew Arnold. It points, however, to the necessity, in any attempt to determine what is primary and what is not primary in the argument of the Epistle, of starting with a clear understanding of the point of view from which the degrees of relative importance are to be assigned. Baur’s object was historical—to set the Epistle in relation to the circumstances of its composition. On that assumption his view was partially—though still not more than partially—justified. Matthew Arnold’s object on the other hand was what he calls ‘a scientific criticism of Paul’s thought’; by which he seems to mean (though perhaps he was not wholly clear in his own mind) an attempt to discriminate in it those elements which are of the highest permanent value. It was natural that he should attach the greatest importance to those elements in particular which seemed to be capable of direct personal verification. From this point of view we need not question his assignment of a primary significance to chapters 6 and 8. His reproduction of the thought of these chapters is the best thing in his book, and we have drawn upon it ourselves in the commentary upon them (p. 163 f.). There is more in the same connexion that well deserves attentive study. But there are other portions of the Epistle which are not capable of verification precisely in the same manner, and yet were of primary importance to St. Paul himself and may be equally of primary importance to those of us who are willing to accept his testimony in spiritual things which lie beyond the reach of our personal experience. Matthew Arnold is limited by the method which he applies—and which others would no doubt join with him in applying—to the subjective side of Christianity, the emotions and efforts which it generates in Christians. But there is a further question how and why they came to be generated. And in the answer which St. Paul would give, and which the main body of Christians very largely on his authority would also give to that question, he and they alike are led up into regions where direct human verification ceases to be possible.

It is quite true that ‘faith in Christ’ means attachment to Christ, a strong emotion of love and gratitude. But that emotion is not confined, as we say, to ‘the historical Christ,’ it has for its object not only Him who walked the earth as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’; it is directed towards the same Jesus ‘crucified, risen and ascended to the right hand of God.’ St. Paul believed, and we also believe, that His transit across the stage of our earth was accompanied by consequences in the celestial sphere which transcend our faculties. We cannot pretend to be able to verify them as we can verify that which passes in our own minds. And yet a certain kind of indirect verification there is. The thousands and tens of thousands of Christians who have lived and died in the firm conviction of the truth of these supersensual realities, and who upon the strength of them have reduced their lives to a harmonious unity superseding the war of passion, do really afford no slight presumption that the beliefs which have enabled them to do this are such as the Ruler of the universe approves, and such as aptly fit into the eternal order. Whatever the force of this presumption to the outer world, it is one which the Christian at least will cherish.

We therefore do not feel at liberty to treat as anything less than primary that which was certainly primary to St. Paul. We entirely accept the view that chapters 6 and 8 are primary, but we also feel bound to place by their side the culminating verses of chapter 3. The really fundamental passages in the Epistle we should say were, ch. 1:16, 17, which states the problem, and 3:21-26, 6:1-14, 8:1-30 (rather than 1-28), which supply its solution. The problem is, How is man to become righteous in the sight of God? And the answer is (1) by certain great redemptive acts on the part of God which take effect in the sphere above, though their consequences are felt throughout the sphere below; (2) through a certain ardent apprehension of these acts and of their Author Christ, on the part of the Christian; and (3) through his continued self-surrender to Divine influences poured out freely and unremittingly upon him.

It is superfluous to say that there is nothing whatever that is new in this statement. It does but reproduce the belief, in part implicit rather than explicit, of the Early Church; then further defined and emphasized more vigorously on some of its sides at the Reformation; and lastly brought to a more even balance (or what many would fain make a more even balance) by the Church of our own day. Of course it is liable to be impugned, as it is impugned by the attractive writer whose words have been quoted above, in the interest of what is thought to be a stricter science. But whatever the value in itself of the theory which is substituted for it, we may be sure that it does not adequately represent the mind of St. Paul. In the present commentary our first object is to do justice to this. How it is afterwards to be worked up into a complete scheme of religious belief, it lies beyond our scope to consider.

For the sake of the student it may be well to draw out the contents of the Epistle in a tabular analytical form. St. Paul, as Matthew Arnold rightly reminds us, is no Schoolman, and his method is the very reverse of all that is formal and artificial. But it is undoubtedly helpful to set before ourselves the framework of his thought, just as a knowledge of anatomy conduces to the better understanding of the living human frame.

I. —Introduction (1:1-15).

α. The Apostolic Salutation (1:1-7).

β. St. Paul and the Roman Church (1:8-15).

II. —Doctrinal.

The Great Thesis. Problem: How is Righteousness to be attained?

Answer: Not by man’s work, but by God’s gift, through Faith, or loyal attachment to Christ (1:16, 17).

A. Righteousness as a state or condition in the sight of God (Justification) (1:18-5:21).

1. Righteousness not hitherto attained (1:18-3:20). [Rather, by contrast, a scene which bespeaks impending Wrath].

α. Failure of the Gentile (1:18-32).

i) Natural Religion (1:18-20);

ii) deserted for idolatry (1:21–25);

iii) hence judicial abandonment to abominable sins (1:26–27), to every kind of moral depravity (28–31), even to perversion of conscience (32).

β. [Transitional]. Future judgement without respect of persons such as Jew or Gentile (2:1–16).

i) Jewish critic and Gentile sinner in the same position (2:1–4).

ii) Standard of judgement: deeds, not privileges (2:5–11)

iii) Rule of judgement: Law of Moses for the Jew; Law of Conscience for the Gentile (2:12–16).

γ. Failure of the Jew (2:17–29). Profession and reality, as regards

i) Law (2:17–24);

ii) Circumcision (2:25–29).

δ. [Parenthetic]. Answer to casuistical objections from Jewish stand-point (3:1–8).

i) The Jew’s advantage as recipient of Divine Promises (3:1, 2);

ii) which promises are not invalidated by Man’s unfaithfulness (3:3, 4).

iii) Yet God’s greater glory no excuse for human sin (3:5–8).

ε. Universal failure to attain to righteousness and earn acceptance illustrated from Scripture (3:9–20).

2. Consequent Exposition of New System (3:21–31):

α.

i) in its relation to Law, independent of it, yet attested by it (21);

ii) in its universality, as the free gift of God (22–24);

iii) in the method of its realization through the propitiatory Death of Christ, which occupies under the New Dispensation the same place which Sacrifice, especially the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement, occupied under the Old (25);

iv) in its final cause—the twofold manifestation of God’s righteousness, at once asserting itself against sin and conveying pardon to the sinner (26).

β. Preliminary note of two main consequences from this:

i) Boasting excluded (27, 28);

ii) Jew and Gentile alike accepted (29–31).

3. Relation of this New System to O. T. considered in reference to the crucial case of Abraham (4:1–25).

i) Abraham’s acceptance (like that described by David) turned on Faith, not Works (4:1–8);

ii) nor Circumcision (4:9–12) [so that there might be nothing to prevent him from being the spiritual father of uncircumcised as well as circumcised (11, 12)],

iii) nor Law, the antithesis of Promise (4:13–17) [so that he might be the spiritual father of all believers, not of those under the Law only].

iv) Abraham’s Faith, a type of the Christian’s (4:17–25): [he too believed in a birth from the dead].

4. Blissful effects of Righteousness by Faith (5:1–21).

α.

i) It leads by sure degrees to a triumphant hope of final salvation (5:1–4).

ii) That hope guaranteed a fortiori by the Love displayed in Christ’s Death for sinners (5:5–11).

β. Contrast of these effects with those of Adam’s Fall (5:12–21):

i) like, in the transition from one to all (12–14);

ii) unlike, in that where one brought sin, condemnation, death, the other brought grace, a declaration of unmerited righteousness, life (15–17).

iii) Summary. Relations of Fall, Law, Grace (18–21) [The Fall brought sin; Law increased it; but Grace more than cancels the ill effects of Law].

B. Progressive Righteousness in the Christian (Sanctification) (vi–viii).

1. Reply to further casuistical objection: ‘If more sin means more grace, why not go on sinning?’

The immersion of Baptism carried with it a death to sin, and union with the risen Christ. The Christian therefore cannot, must not, sin (6:1–14).

2. The Christian’s Release: what it is, and what it is not: shown by two metaphors.

α. Servitude and emancipation (6:15–23).

β. The marriage-bond (7:1–6). [The Christian’s old self dead to the Law with Christ; so that he is henceforth free to live with Him].

3. Judaistic objection from seeming disparagement of Law: met by an analysis of the moral conflict in the soul. Law is impotent, and gives an impulse or handle to sin, but is not itself sinful (7:7–24). The conflict ended by the interposition of Christ (25).

4. Perspective of the Christian’s New Career (viii).

The Indwelling Spirit.

α. Failure of the previous system made good by Christ’s Incarnation and the Spirit’s presence (8:1–4).

β. The new régime contrasted with the old—the régime of the Spirit with the weakness of unassisted humanity (8:5–9).

γ. The Spirit’s presence a guarantee of bodily as well as moral resurrection (8:10–13);

δ. also a guarantee that the Christian enjoys with God a son’s relation, and will enter upon a son’s inheritance (8:14–17).

ε. That glorious inheritance the object of creation’s yearning (8:18–22); and of the Christian’s hope (8:23–25).

η. Human infirmity assisted by the Spirit’s intercession (8:26, 27);

θ. and sustained by the knowledge of the connected chain by which God works out His purpose of salvation (8:28–30).

ι. Inviolable security of the Christian in dependence upon God’s favour and the love of Christ (8:31–39).

C. Problem of Israel’s Unbelief. The Gospel in history (9, 10, 11). The rejection of the Chosen People a sad contrast to its high destiny and privileges (9:1–5).

1. Justice of the Rejection (9:6–29).

α. The Rejection of Israel not inconsistent with the Divine promises (9:6–13);

β. nor with the Divine Justice (9:14–29).

i) The absoluteness of God’s choice shown from the O. T. (9:14–18).

ii) A necessary deduction from His position as Creator (9:19–23).

iii) The alternate choice of Jews and Gentiles expressly reserved and foretold in Scripture (9:24–29).

2. Cause of the Rejection.

α. Israel sought righteousness by Works instead of Faith, in their own way and not in God’s way (9:30–10:4).

And this although God’s method was—

i) Not difficult and remote but near and easy (10:5–10);

ii) Within the reach of all, Jew and Gentile alike (10:11-13).

β. Nor can Israel plead in defence want of opportunity or warning—

i) The Gospel has been fully and universally preached (10:14-18).

ii) Israel had been warned beforehand by the Prophet that they would reject God’s Message (10:19-21).

3. Mitigating considerations. The purpose of God (11).

α. The Unbelief of Israel is now as in the past only partial (11:1-10).

β. It is only temporary—

i) Their fall has a special purpose—the introduction of the Gentiles (11:11-15).

ii) That Israel will be restored is vouched for by the holy stock from which it comes (11:16-24).

γ. In all this may be seen the purpose of God working upwards through seeming severity, to a beneficent result—the final restoration of all (11:25-31).

Doxology (11:33-36).

III. —Practical and Hortatory.

1. The Christian sacrifice (12:1, 2).

2. The Christian as a member of the Church (12:3-8).

3. The Christian in his relation to others (12:9-21).

The Christian’s vengeance (12:19-21).

4. Church and State (13:1-7).

5. The Christian’s one debt; the law of love (13:8-10).

The day approaching (13:11-14).

6. Toleration; the strong and the weak (14:1-15:6).

The Jew and the Gentile (15:7-13).

IV. —Epilogue.

α. Personal explanations. Motive of the Epistle. Proposed visit to Rome (15:14-33).

β. Greetings to various persons (16:1-16).

A warning (16:17-20).

Postscript by the Apostle’s companions and amanuensis (16:21-23).

Benediction and Doxology (16:24-27).

It is often easiest to bring out the force and strength of an argument by starting from its conclusion, and we possess in the doxology at the end of the Epistle a short summary made by St. Paul himself of its contents. The question of its genuineness has been discussed elsewhere, and it has been shown in the commentary how clearly it refers to all the leading thoughts of the Epistle; it remains only to make use of it to help us to understand the argument which St. Paul is working out and the conclusion to which he is leading us.

The first idea which comes prominently before us is that of ‘the Gospel’; it meets us in the Apostolic salutation at the beginning, in the statement of the thesis of the Epistle, in the doxology at the end where it is expanded in the somewhat unusual form ‘according to my Gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ.’ So again in 11:28 it is incidentally shown that what St. Paul is describing is the method or plan of the Gospel. This idea of the Gospel then is a fundamental thought of the Epistle; and it seems to mean this. There are two competing systems or plans of life or salvation before St. Paul’s mind. The one is the old Jewish system, a knowledge of which is presupposed; the other is the Christian system. a knowledge of which again is presupposed. St. Paul is not expounding the Christian religion, he is writing to Christians: what he aims at expounding is the meaning of the new system. This may perhaps explain the manner in which he varies between the expressions ‘the Gospel,’ or ‘the Gospel of God,’ or ‘the Gospel of Jesus Christ,’ and ‘my Gospel.’ The former represents the Christian religion as recognized and preached by all, the latter represents his own personal exposition of its plan and meaning. The main purpose of the argument then is an explanation of the meaning of the new Gospel of Jesus Christ, as succeeding to and taking the place of the old method, but also in a sense as embracing and continuing it.

St. Paul begins then with a theological description of the new method. He shows the need for it, he explains what it is—emphasizing its distinctive features in contrast to those of the old system, and at the same time proving that it is the necessary and expected outcome of that old system. He then proceeds to describe the working of this system in the Christian life; and lastly he vindicates for it its true place in history. The universal character of the new Gospel has been already emphasized, he must now trace the plan by which it is to attain this universality. The rejection of the Jews, the calling of the Gentiles, are both steps in this process and necessary steps. But the method and plan pursued in these cases and partially revealed, enable us to learn, if we have faith to do so, that ‘mystery which has been hidden from the foundation of the world,’ but which has always guided the course of human history—the purpose of God to ‘sum up all things in Christ.’

If this point has been made clear, it will enable us to bring out the essential unity and completeness of the argument of the Epistle. We do not agree as we have explained above with the opinion of Baur, revived by Dr. Hort, that chap. 9-11 represent the essential part of the Epistle, to which all the earlier part is but an introduction. That is certainly a one-sided view. But Dr. Hort’s examination of the Epistle is valuable as reminding us that neither are these chapters an appendix accidentally added which might be omitted without injuring St. Paul’s argument and plan.

We can trace incidentally the various difficulties, partly raised by opponents, partly suggested by his own thought, which have helped to shape different portions of the Epistle. We are able to analyze and separate the different stages in the argument more accurately and distinctly than in any other of St. Paul’s writings. But this must not blind us to the fact that the whole is one great argument; the purpose of which is to explain the Gospel of God in Jesus the Messiah, and to show its effects on human life, and in the history of the race, and thus to vindicate for it the right to be considered the ultimate and final revelation of God’s purpose for mankind.

§ 6. Language and Style

(1) Language1. It will seem at first sight to the uninitiated reader a rather strange paradox that a letter addressed to the capital of the Western or Latin world should be written in Greek. Yet there is no paradox, either to the classical scholar who is acquainted with the history of the Early Empire, or to the ecclesiastical historian who follows the fortunes of the Early Church. Both are aware that for fully two centuries and a half Greek was the predominant language if not of the city of Rome as a whole yet of large sections of its inhabitants, and in particular of those sections among which was to be sought the main body of the readers of the Epistle.

The early history of the Church of Rome might be said to fall into three periods, of which the landmarks would be (1) the appearance of the first Latin writers, said by Jerome2 to be Apollonius who suffered under Commodus in the year 185, and whose Apology and Acts have been recently recovered in an Armenian Version and edited by Mr. Conybeare3 , and Victor, an African by birth, who became Bishop of Rome about 189 a.d. (2) Next would come in the middle of the third century a more considerable body of Latin literature, the writings of Novatian and the correspondence between the Church of Rome and Cyprian at Carthage. (3) Then, lastly, there would be the definite Latinizing of the capital of the West which followed upon the transference of the seat of empire to Constantinople dating from 330 a.d.

(1) The evidence of Juvenal and Martial refers to the latter half of the first century. Juvenal speaks with indignation of the extent to which Rome was being converted into ‘a Greek city4.’ Martial regards ignorance of Greek as a mark of rusticity5. Indeed, there was a double tendency which embraced at once classes at both ends of the social scale. On the one hand among slaves and in the trading classes there were swarms of Greeks and Greek-speaking Orientals. On the other hand in the higher ranks it was the fashion to speak Greek; children were taught it by Greek nurses; and in after life the use of it was carried to the pitch of affectation6.

For the Jewish colony we have the evidence of the inscriptions. Out of thirty-eight collected by Schürer7 no less than thirty are Greek and eight only Latin; and if one of the Greek inscriptions is in Latin characters, conversely three of the Latin are in Greek characters. There do not seem to be any in Heb_1.

Of Christian inscriptions the proportion of Greek to Latin would seem to be about 1:2. But the great mass of these would belong to a period later than that of which we are speaking. De Rossi2 estimates the number for the period between M. Aurelius and Septimius Severus at about 160, of which something like half would be Greek. Beyond this we can hardly go.

But as to the Christian Church there is a quantity of other evidence. The bishops of Rome from Linus to Eleutherus (c. 174-189 a.d.) are twelve in number: of these not more than three (Clement, Sixtus I = Xystus, Pius) bear Latin names. But although the names of Clement and Pius are Latin the extant Epistle of Clement is written in Greek; we know also that Hermas, the author of ‘The Shepherd,’ was the brother of Pius3 , and he wrote in Greek. Indeed all the literature that we can in any way connect with Christian Rome down to the end of the reign of M. Aurelius is Greek. Besides the works of Clement and Hermas we have still surviving the letter addressed to the Church at Rome by Ignatius; and later in the period, the letter written by Soter (c. 166-174 a.d.) to the Corinthian Church was evidently in Greek4. Justin and Tatian who were settled in Rome wrote in Greek; so too did Rhodon, a pupil of Tatian’s at Rome who carried on their tradition5. Greek was the language of Polycarp and Hegesippus who paid visits to Rome of shorter duration. A number of Gnostic writers established themselves there and used Greek for the vehicle of their teaching; so Cerdon, Marcion, and Valentinus, who were all in Rome about 140 a.d. Valentinus left behind a considerable school, and the leading representatives of the ‘Italic’ branch, Ptolemaeus and Heracleon, both wrote in Greek. We may assume the same thing of the other Gnostics combated by Justin and Irenaeus. Irenaeus himself spent some time at Rome in the Episcopate of Eleutherus, and wrote his great work in Greek.

To this period may also be traced back the oldest form of the Creed of the Roman Church now known as the Apostles’ Creed6. This was in Greek. And there are stray Greek fragments of Western Liturgies which ultimately go back to the same place and time. Such would be the Hymnus angelicus(Luke 2:14) repeated in Greek at Christmas, the Trishagion, Kyrie eleison and Christe eleison. On certain set days (at Christmas, Easter, Ember days, and some others) lections were read in Greek as well as Latin; hymns were occasionally sung in Greek; and at the formal committal of the Creed to the candidates for baptism (the so-called Traditio and Redditio Symboli) both the Apostles’ Creed (in its longer and shorter forms) and the Nicene were recited and the questions put first in Greek and then in Lam_1. These are all survivals of Roman usage at the time when the Church was bilingual.

(2) The dates of Apollonius and of Bp. Victor are fixed, but rather more uncertainty hangs over that of the first really classical Christian work in Latin, the Octavius of Minucius Felix. This has been much debated, but opinion seems to be veering round to the earlier date2 , which would bring him into near proximity to Apollonius, perhaps at the end of the reign of M. Aurelius. The period which then begins and extends from c. 180-250 a.d. shows a more even balance of Greek and Latin. The two prominent writers, Hippolytus and Caius, still make use of Greek. The grounds perhaps preponderate for regarding the Muratorian Fragment as a translation. But at the beginning of the period we have Minucius Felix and at the end Novatian, and Latin begins to have the upper hand in the names of bishops. The glimpse which we get of the literary activity of the Church of Rome through the letters and other writings preserved among the works of Cyprian shows us at last Latin in possession of the field.

(3) The Hellenizing character of Roman Christianity was due in the first instance to the constant intercourse between Rome and the East. In the troubled times which followed the middle of the third century, with the decay of wealth and trade, and Gothic piracies breaking up the pax Romana on the Aegean, this intercourse was greatly interrupted. Thus Greek influences lost their strength. The Latin Church, Rome reinforced by Africa, had now a substantial literature of its own. Under leaders like Tertullian, Cyprian, and Novatian it had begun to develop its proper individuality. It could stand and walk alone without assistance from the East. And a decisive impulse was given to its independent career by the founding of Constantinople. The stream set from that time onwards towards the Bosphorus and no longer towards the Tiber. Rome ceases to be the centre of the Empire to become in a still more exclusive sense the capital of the West.

(2) Style. The Epistles which bear the name of St. Paul present a considerable diversity of style. To such an extent is this the case that the question is seriously raised whether they can have had the same author. Of all the arguments urged on the negative side this from style is the most substantial; and whatever decision we come to on the subject there remains a problem of much complexity and difficulty.

It is well known that the Pauline Epistles fall into four groups which are connected indeed with each other, but at the same time stand out with much distinctness. These groups are: 1, 2 Thess.; Gal., 1, 2 Cor., Rom.; Phil., Col., Eph., Philem.; Past. Epp. The four Epistles of the second group hang very closely together; those of the third group subdivide into two pairs, Phil. Philem. on the one hand, and Eph. Col. on the other. It is hard to dissociate Col. from Philem.; and the very strong presumption in favour of the genuineness of the latter Epistle reacts upon the former. The tendency of critical inquiry at the present moment is in favour of Colossians and somewhat less decidedly in favour of Ephesians. It is, for instance, significant that Jülicher in his recent Einleitung (Freiburg i. B. and Leipzig, 1894) sums up rather on this side of the question than the other. We believe that this points to what will be the ultimate verdict. But in the matter of style it must be confessed that Col. and Eph.—and more especially Eph.—stand at the furthest possible remove from Romans. We may take Eph. and Rom. as marking the extreme poles of difference within the Epistles claimed for St. Paul1. Any other member of the second group would do as well; but as we are concerned specially with Rom., we may institute a comparison with it.

The difference is not so much a difference of ideas and of vocabulary as a difference of structure and composition. There are, it is true, a certain number of new and peculiar expressions in the later Epistle; but these are so balanced by points of coincidence, and the novel element has so much of the nature of simple addition rather than contrariety, that to draw a conclusion adverse to St. Paul’s authorship would certainly not be warranted. The sense of dissimilarity reaches its height when we turn from the materials (if we may so speak) of the style to the way in which they are put together. The discrepancy lies not in the anatomy but in the surface distribution of light and shade, in the play of feature, in the temperament to which the two Epistles seem to give expression. We will enlarge a little on this point, as the contrast may help us to understand the individuality of the Epistle to the Romans.

This Epistle, like all the others of the group, is characterized by a remarkable energy and vivacity. It is calm in the sense that it is not aggressive and that the rush of words is always well under control. Still there is a rush of words, rising repeatedly to passages of splendid eloquence; but the eloquence is spontaneous, the outcome of strongly moved feeling; there is nothing about it of laboured oratory. The language is rapid, terse, incisive; the argument is conducted by a quick cut and thrust of dialectic; it reminds us of a fencer with his eye always on his antagonist.

We shut the Epistle to the Romans and we open that to the Ephesians; how great is the contrast! We cannot speak here of vivacity, hardly of energy; if there is energy it is deep down below the surface. The rapid argumentative cut and thrust is gone. In its place we have a slowly-moving onwards-advancing mass, like a glacier working its way inch by inch down the valley. The periods are of unwieldy length; the writer seems to stagger under his load. He has weighty truths to express, and he struggles to express them—not without success, but certainly with little flexibility or ease of composition. The truths unfolded read like abstract truths, ideal verities, ‘laid up in the heavens’ rather than embodying themselves in the active controversies of earth.

There is, as we shall see, another side. We have perhaps exaggerated the opposition for the sake of making the difference clear. When we come to look more closely at the Epistle to the Romans we shall find in it not a few passages which tend in the direction of the characteristics of Ephesians; and when we examine the Epistle to the Ephesians we shall find in it much to remind us of characteristics of Romans. We will however leave the comparison as it has been made for the moment, and ask ourselves what means we have of explaining it. Supposing the two Epistles to be really the work of the same man, can the difference between them be adequately accounted for?

There is always an advantage in presenting proportions to the eye and reducing them to some sort of numerical estimate. This can be done in the present case without much difficulty by reckoning up the number of longer pauses. This is done below for the two Epistles, Romans and Ephesians. The standard used is that of the Revisers’ Greek Text, and the estimate of length is based on the number of στίχοι or printed lines1. It will be worth while to compare the Epistles chapter by chapter:—

Romans.

στίχοι. (∙) (.) (;)

Ch. I. 64 13 14 —

II. 51 14 7 8

III. 47 20 12 16

IV. 45 6 14 7

V. 47 6 15 —

VI. 42 8 14 8

VII. 49 16 20 5

VIII. 70 17 26 14

IX. 55 8 19 10

X. 37 6 16 9

XI. 63 16 27 11

Total for doctrinal portion 570 130 184 88

402





XII. 36 14 12 —

XIII. 29 11 15 1

XIV. 41 11 27 3

XV. 63 8 24 —

XVI. 50 7 28 —

Total for the Epistle 789 181 290 92

563





Here the proportion of major points to στίχοι is for the doctrinal chapters 402:570 = (approximately) 1 in 1.4; and for the whole Epistle not very different, 563:789 = 1 in 1.4.18. The proportion of interrogative sentences is for the whole Epistle, 92:789, or 1 in 8.6; for the doctrinal chapters only, 88:570, or 1 in 6.5; and for the practical portion only, 4:219, or 1 in 55. This last item is instructive, because it shows how very greatly, even in the same Epistle, the amount of interrogation varies with the subject-matter. We also observe that in two even of the doctrinal chapters interrogative sentences are wanting. They lie indeed in patches or thick clusters, and are not distributed equally throughout the Epistle.

Now we turn to Ephesians, for which the data are as follows:—

Ephesians.

στίχοι (∙.) (.) (;)

Ch. I. 45 4 3 —

II. 40 9 6 —

III. 36 2 6 —

[121 15 15 —]

IV. 55 8 13 1

V. 50 11 17 —

VI. 44 2 13 —

Total 270 36 58 1

95





This gives a very different result. The proportion of major points is for Eph. 1-3, roughly speaking, 1 in 4, as against 1 in 1.4 for Rom. 1-12, and for the whole Epistle rather more than 1 in 3, as against 1 in 1.418. The proportion of interrogations Isa_1 in 270 compared with 1 in 8.6 or 6.5.

In illustrating the nature of the difference in style between Romans and Ephesians we have left in suspense for a time the question as to its cause. To this we will now return, and set down some of the influences which may have been at work—which we may be sure were at work—and which would go a long way to account for it.

(1) First would be the natural variation of style which comes from dealing with different subject-matter. The Epistles of the second group are all very largely concerned with the controversy as to Circumcision and the relations of Jewish and Gentile Christians. In the later Epistle this controversy has retired into the background, and other topics have taken its place. Ideas are abroad as to the mediating agencies between God and man which impair the central significance of the Person of Christ; and the multiplication of new Churches with the growing organization of intercommunication between those of older standing, brings to the front the conception of the Church as a whole, and invests it with increased impressiveness.

These facts are reflected on the vocabulary of the two Epistles. The controversy with the Judaizers gives a marked colour to the whole group which includes the Epistle to the Romans. This will appear on the face of the statistics of usage as to the frequency with which the leading terms occur in these Epistles and in the rest of the Pauline Corpus. Of course some of the instances will be accidental, but by far the greater number are significant. Those which follow have a direct bearing on the Judaistic controversy. ‘Elsewhere’ means elsewhere in the Pauline Epistles.

1 Ἁβραάμ 2Co_1, Gal. 9; not elsewhere in St. Paul. [σπέρμα Ἀβραάμ 2Co_1, Gal_1.]

ἀκροβυστία 1Co_2, Gal_3; elsewhere 3.

ἀποστολή 1Co_1, Gal_1; not elsewhere in St. Paul.

δικαιοῦν 1Co_2, Gal_3; elsewhere 2.

δικαίωμα Rom_5; not elsewhere.

δικαίωσις Rom_2; not elsewhere.

καταργεῖν 2Co_4, Gal_3; elsewhere 4.

νόμος Rom. 76, 1Co_8, Gal. 32; elsewhere 6.

περιτομή 1Co_1, Gal. 7; elsewhere 8.

σπέρμα 2Co_1, Gal_5; elsewhere 1.

Connected with this controversy, though not quite so directly, would be:—

ἀσθενής 2Co_1, Gal_1; elsewhere 1.

ἀσθενεῖς 2Co_6; elsewhere 2.

ἀσθένεια 2Co_6, Gal_1; elsewhere 1.

ἀσθένημα Rom_1; not elsewhere.

ἐλεύθερος 1Co_6, Gal_6; elsewhere 2.

ἐλευθεροῦν Rom_4, Gal_1; not elsewhere.

ἐλευθερία 2Co_1, Gal_1; not elsewhere.

καυχᾶσθαι 1Co_5 (1 v. l.), 2 Cor. 20, Gal_2; elsewhere 3.

καυχῆμα 2Co_3, Gal_1; elsewhere 2.

καυχῆσις 2Co_6; elsewhere 1.

κατακαυχᾶσθαι Rom_2; not elsewhere.

ὀφειλέτης Rom_3, Gal_1; not elsewhere.

ὀφείλημα Rom_1; not elsewhere.

σκάνδαλον 1Co_1, Gal_1; not elsewhere. [σκανδαλίζεω 2Co_1, Rom_1 v. l.]

ὠφελεῖν 1Co_2, Gal_1: ὠφέλεια Rom_1; neither elsewhere.

Two other points may be noticed, one in connexion with the large use of the O.T. in these Epistles, and the other in connexion with the idea of successive periods into which the religious history of mankind is divided:—

γέγραπται 2Co_2, Gal_4; not elsewhere in St. Paul.

ἄχρις οὗ 1Co_2, Gal_2 (1 v.l.); not elsewhere.

ἐφʼ ὄσον χρόνον 1Co_1, Gal_1; not elsewhere

These examples stand out very distinctly; and their disappearance from the later Epistle is perfectly intelligible: cessante causa, cessat effectus.

(2) But it is not only that the subject-matter of Ephesians differs from that of Romans, the circumstances under which it is presented also differ. Romans belongs to a period of controversy, and although at the time when the Epistle is written the worst is over, and the Apostle is able to survey the field calmly, and to state his case uncontroversially, still the crisis through which he has passed has left its marks behind. The echoes of war are still in his ears. The treatment of his subject is concrete and not abstract. He sees in imagination his adversary before him, and he argues much as he might have argued in the synagogue, or in the presence of refractory converts. The atmosphere of the Epistle is that of personal debate. This acts as a stimulus, it makes the blood circulate more rapidly in the veins, and gives to the style a liveliness and directness which might be wanting when the pressure was removed. Between Romans, written to a definite Church and gathering up the result of a time of great activity, the direct outcome of prolonged discussion in street and house and school, and Ephesians, written in all probability not to a single Church but to a group of Churches, with its personal edge thus taken off, and written too under confinement after some three years of enforced inaction, it would be natural that there should be a difference.

(3) This brings us to a third point which may be taken with the last, the allowance which ought to be made for the special temperament of the Apostle. His writings furnish abundant evidence of a highly strung nervous organization. It is likely enough that the physical infirmity from which he suffered, the ‘thorn in the flesh’ which had such a prostrating effect upon him, was of nervous origin. But constitutions of this order are liable to great fluctuations of physical condition. There will be ‘lucid moments,’ and more than lucid moments—months together during which the brain will work not only with ease and freedom, but with an intensity and power not vouchsafed to other men. And times such as these will alternate with periods of depression when body and mind alike are sluggish and languid, and when an effort of will is needed to compel production of any kind. Now the physical conditions under which St. Paul wrote his letter to the Romans would as naturally belong to the first head as those under which he wrote the Epistle which we call ‘Ephesians’ would to the second. Once more we should expect antecedently that they would leave a strong impress upon the style.

The difference in style between Rom. and Eph. would seem to be very largely a difference in the amount of vital energy thrown into the two Epistles. Vivacity is a distinguishing mark of the one as a certain slow and laboured movement is of the other. We may trace to this cause the phenomena which have been already noted—the shorter sentences of Romans, the long involved periods of Ephesians, the frequency of interrogation on the one hand, its absence on the other. In Rom. we have the champion of Gentile Christendom with his sword drawn, prepared to meet all comers; in Eph. we have ‘such an one as Paul the aged, and now a prisoner also of Jesus Christ.’

Among the expressions specially characteristic of this aspect of Ep. to Romans would be the following:—

ἄρα, beginning a sentence, 2Co_2, Gal_5; elsewhere Epp. Paul. 3, Heb_2. [ἄρα οὖν Rom_8 (or 9 v. l.), Gal_1; elsewhere 3: ἄρα without οὖν Rom_1 (or 2 v. l.), 1Co_1, Gal_3, Heb_2.]

[λέγω]

ἀλλὰ λέγω Rom_2.

λέγω δέ Gal_2.

λέγω οὖν Rom_2.

λέγω δὲ τοῦτο ὅτι 1Co_1.

πάλιν λέγω 2Co_2.

τοῦτο δὲ λέγω Gal_1.

ἐγὼ Παῦλος λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι Gal_1.

ποῦ; ποῦ οὖν; 1Co_8, Gal_1; not elsewhere.

τί οὖν; τίς οὖν; 1Co_5, Gal_1; not elsewhere. [τί οἶν ἐροῦμεν; Rom_6; τί ἐροῦμεν; Rom_1.]

τί λέγω (λέγει, &c.) Rom_3, Gal_1; not elsewhere.

διατί 2Co_1; not elsewhere.

ὑπέρ, unusual compounds of—

ὑπερεκτείνειν 2Co_1.

ὑπερλίαν 2Co_2.

ὑπερνικᾶν Rom_1.

ὑπερπερισσεύειν 2Co_1.

ὑπερφρονεῖν Rom_1.

(4) A last cause which we suspect may possibly have been at work, though this is more a matter of conjecture, is the employment of different amanuenses. We know that St. Paul did not as a rule write his own letters. But then the question arises, How were they written? It seems to us probable that they were in the first instance taken down in shorthand—much as our own merchants or public men dictate their correspondence to a shorthand writer—and then written out fair. We believe this to have been the case from the double fact that dictation was extremely common—so that even as early as Horace and Persius dictare had already come to mean ‘to compose’—and from the wide diffusion of the art of shorthand. We know that Origen’s lectures were taken down in this way, and that fair copies were made of them at leisure (Eus. H. E. VI. xxiii. 2). But we can well believe that if this were the case some scribes would be more expert than others, and would reproduce what was dictated to them more exactly. Tertius, we should suppose, was one of the best of those whom St. Paul employed for this purpose. An inferior scribe would get down the main words correctly, but the little connecting links he may have filled in for himself.

This is rather speculation, and we should not wish to lay stress upon it in any particular instance. It is however interesting to note that if we look below the superficial qualities of style at the inner tendencies of mind to which it gives expression the resemblance between Ephesians and Romans becomes more marked, so that we may well ask whether we have not before us in both the same hand. One of the most striking characteristics of St. Paul is the sort of telescopic manner, in which one clause is as it were drawn out of another, each new idea as it arises leading on to some further new idea, until the main thought of the paragraph is reached again often by a circuitous route and not seldom with a somewhat violent twist or turn at the end. This is specially noticeable in abstract doctrinal passages, just as a briefer, more broken, and more direct form of address is adopted in the exhortations relating to matters of practice. A certain laxity of grammatical structure is common to both.

We will place side by side one or two passages which may help to show the fundamental resemblance between the two Epistles. [For a defence of the punctuation of the extract from Romans reference may be made to the notes ad loc.]

Romans 3:21-26. Ephesians 3:1-7.

Νυνὶ δὲ χωρὶς νόμου δικαιοσύνη Θεοῦ πεφανέρωται, μαρτυρουμένη ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου καὶ τῶν προφητῶν· δικαιοσύνη δὲ Θεοῦ διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ εἰς πάντας τοὺς πιστεύοντας· οὐ γάρ ἐστι διαστολή· πάντες γὰρ ἥμαρτον, καὶ ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τοῦ Θεοῦ· δικαιούμενοι δωρεὰν τῇ αὐτοῦ χάριτι διὰ τῆς�

The passage from Ephesians in like manner begins with a statement of the durance which the Apostle is suffering for the Gentiles, then goes off to explain why specially for the Gentiles, so leading on to the μυστήριον on which that mission to the Gentiles is based, then refers back to the previous mention of this μυστήριον, which the readers are advised to consult, then gives a fuller description of its character, and at last states definitely its substance. Dr. Gifford has pointed out (on Romans 3:26) how the argument works round in Eph. to the same word μυστήριον as in Rom. to the same word ἔνδειξιν. And we have similar examples in Romans 2:16 and 3:8, where two distinct trains of thought and of construction converge upon a clause which is made to do duty at the same time for both.

The particular passage of Ephesians was chosen as illustrating this peculiarity. But the general tendency to the formation of periods on what we have called the ‘telescopic’ method—not conforming to a plan of structure deliberately adopted from the first, but linking on clause to clause, each suggested by the last—runs through the whole of the first three chapters of Eph. and has abundant analogues in Rom. (1:1-7, 18-24; 2:5-16; 3:21-26; 4:11-17; 5:12-14; 9:22-29; 15:14-28). The passages from Rom. are as we have said somewhat more lively than those from Eph.; they have a more argumentative cast, indicated by the frequent use of γάρ; whereas those from Eph. are not so much argumentative as expository, and consist rather of a succession of clauses connected by relatives. But the difference is really superficial, and the underlying resemblance is great.

Just one other specimen may be given of marked resemblance of a some what different kind—the use of a quotation from the O.T. with running comments. In this instance we may strengthen the impression by printing for comparison a third passage from Ep. to Galatians.

Ephesians 4:7-11.

Μωσῆς γὰρ γράφει ὅτι τὴν δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐκ νόμου ὁ ποιήσας ἄνθρωπος ζήσεται ἐν αὐτῇ. ἡ δὲ ἐκ πίστεως δικαιοσύνη οὕτω λέγει, Μὴ εἴπῃς ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ σου Τίς�

Galatians 4:25-31.

Τὸ δὲ Ἄγαρ Σινᾶ ὅρος ἐστὶν ἐν τῇ Ἀραβίᾳ, συστοιχεῖ δὲ τῇ νῦν Ἱερουσαλήμ· δουλεύει γὰρ μετὰ τῶν τέκνων αὐτῆς. ἡ δὲ ἄνω Ἱερουσαλὴμ ἐλευθέρα ἐστίν, ἥτις ἐστὶ μήτηρ ἡμῶν. γέγραπται γάρ, Εὐφράνθητι, στεῖρα ἡ οὐ τίκτουσα … ἡμεῖς δέ,�

It would be interesting to work out the comparison of this passage of Eph. with the earlier Epistles phrase by phrase (e.g. cp. Ephesians 4:7 with Romans 12:3, Romans 12:6; 1 Corinthians 12:11; 2 Corinthians 10:13); but to do this would be really endless and would have too remote a bearing on our present subject. Enough will have been said both to show the individuality of style in Ep. to Rom_1 and also to show its place in connexion with the range of style in the Pauline Epistles generally, as seen in a somewhat extreme example. It is usual, especially in Germany, to take Ep. to Romans with its companion Epistles as a standard of style for the whole of the Corpus Paulinum. But Bp. Lightfoot has pointed out that this is an error, this group of Epistles having been written under conditions of high tension which in no writer are likely to have been permanent. ‘Owing to their greater length in proportion to the rest, it is probably from these Epistles that we get our general impression of St. Paul’s style; yet their style is in some sense an exceptional one, called forth by peculiar circumstances, just as at a late period the style of the Pastoral Epistles is also exceptional though in a different way. The normal style of the Apostle is rather to be sought for in the Epistles

the Thessalonians and those of the Roman captivity2.’

When we look back over the whole of the data the impression which they leave is that although the difference, taken at its extremes, is no doubt considerable, it is yet sufficiently bridged over. It does not seem to be anywhere so great as to necessitate the assumption of different authorship. Even though any single cause would hardly be enough to account for it, there may quite well have been a concurrence of causes. And on the other hand the positive reasons for supposing that the two Epistles had really the same author, are weighty enough to support the conclusion. Between the limits thus set, it seems to us that the phenomena of style in the Epistles attributed to St. Paul may be ranged without straining.











&c. always qualify the word which precedes, not that which follows:

1 The main authorities used for this section are Furneaux, The Annals of Tacitus, vol. ii, and Schiller, Geschichte des Römischen Kaisserreichs unter der Regierung des Nero.

2 Romans 1:8-15.

3 Acts 19:21; Acts 23:11.

4 Philippians 1:27; Philippians 3:20; Ephesians 2:19; Acts 23:1.

1 2Th_2:7ὁ κατέχων, 6 τὸ κατέχον. It is well known that the commonest interpretation of these words among the Fathers was the Roman Empire (see the Catena of passages in Alford, iii. p. 56 ff.), and this accords most suitably with the time when the Epistle was written (c. 53 a.d.). The only argument of any value for a later date and the unauthentic character of the whole Epistle or of the eschatological sections (2:1-12) is the attempt to explain this passage of the return of Nero, but such an interpretation is quite unnecessary, and does not particularly suit the words. St. Paul’s experience had taught him that there were lying restrained and checked great forces of evil which might at any time burst out, and this he calls the ‘mystery of iniquity,’ and describes in the language of the O. T. prophets. But everywhere the power of the civil government, as embodied in the Roman Empire (τὸ κατέχον) and visibly personified in the Emperor (ὁ κατέχων), restrained these forces. Such an interpretation, either of the eschatological passages of the Epistle or of the Apocalypse, does not destroy their deeper spiritual meaning; for the writers of the New Testament, as the prophets of the Old, reveal to us and generalize the spiritual forces of good and evil which underlie the surface of society.

2 Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire, pp. 147, 148; cf. also pp. 60, 70, 158 n. See also Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, pp. 202-205.

3 Aur. Victor, Son_5, Epit. 12, Unde quidam prodidere, Traianum solitum dicere, procul distare cunctos principes a Neronis quinquennio. The expression quinquennium may have been suggested by the certamen quinquennale which Nero founded in Rome, as Dio tells us, ὑπὲρ τῆς σωτηρίας τῆς τε διαμονῆς τοῦ κράτους αὐτοῦ, Dio, Epit. lxi. 21; Tac. Ann. xiv. 20; Suet. Nero 12; cf. the coins described, Eckhel, vi 264; Cohen, i. p. 282. 47-65. cer. quinq. rom. co.

1 For the provincial administration of Nero see Furneaux, op. cit. pp. 56, 57; W. T. Arnold, The Roman System of Provincial Administration, pp. 135, 137; Tac. Ann. xiii. 30, 31, 33, 50, 51, 53-57.

2 Suetonius, Nero16. Schiller, p. 420.

3 Schiller, pp. 381, 382: ‘In dem Mechanismus des gerichtlichen Verfahrens, im Privatrecht, in der Ausbildung und Förderung der Rechtswissen schaft, selbst auf dem Gebiete der Appellation können gegründete Vorwürfe kaum erhoben werden. Die kaiserliche Regierung liess die Verhältnisse hier ruhig den Gang gehen, welchen ihnen frühere Regierungen angewiesen hatten’

4 Tac Ann.xv. 20, 21.

5 Arnold, p. 137.

1 See Lightfoot, St. Paul and Seneca, Philippians, p. 268. To this period of his life belong the�

6 It was called after them the ‘synagogue of the Libertini’ (Acts 6:10).

7 Sueton. Caesar84.

8 This was the quarter usually assigned to prisoners of war (Beschreibung d. Stadt Rom, III. iii. 578).

1 The Jews were interested in this trial as Flaccus had laid hands on the money collected for the Temple at Jerusalem. Cicero’s speech makes it clear that the Jews of Rome were a formidable body to offend.

2 Joseph. Ant. XVII. xi. I; B. J. II. vi. 1.

3 There is mention of an ἄρχων Σιβουρησίων, C. I. G.6447 (Schürer, Gemeindeverfassung d. Juden in Rom, pp. 16, 35; Berliner, p. 94). As synagogues were not allowed within the pomoerium (ibid. p. 16) we may suppose that the synagogue itself was without the walls, but that its frequenters came from the Subura.

4 Berliner conjectures that the complimentary title may have been given as a sort of equivalent for emperor-worship (op. cit.p. 21).

5 Data relating to the synagogues have been obtained from inscriptions, which have been carefully collected and commented upon by Schürer in the work quoted above (Leipzig, 1879), also more recently by Berliner (op. cit.p. 46 ff.).

6 Tacitus, Annal. ii. 85 si ob gravitatem caeli interissent, vile damnum.

1 Leg. ad Caium44, 45.

2 Sueton. Claud.25 Judaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantes Roma expulit.

3 Dio Cassius, lx. 6 τούς τε Ἰουδαίους, πλεονάσαντας αὖθις ὥστε χαλεπῶς ἂν ἂνευ ταραχῆς ὑπὸ τοῦ ὀχλοῦ σφῶν τῆς πόλεως εἰρχθῆναι, οὐκ ἐξήλασε μέν, τῷ δὲ δὴ πατρίῳ νόμῳ βίῳ χρωμένους ἐκέλευσε μὴ συναθροίζεσθαι, τάς τε ἑταιρείας ἐπαναχθείσας ὑπὸ τοῦ Γαΐου διέλυσε.

1 A suggestion was made in the Church Quarterly Review for Oct. 1894, which deserves consideration; viz. that the dislocation of the Jewish community caused by the edict of Claudius may explain ‘why the Church of the capital did not grow to the same extent as elsewhere out of the synagogue. Even when St. Paul arrived there in bonds the chiefs of the restored Jewish organization professed to have heard nothing, officially or unofficially, of the Apostle, and to know about the Christian sect just what we may suppose the rioters ten years earlier knew, that it was “everywhere spoken against”’ (p. 175.)

2 Vit. Joseph.3; Ant. XX. viii. 11

3 Dio Cassius xxxvii. 17 ἔστι καὶ παρὰ τοῖς Ῥωμαίοις τὸ γένος τοῦτο, κολουσθὲν μὲν πολλάκις αὐξἠθὲν δὲ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον·, ὥστε καὶ εἰς παρρησίαν τῆς νομίσεως ἐκνικῆσαι.

1 This is the view of Schürer (Gemeindeverf.p. 22). The point is not discussed by Berliner. Dr. Edersheim appears to regard the ‘elders’ as identical with the ‘rulers,’ and the�

2 The passages on which this description is based are well known. Small Trades: Martial, Epig.I. xlii 3-5; XII. Leviticus 13:14. Mendicancy: Juvenal, Sat. iii. 14; vi. 542 ff. Proselytism: Horace, Sat. I. iv. 142 f.; Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 96 ff.

3 Horace, Sat.I. ix. 69 f.; Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 96 ff. (of proselytes); Persius, Sat. v. 184; Sueton. Aug. 76. The texts of Greek and Latin authors relating to Judaism have recently been collected in a complete and convenient form by Theodore Reinach (Textes relatifs au Judaisme, Paris, 1895)

1 Juvneal, Sat. xiv. 96 ff.

2 See the very ample collection of material on this subject in Schurer, Neutest. Zeitgesch. ii. 558 ff.

3 Constat itaque temporibus apostolorum Iudaeos, propterea quod sub regno Romano agerent, Romae habitasse: ex quibus hi qui crediderant, tradiderunt Romanis ut Christum profitentes, Legem servarent… Romanis autem irasci non debuit, sed et laudare fidem illorum; quia nulla insignia virtutum videntes, nec aliquem apostolorum, susceperant fidem Christi ritu licet Iudaics (S. Amdrosii Opp. iii. 373 f., ed. Ballerini). We shall see that Amdrosiaster exaggerates the strictly Jewish influence on the Church, but in his general conclusion he is more right than we might have expected.

1 ‘The conditions of travelling, for ease, safety, and rapidity, over the greater part of the Roman empire, were such as in part have only been reached again in Europe since the beginning of the present century’ (Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms,ii. 3).

1 The summary which follows contains only the main points and none of the indirect evidence. For a fuller presentation the reader may be referred to Lightfoot, St. Clement ii. 490 ff., and Lipsius, Apokr. Apostelgesch. ii. 11 ff.

&c. always qualify the word which precedes, not that which follows:

2 On this practice, see Biesenthal, Trostschreiben an die Hebräer, p. 3 ff.; and for a defence of the view that St. Peter wrote his First Epistle from Rome, Lightfoot, St. Clement ii. 491 f.; Von Soden in Handcommentar III. ii. 105 f. &c. Dr. Hort, who had paid special attention to this Epistle, seems to have held the same opinion (Judaistic Christianity, p. 155).

3 There is a natural reluctance in the lay mind to take ἐν Βαβυλῶνι in any other sense than literally. Still it is certainly to be so taken in Orac. Sibyll. v. 159 (Jewish); and it should be remembered that the advocates of this view include men of the most diverse opinions, not only the English scholars mentioned above and Döllinger, but Renan and the Tübingen school generally.

4 Ad Cor.v. 4 ff.

5 Ad Rom. iv. 3.

6 Eus. H. E. II. xxv. 8.

7 Adv. Haer.III. iii. 2, 3.

8 Scorp.15; De Praescript. 36.

9 Eus. H. E. II. xxv. 6, 7.

10 There has been much discussion as to the exact meaning of this word. The leading Protestant archaeologists (Lipsius, Erbes, V. Schultze) hold that it refers to some conspicuous mark of the place of martyrdom (a famous ‘terebinth’ near the naumachium on the Vatican (Mart. Pet. et Paul. 63) and a ‘pine-tree’ near the road to Ostia. The Roman Catholic authorities would refer it to the ‘tombs’ or ‘memorial chapels’ (memoriae). It seems to us probable that buildings of some kind were already in existence. For statements of the opposing views see Lipsius, Apokr. Apostelgesch. ii. 21; De Waal, Dis Apostelgruft ad Catacumbas, p. 14 ff.

1 The best account of this transfer is that given by Duchesne, Liber Pontificalisi. cvi f.

2 So Lipsius, after Erbes, Apokr. Apostelgesch. ii. 335 f., 391 ff.; also Lightfoot, Clement ii. 500. The Roman Catholic writers, Kraus and De Waal, would connect the story with the jealousies of Jewish and Gentile Christians in the first century: see the latter’s Die Apostelgruft ad Catacumbas, pp. 33 f., 49 ff. This work contains a full survey of the controversy with new archaeological details.

3 Lightfoot, op. cit.i. 259 ff.; 333.

4 Ap.Lightfoot, pp. 237, 333.

5 Ibid.p. 333.

6 Apokr. Apostelgesch. ii. 27, 69.

1 It is significant that on this point Weizsäcker parts company from Lipsius (Apost. Zeitalt.p. 485).

2 Op. cit.p. 11 ff.

3 Ibid.p. 28 ff.

4 Ibid.p. 62 ff.

5 There is no substantial reason for supposing the death of St. Peter to have taken place at the same time as that of St. Paul. It is true that the two Apostles are commemorated upon the same day (June 29), and that the Chronicle of Eusebius refers their deaths to the same year (a.d. 67 Vers. Armen.; 68 Hieron.). But the day is probably that of the deposition or removal of the bodies to or from the Church of St. Sebastian (see above); and for the year the evidence is very insufficient. Professor Ramsay (The Church in the Roman Empire, p. 279 ff.) would place the First Epistle of St. Peter in the middle of the Flavian period, a.d. 75-80; and it must be admitted that the authorities are not such as to impose an absolute veto on this view. The fact that tradition connects the death of St. Peter with the Vatican would seem to point to the great persecution of a.d. 64; but the state of things implied in the Epistle does not look as if it were anterior to this. On the other hand, Professor Ramsay’s arguments have greatly shaken the objections to the traditional date of the death of St. Paul.

1 See the note on ch. 16:3, where reference is made to the view favoured by Dr. Hort (Rom. and Eph.p. 12 ff.), that Prisca was a Roman lady belonging to the well-known family of that name.

1 Lightfoot, Clement, i. 30-39, &c.

Eus. Eusebius.

1 On this collection see an excellent article by Mr. Rendall in The Expositor, 1893, ii. 321 ff.

1 Jülicher, in his recent Einleitung, p. 62, separates the two Epistles to the Corinthians by an interval of eighteen months; nor can this opinion be at once ruled out of court, though it seems opposed to 1 Corinthians 16:8, from which we gather that when he wrote the first Epistle St. Paul did not contemplate staying in Ephesus longer than the next succeeding Pentecost.

1 Dr. Clemen places St. Paul’s long stay at Ephesus (2¼ years on his reckoning) in 50-52 a.d. In the course of it would fall our 1 Corinthians and two out of the three letters which are supposed to be combined in our 2 Corinthians (for this division there is really something of a case). He then inserts a third missionary journey, extending not over three months (as Acts 20:3), but over some two years in Macedonia and Greece. To this he refers the last Corinthian letter (2 Cor. 1-8) and a genuine fragment of Ep. to Titus (Titus 3:12-14). Ep. to Romans is written from Corinth in the winter of a.d. 53-54. Then follow the Council at Jerusalem, the dispute at Antioch, Ep. to Galatians, and a fourth journey in Asia Minor, with another genuine fragment, 2 Timothy 4:19-21. This fills the interval which ends with the arrest at Jerusalem in the year 58, Epp. to Phil., Col., Philem. and one or two more fragments of Past. Epp., the Apostle’s arrival at Rome in a.d. 61 and his death in a.d. 64. The whole scheme stands or falls with the place assigned to the Council of Jerusalem, and the estimate formed of the historical character of the Acts.

1 This is impressively stated in Hort, Rom. and Eph.p. 42 ff.

1 See the notes on ch. 8:9-17; compare also ch. 6:1-14.

1 The question of the use of Greek at Rome has been often discussed and the evidence for it set forth, but the classical treatment of the subject is by the late Dr. C. P. Caspari, Professor at Christiania, in an Excursus of 200 pages to vol. iii. of his work Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols(Christiania, 1875).

2 De Vir. Ill. liii. Tertullianus presbyter nunc demum primus post Victorem et Apollonium Latinorum ponitur.

3 Monuments of Early Christianity(London, 1894), p. 29 ff.

4 Juv. Sat.iii. 60 f.; cf. vi. 187 ff.

5 Epig. xiv. 58.

6 Caspari, Quellen zum Taufsymbol, iii. 286 f.

7 Gemeindeverfassung, p. 33 ff. The inscriptions referred to are all from Roman sites. There is also one in Greek from Portus.

1 Comp. also Berliner, i. 54.

2 Ap.Caspari, p. 303.

3 Pius is described in the Liber Pontificalis as natione Italus … de civitats Aquileia; but there is reason to think that Hermas was a native of Arcadia. The assignments of nationality to the earliest bishops are of very doubtful value.

4 It was to be kept in the archives and read on Sundays like the letter of Clement (Eus. H. E. IV. xxiii. 11).

5 Eus. H. E. V. xiii. 1).

6 It was in pursuit of the origin of this Creed that Caspari was drawn into his elaborate researches. It is generally agreed that it was in use at Rome by the middle of the second century. The main question at the present moment is whether it was also composed there, and if not whence it came. Caspari would derive it from Asia Minor and the circle of St. John. This is a problem which we may look to have solved by Dr. Kattenbusch of Giessen, who is continuing Caspari’s labours (Das Apostolische Symbol, Bd. I. Leipzig, 1894).

1 More precise and full details will be found in Caspari’s Excursus, Op. cit.p. 466 ff.

2 Krüger, Altchristl, Lit.p. 88.

1 The difference between these Epistles on the side we are considering is greater (e. g.) than that between Romans and the Pastorals.

1 The counting of these is approximate, anything over half a line being reckoned as a whole line, and anything less than half a line not reckoned.

1 These examples are selected from the lists in Bishop Lightfoot’s classical essay ‘On the Style and Character of the Epistle to the Galatians,’ in Journ. of Class. and Sacr. Philol. iii. (1857) 308 ff.

1 Besides the passages commented upon here, reference may be made to the marked coincidences between the doxology, Romans 15:25-27, and Ep. to Ephesians. These are fully pointed out ad loc., and the genuineness of the doxology is defended in § 9 of this Introduction.

2 Journ. of Class. and Sacr. Philol., ut sup., p. 302.



§ 7. The Text

(1) Authorities. The authorities quoted for the various readings to the text of the Epistle are taken directly from Tischendorf’s great collection (Nov. Test. Graec. vol. ii. ed. 8, Lipsiae, 1872), with some verification of the Patristic testimony. For a fuller account of these authorities the student must be referred to the Prolegomena to Tischendorf’ s edition (mainly the work of Dr. C. R. Gregory, 1884, 1890, 1894), and to the latest edition of Scrivener’s Introduction (ed. Miller, London, 1894). They may be briefly enumerated as follows:

(1) Greek Manuscripts

Primary uncials

א Cod. Sinaiticus, saec. iv. Brought by Tischendorf from the Convent of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai; now at St. Petersburg. Contains the whole Epistle complete.

Its correctors are

אa contemporary, or nearly so, and representing a second MS. of high value;

אb attributed by Tischendorf to saec. vi;

אc attributed to the beginning of saec. vii. Two hands of about this date are sometimes distinguished as אca and אcb.

A. Cod. Alexandrinus, saec. v. Once in the Patriarchal Library at Alexandria; sent by Cyril Lucar as a present to Charles I in 1628, and now in the British Museum. Complete.

B. Cod. Vaticanus, saec. iv. In the Vatican Library certainly since 15331 (Batiffol, La Vaticane de Paul iii a Paul v, p. 86). Complete.

The corrector B2 is nearly of the same date and used a good copy, though not quite so good as the original. Some six centuries later the faded characters were retraced, and a few new readings introduced by B3.

C. Cod. Ephraemi Rescriptus, saec. v. In the National Library at Paris. Contains the whole Epistle, with the exception of the following passages: ii. 5 κα]τὰ δὲ τὴν … ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου iii. 21; ix. 6 οὐχ ὁον … ἐαν x. 15: xi. 31 ἠπεῖ]θησαν τῷ … πλήρωμα xiii. 10.

D. Cod. Claromontanus, saec. vi. Graeco-Latinus. Once at Clermont, near Beauvais (if the statement of Beza is to be trusted), now in the National Library at Paris. Contains the Pauline Epistles, but Romans 1:1, Παῦλος …�

E. Cod. Sangermanensis, saec. ix. Graeco-Latinus. Formerly at St. Germain-des-Prés, now at St. Petersburg. [This MS. might well be allowed to drop out of the list, as it is nothing more than a faulty copy of D.]

F. Cod. Augiensis, saec. ix. Graeco-Latinus. Bought by Bentley in Germany, and probably written at Reichenau (Augia Major); now in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Romans 1:1 Παῦλος … ἐν τῷ νό[μῳ] 3:19 is missing, both in the Greek and Latin texts.

G. Cod. Boernerianus, saec. ix ex. Graeco-Latinus. Written at St. Gall, now at Dresden. Romans 1:1�

It has been suggested by Traube (Wattenbach, Anleitung zur Griech. Paläographie, ed. 3, 1895, p. 41) that this MS. was written by the same hand as a well-known Psalter in the library of the Arsenal at Paris which bears the signature Σηδύλιος Σκόττος ἓγὼ ἕγραψα. The resemblance of the handwriting is close, as may be seen by comparing the facsimile of the Paris Psalter published by Omont in the Mélanges Graux, p. 313, with that of the St. Gall Gospels in the Palaeographical Society’s series (i. pl. 179). This fact naturally raises the further question whether the writer of the MS. of St. Paul’s Epistles is not also to be identified with the compiler of the commentary entitled Collectanea in omnes B. Pauli Epistolas Migne, Patrol. Lat. ciii. 9-128), which is also ascribed to a ‘Sedulius Scotus.’ The answer must be in the negative. The commentary presents none of the characteristic readings of the MS., and appears to represent a higher grade of scholarship. It is more probable that the scribe belonged to the fratres hellenici who formed a sort of guild in the monastery of St. Gall (see the authorities quoted in Caspari, Quellen zum Taufsymbol, iii. 475 n, and compare Berger, Histoire de la Vulgate, p. 137). There are several instances of the name ‘Sedulius Scotus’ (Migne, P. L. ut sup.).

It should be noted that of these MSS. א A B C are parts of what were once complete Bibles, and are designated by the same letter throughout the LXX and Greek Testament; D E F G are all Graeco-Latin, and are different MSS. from those which bear the same notation on the Gospels and Acts. In Westcott and Hort’s Introduction they are distinguished as D2 E3 F2 G3. An important MS., Cod. Coislinianus (H or H2), which, however, exists only in fragments, is unfortunately wanting for this Epistle: see below.

Secondary uncials

K. Cod. Mosquensis, saec. ix. Brought to Moscow from the monastery of St. Dionysius on Mount Athos. Contains Acts, Epp. Cath., Epp. Paul. Romans 10:18�

L. Cod. Angelicus, saec. ix. In the Angelican Library of the Augustinian monks at Rome. Contains Acts, Epp. Cath., Epp. Paul. Romans complete.

P. Cod. Porphyrianus, saec. ix in. A palimpsest brought from the East by Tischendorf and called after its present owner Bishop Porphyry. Contains Acts, Epp. Cath., Epp. Paul., Apoc. Romans 2:15 �

S. Cod. Athous Laurae, saec. viii-ix. In the monastery Laura on Mount Athos. Contains Acts, Epp. Cath., Epp. Paul. Romans complete. This MS. has not yet been collated.

J. Cod. Patiriensis, saec. v. Formerly belonging to the Basilian monks of the abbey of Sta. Maria de lo Patire near Rossano, now in the Vatican. There is some reason to think that the MS. may have come originally from Constantinople (cf. Batiffol, L’ Abbaye de Rossano, pp. 6, 79 and 62, 71-74). Twenty-one palimpsest leaves, containing portions of Acts, Epp. Cath., Epp. Paul. These include Romans 13:4-9. A study of readings from this MS. is published in the Revue Biblique for April, 1895.

Minuscules

A few only of the leading minuscules can be given,

5. ( = Evv. 5, Act_5), saec. xiv. At Paris; at one time in Calabria.

17. ( = Evv. 33, Act_13), saec. ix (Omont, ix-x Gregory). At Paris. Called by Eichhorn ‘the queen of cursives.’

31. ( = Act_25, Rev_7). Written 1087 a.d. Belonged to John Covell, English chaplain at Constantinople about 1675; now in the British Museum.

32. ( = Act_26), saec. xii. Has a similar history to the last.

37. ( = Evv. 69, Act. 31, Rev_14), saec. xv. The well-known ‘Leicester MS.’; one of the ‘Ferrar group,’ the archetype of which was probably written in Calabria.

47. Saec. xi. Now in the Bodleian, but at one time belonged to the monastery of the Holy Trinity on the island of Chalcis.

67. ( = Act. 66, Apoc. 34), saec. xi. Now at Vienna: at one time in the possession of Arsenius, archbishop of Monemvasia in Epidaurus. The marginal corrector (67**) drew from a MS. containing many peculiar and ancient readings akin to those of M Paul., which is not extant for Ep. to Romans.

71. Saec. x-xi. At Vienna. Thought to have been written in Calabria.

80. ( = Act. 73), saec. xi. In the Vatican.

93. ( = Act. 83, Apoc. 99), saec. xii (Gregory). At Naples. Said to have been compared with a MS. of Pamphilus, but as yet collated only in a few places.

137. ( = Evv. 263, Act. 117), saec. xiii-xiv. At Paris.

252. (Gregory, 260 Scrivener = Evv. 489. Greg., 507 Scriv.; Act. 195 Greg., 224 Scriv.). In the library of Trin. Coll., Cambridge. Written on Mount Sinai in the year 1316.

These MSS. are partly those which have been noticed as giving conspicuous readings in the commentary, partly those on which stress is laid by Hort (Introd. p. 166), and partly those which Bousset connects with his ‘Codex Pamphili’ (see below).

(2) Versions

The versions quoted are the following:

The Latin (Latt.).

The Vetus Latina (Lat. Vet.).

The Vulgate (Vulg.).

The Egyptian (Aegypt.).

The Bohairic (Boh.).

The Sahidic (Sah.).

The Syriac (Syrr.).

The Peshitto (Pesh.).

The Harclean (Harcl.).

The Armenian (Arm.).

The Gothic (Goth.).

The Ethiopic (Aeth.).

Of these the Vetus Latina is very imperfectly preserved to as. We possess only a small number of fragments of MSS. These are:

gue. Cod. Guelferbytanus, saec. vi, which contains fragments of Romans 11:33; Romans 12:17; Romans 14:9-20; Romans 15:3-13.

r. Cod. Frisingensis, saec. v or vi, containing Romans 14:10-13.

r2. Cod. Gottvicensis, saec. vi or vii, containing Romans 5:16; Romans 6:6-19.

The texts of these fragments are, however, neither early (relatively to the history of the Version) nor of much interest. To supplement them we have the Latin versions of the bilingual MSS. D E F G mentioned above, usually quoted as d e f g, and quotations in the Latin Fathers. The former do not strictly represent the underlying Greek of the Version, as they are too much conformed to their own Greek. d (as necessarily e) follows an Old-Latin text not in all cases altered to suit the Greek; g is based on the Old Latin but is very much modified; f is the Vulgate translation, altered with the help of g or a MS. closely akin to g. For the Fathers we are mainly indebted to the quotations in Tertullian (saec. ii-iii), Cyprian (saec. iii), the Latin Irenaeus (saec. ii, or more probably iv), Hilary of Poitiers (saec. iv), and to the so-called Speculum S. Augustini (cited as m), a Spanish text also of the fourth century (see below, p. 124).

One or two specimens are given in the course of the commentary of the evidence furnished by the Old-Latin Version (see on 1:30; 5:3-5; 8:36), which may also serve to illustrate the problems raised in connexion with the history of the Version. They have however more to do with the changes in the Latin diction of the Version than with its text. The fullest treatment of the Vetus Latina of St. Paul’s Epistles will be found in Ziegler, Die lateinischen Bibelütersetzungen vor Hieronymus, München, 1879; but the subject has not as yet been sufficiently worked at for a general agreement to be reached.

For the Vulgate the following MSS. are occasionally quoted:

am. Cod. Amiatinus c. 700 a.d.

fuld. Cod. Fuldensis c. 546 a.d.

harl. British Museum Harl. 1775. Saec. vi or vii.

tol. Cod. Toletanus. Saec. x, or rather perhaps viii (see Berger, Histoire de la Vulgate, p. 14).

The Vulgate of St. Paul’s Epistles is a revision of the Old Latin so slight and cursory as to be hardly an independent authority. It was however made with the help of the Greek MSS., and we have the express statement of St. Jerome himself that in Romans 12:11 he preferred to follow Greek MSS. and to say Domino servientes for tempori servientes of the older Version (Ep. xxvii. 3 ad Marcellam). And this reading is found in the text of the Vulgate.

Of the Egyptian Versions, Bohairic is that usually known as Memphitic (= ‘me.’ WH.) and cited by Tisch. as ‘Coptic’ (‘cop.’). For the reasons which make it correct to describe it as Bohairic see Scrivener, Introd. ii. 106, Exodus 4:0. It is usually cited according to Tischendorf (who appears in the Epistles to have followed Wilkins; see Tisch N.T. p. ccxxxiv, Exodus 7:0), but in some few instances on referring to the original it has become clear that his quotations cannot always be trusted: see the notes on 5:6; 8:28; 10:5; 16:27. This suggests that not only a fresh edition of the text, but also a fresh collation with the Greek, is much needed.

In the Sahidic (Thebaic) Version ( = ‘sah.’ Tisch., ‘the.’ WH.) some few readings have been added from the fragments published by Amélineau in the Zeitschrift für Aegypt. Sprache, 1887. These fragments contain 6:20-23; 7:1-21; 8:15-38; 9:7-23; 11:31-36; 12:1-9.

The reader may be reminded that the Peshitto Syriac was certainly current much in its present form early in the fourth century. How much earlier than this it was in use, and what amount of change it had previously undergone, are questions still being debated. In any case, there is no other form of the Version extant for the Pauline Epistles.

The Harclean Syriac (= ‘syr. p[osterior]’ Tisch., ‘hl.’ WH.) is a recension made by the Monophysite Thomas of Harkhel or Heraclea in 616 a.d., of the older Philoxenian Version of 508 a.d., which for this part of the N.T. is now lost. A special importance attaches to the readings, sometimes in the text but more often in the margin, which appear to be derived from ‘three (v. l. two) approved and accurate Greek copies’ in the monastery of the Enaton near Alexandria (WH. Introd. p. 156 f.).

The Gothic Version is also definitely dated at about the middle of the fourth century, and the Armenian at about the middle of the fifth. The dates of the two Egyptian Versions and of the Ethiopic are still uncertain (Scrivener, Introd. ii. 105 f., 154, Exodus 4:0). It is of more importance to know that the types of text which they represent are in any case early, the Egyptian somewhat the older.

The abbreviations in references to the Patristic writings are such as it is hoped will cause no difficulty (but see p. cx).

(2) Internal Grouping of Authorities. The most promising and successful of all the directions in which textual criticism is being pursued at this moment is that of isolating comparatively small groups of authorities, and investigating their mutual relations and origin. For the Pauline Epistles the groups most affected by recent researches are אB אcH, Arm., Euthal, and in less degree a number of minuscules; D [E] F G.

אB.

The proofs seem to be thickening which connect these two great MSS. with the library of Eusebius and Pamphilus at Caesarea. That is a view which has been held for some time past (e.g. by the late Canon Cook, Revised Version of the First Three Gospels, p. 159 ff.; and Dr. Scrivener, Collation of Cod. Sinaiticus, p. xxxvii f.), but without resting upon any very solid arguments. And it must always be remembered that so excellent a palaeographer as Dr. Ceriani of Milan (ap. Scrivener, Introd. i. 121, Exodus 4:0) thought that B was written in Italy (Magna Graecia), and that Dr. Hort also gives some reasons for ascribing an Italian origin to this MS. We are however confronted by the fact that there is a distinct probability that both MSS. if they were not written in the same place had at least in part the same scribes. It was first pointed out by Tischendorf (N. T. Vat., Lipsiae, 1867, pp. xxi-xxiii), on grounds which seem to be sufficient, that the writer whom he calls the ‘fourth scribe’ of א wrote also the N.T. portion of B. And, as it has been said, additional arguments are becoming available for connecting א with the library at Caesarea (see Rendel Harris, Stichometry, p. 71 ff.; and the essay of Bousset referred to below).

The provenance of א would only carry with it approximately and not exactly that of B. The conditions would be satisfied if it were possible, or not difficult, for the same scribe to have a hand in both. For instance, the view that א had its origin in Palestine would not be inconsistent with the older view, recently revived and defended by Bousset, that B was an Egyptian MS. There would be so much coming and going between Palestine and Egypt, especially among the followers of Origen, that they would belong virtually to the same region. But when Herr Bousset goes further and maintains that the text of B represents the recension of Hesychius1 , that is another matter, and as it seems to us, at least prima facie, by no means probable. The text of B must needs be older than the end of the third century, which is the date assigned to Hesychius. If we admit that the MS. may be Egyptian, it is only as one amongst several possibilities. Nothing can as yet be regarded as proved.

Apart from such external data as coincidences of handwriting which connect the two MSS. as they have come down to us there can be no doubt that they had also a common ancestor far back in the past. The weight which their agreement carries does not depend on the independence of their testimony so much as upon its early date. That the date of their common readings is in fact extremely early appears to be proved by the number of readings in which they differ, these divergent readings being shared not by any means always by the same but by a great variety of other authorities. From this variety it may be inferred that between the point of divergence of the ancestors of the two MSS. and the actual MSS. the fortunes of each had been quite distinct. Not only on a single occasion, but on a number of successive occasions, new strains of text have been introduced on one or other of the lines. א especially has received several side streams in the course of its history, now of the colour which we call ‘Western’ and now ‘Alexandrian’; and B also (as we shall see) in the Pauline Epistles has a clear infusion of Western readings. It is possible that all these may have come in from a single copy; but it is less likely that all the ‘Western’ or all the ‘Alexandrian’ readings which are found in א had a single origin. Indeed the history of א since it was written does but reflect the history of its ancestry. We have only to suppose the corrections of אa embodied in the text of one MS., then those of אb first inserted in the margin and then embodied in the text of a succeeding MS., then those of אac in a third and אcb in a fourth, to form a mental picture of the process by which our present MS. became what it is. It remains for critical analysis to reconstruct this process, to pick to pieces the different elements of which the text of the MS. consists, to arrange them in their order and determine their affinities. This analysis will doubtless be carried further than it has been.

אc H, Arm., Euthal.

A number of scholars working on א have thrown out suggestions which would tend to group together these authorities, and possibly to bring them into some further connexion with א B. The MS. H Paul. (unfortunately, as we have said, not extant for Romans) bears upon its face the traces of its connexion with the library of Caesarea, as the subscription to Ep. to Titus states expressly that the MS. was corrected ‘with the copy at Caesarea in the library of the holy Pamphilus written with his own hand.’ Now in June, 1893, Dr. Rendel Harris pointed out a connexion between this MS. H Paul. and Euthalius (Stichometry, p. 88). This had also been noticed by Dr. P. Corssen in the second of the two programmes cited below (p. 12). Early in 1894 Herr W. Bousset brought out in Gebhardt and Harnack’s Texte u. Untersuchungen a series of Text-kritische Studien zum N. T., in the course of which (without any concert with Dr. Rendel Harris, but perhaps with some knowledge of Corssen) he not only adduced further evidence of this connexion, but also brought into the group the third corrector of א (אc). A note at the end of the Book of Esther said to be by his hand speaks in graphic terms of a MS. corrected by the Hexapla of Origen, compared by Antoninus a confessor, and corrected by Pamphilus ‘in prison’ (i. e. just before his death in the persecution of Diocletian). Attention had often been drawn to this note, but Herr Bousset was the first to make the full use of it which it deserved. He found on examination that the presumption raised by it was verified and that there was a real and close connexion between the readings of אc and those of H and Euthalius which were independently associated with Pamphilus1. Lastly, to complete the series of novel and striking observations, Mr. F. C. Conybeare comes forward in the current number of the Journal of Philology (no. 46, 1895) and maintains a further connexion of the group with the Armenian Version. These researches are at present in full swing, and will doubtless lead by degrees to more or less definite results. The essays which have been mentioned all contain some more speculative matter in addition to what has been mentioned, but it is also probable that they have a certain amount of solid nucleus. It is only just what we should have expected. The library founded by Pamphilus at Caesarea was the greatest and most famous of all the book-collections in the early Christian centuries; it was also the greatest centre of literary and copying activity just at the moment when Christianity received its greatest expansion; the prestige not only of Eusebius and Pamphilus, but of the still more potent name (for some time yet to come) of Origen, attached to it. It would have been strange if it had not been consulted from far and wide and if the influence of it were not felt in many parts of Christendom.

D F G, Goth.

Not only is E a mere copy of D, but there is a very close relation between F and G, especially in the Greek. It is not as yet absolutely determined what that relation is. In an essay written in 1871 (reprinted in Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, p. 321 ff.) Dr. Hort states his opinion that F Greek is a direct copy of G, F Latin a Vulgate text partly assimilated to the Greek and with intrusive readings from the Latin of G. Later (Introd. p. 150) he writes that F is ‘as certainly in its Greek text a transcript of G as E of D: if not it is an inferior copy of the same immediate exemplar.’ This second alternative is the older view, adopted by Scrivener (Introd. p. 181, Exodus 3:0) and maintained with detailed arguments in two elaborate programmes by Dr. P. Corssen (Epp. Paulin. Codd. Aug. Boern. Clarom., 1887 and 1889). We are not sure that the question can still be regarded as settled in this sense, and that Dr. Hort’s original view is not to be preferred. Dr. Corssen admits that there are some phenomena which he cannot explain (1887, p. 13). These would fall naturally into their place if F Gk. is a copy of G; and the arguments on the other side do not seem to be decisive. In any case it should be remembered that F Gk. and G Gk. are practically one witness and not two.

Dr. Corssen reached a number of other interesting conclusions. Examining the common element in D F G he showed that they were ultimately derived from a single archetype (Z), and that they archetype was written per cola et commata, or in clauses corresponding to the sense (sometimes called στίχοι), as may be seen in the Palaeographical Society’s facsimile of D (ser. i. pl. 63, 64). Here again we have another coincidence of independent workers, for in 1891 Dr. Rendel Harris carrying further a suggestion of Rettig’s had thrown out the opinion, that not only did the same system of colometry lie behind Cod. Δ Evv. (the other half, as we remember, of G Paul.) and D Evv. Act. (Cod. Bezae, which holds a like place in the Gospel and Acts to D Paul.), but that it also extended to the other important Old-Latin MS. k (Cod. Bobiensis), and even to the Curetonian Syriac—to which we suppose may now be added the Sinai palimpsest. If that were so—and indeed without this additional evidence—Dr. Corssen probably puts the limit too late when he says that such a MS. is not likely to have been written before the time of St. Chrysostom, or 407 a.d.

Thus Dr. Corssen thinks that there arose early in the fifth century a ‘Graeco-Latin edition,’ the Latin of which was more in agreement with Victorinus Ambrosiaster and the Spanish Speculum. For the inter-connexion of this group he adduces a striking instance from 1 Corinthians 13:1; and he argues that the locality in which it arose was more probably Italy than Africa. As to the place of origin we are more inclined to agree with him than as to the date, though the Speculum contains an African element. He then points out that this Graeco-Latin edition has affinities with the Gothic Version. The edition did not contain the Epistle to the Hebrews; and the Epistle to the Romans in it ended at Romans 15:14 (see § 9 below); it was entirely without the doxology (Romans 16:25-27).

Dr. Corssen thinks that this Graeco-Latin edition has undergone some correction in D by comparison with Greek MSS. and therefore that it is in part more correctly preserved in G, which however in its turn can only be used for reconstructing it with caution.

Like all that Dr. Corssen writes this sketch is suggestive and likely to be fruitful, though we cannot express our entire agreement with it. We only regret that we cannot undertake here the systematic inquiry which certainly ought to be made into the history of this group. The lines which it should follow would be something of this kind. (i) It should reconstruct as far as possible the common archetype of D and G. (ii) It should isolate the peculiar element in both MSS. and distinguish between earlier and later readings. The instances in which the Greek has been conformed to the Latin will probably be found to be late and of little real importance. (iii) The peculiar and ancient readings in G g should be carefully collected and studied. An opportunity might be found of testing more closely the hypothesis propounded in § 9 of this Introduction. (iv) The relations of the Gothic Version to the group should be determined as accurately as possible. (v) The characteristics both of D and of the archetype of D G should be compared with those of Cod. Bezae and the Old-Latin MSS. of the Gospels and Acts.

(3) The Textual Criticism of Epistle to Romans. The textual criticism of the Pauline Epistles generally is inferior in interest to that of the Historical Books of the New Testament. When this is said it is not meant that investigations such as those outlined above are not full of attraction, and in their way full of promise. Anything which throws new light on the history of the text will be found in the end to throw new light on the history of Christianity. But what is meant is that the textual phenomena are less marked, and have a less distinctive and individual character.

This may be due to two causes, both of which have really been at work. On the one hand, the latitude of variation was probably never from the first so great; and on the other hand the evidence which has come down to us is inferior both in quantity and quality, so that there are parts of the history—and those just the most interesting parts—which we cannot reconstruct simply for want of material. A conspicuous instance of both conditions is supplied by the state of what is called the ‘Western Text.’ It is probable that this text never diverged from the other branches so widely as it does in the Gospels and Acts; and just for that section of it which diverged most we have but little evidence. For the oldest forms of this text we are reduced to the quotations in Tertullian and Cyprian. We have nothing like the best of the Old-Latin MSS. of the Gospels and Acts; nothing like forms of the Syriac Versions such as the Curetonian and Sinaitic; nothing like the Diatessaron.

And yet when we look broadly at the variants to the Pauline Epistles we observe the same main lines of distribution as in the rest of the N.T. A glance at the apparatus criticus of the Epistle to the Romans will show the tendency of the authorities to fall into the groups D E F G; א B; א A C L P. These really correspond to like groups in the other Books: D E F G correspond to the group which, in the nomenclature of Westcott and Hort, is called ‘Western’; א B appear (with other leading MSS. added) to mark the line which they would call ‘Neutral’; א A C L P would include, but would not be identical with, the group which they call ‘Alexandrian.’ The later uncials generally (with accessions every now and then from the older ranks) would constitute the family which they designate as ‘Syrian,’ and which others have called ‘Antiochene,’ ‘Byzantine,’ ‘Constantinopolitan,’ or ‘Ecclesiastical.’

Exception is taken to some of these titles, especially to the term ‘Western,’ which is only retained because of its long-established use, and no doubt gives but a very imperfect geographical description of the facts. It might be proposed to substitute names suggested in most cases by the leading MS. of the group, but generalized so as to cover other authorities as well. For instance, we might speak of the δ-text ( = ‘Western’), the β-text ( = ‘Neutral’), the α-text ( = ‘Alexandrian’), and the ε-text or ς-text ( = ‘Ecclesiastical’ or ‘Syrian’). Such terms would beg no questions; they would simply describe facts. It would be an advantage that the same term ‘δ-text’ would be equally suggested by the leading MS. in the Gospels and Acts, and in the Pauline Epistles; the term ‘β-text,’ while suggested by B, would carry with it no assumption of superiority; ‘α-text’ would recall equally ‘Alexandrian’ and ‘Codex Alexandrinus’; and ‘ε-text’ or ‘ς-text’ would not imply any inherent inferiority, but would only describe the undoubted facts, either that the text in question was that generally accepted by the Church throughout the Middle Ages, or that in its oldest form it can be traced definitely to the region of Antioch and northern Syria. It is certain that this text (alike for Gospels, Acts, and Epistles) appears in the fourth century in this region, and spread from it; while as to the debated point of its previous history nothing would be either affirmed or denied.

If some such nomenclature as this were adopted a further step might be taken by distinguishing the earlier and later stages of the same text as δ1, δ2, &c., ς1, ς2, &c. It would also have to be noted that although in the vast majority of cases the group would include the MS. from which it took its name, still in some instances it would not include it, and it might even be ranged on the opposite side. This would occur most often with the α-text and A, but it would occur also occasionally with the β-text and B (as conspicuously in Romans 11:6).

Such being the broad outlines of the distribution of authorities on the Epistle to the Romans, we ask, What are its distinctive and individual features? These are for the most part shared with the rest of the Pauline Epistles. One of the advantages which most of the other Epistles possess. Romans is without: none of the extant fragments of Cod. H belong to it. This deprives us of one important criterion; but conclusions obtained for the other Epistles may be applied to this. For instance, the student will observe carefully the readings of אc and Arm. Sufficient note has unfortunately not been taken of them in the commentary, as the clue was not in the writer’s hands when it was written. In this respect the reader must be asked to supplement it. He should of course apply the new test with caution, and judge each case on its merits: only careful use can show to what extent it is valid. When we consider the mixed origin of nearly all ancient texts, sweeping propositions and absolute rules are seen to be out of place.

The specific characteristics of the textual apparatus of Romans may be said to be these: (i) the general inferiority in boldness and originality of the δ- (or Western) text; (ii) the fact that there is a distinct Western element in B, which therefore when it is combined with authorities of the δ- or Western type is diminished in value; (iii) the consequent rise in importance of the group א A C; (iv) the existence of a few scattered readings either of B alone or of B in combination with one or two other authorities which have considerable intrinsic probability and may be right.

We proceed to say a few words on each of these heads.

(i) The first must be taken with the reservations noted above. The Western or δ-text has not it is true the bold and interesting variations which are found in the Gospels and Acts. It has none of the striking interpolations which in those Books often bring in ancient and valuable matter. That may be due mainly to the fact that the interpolations in question are for the most part historical, and therefore would naturally be looked for in the Historical Books. In Ep. to Romans the more important δ-variants are not interpolations but omissions (as e.g. in the Gospel of St. Luke). Still these variants preserve some of the freedom of correction and paraphrase to which we are accustomed elsewhere.

E. g. 3:9 τί προκατέχομεν πέρισσον; D* G, Chrys. Orig.-lat. al.: τί οὖν; προεχόμεθα; rel.

4:19 οὐ κατενόησεν D E F G, &c. Orig.-lat. Epiph. Ambrstr. al.: κατενόησεν א A B C al.

5:14 ἑπὶ τοὺς ἁμαρτήσαντας 62, 63, 67**, Orig.-lat. Coda. Lat. ap. Aug., Ambrstr.: ἐπὶ τοὺς μὴ ἁμαρτήσαντας rel.

7:6 τοῦ θανάτου D E F G, Codd. ap. Orig.-lat. al.:�

Romans 9:25 καλέσω τὸν οὐ λαόν μου λαόν μου, καὶ τὴν οὐκ ἠγαπημένην ἠγαπημένην. 1 Peter 2:10 οἱ ποτὲ οὐ λαός, νῦν δὲ λαὸς Θεοῦ, οἱ οὐκ ἠλεημένοι, νῦν δὲ ἐλεηθέντες.

Romans 9:32, Romans 9:33 προσέκοψαν τῷ λίθῳ τοῦ προσκόμματος, καθὼς γέγραπται, Ἰδού, τίθημι ἐν Σιὼν λίθον προσκόμματος καὶ πέτραν σκανδάλου· καὶ ὁ πιστεύων ἐπʼ αὐτῷ οὐ καταισχυνθήσεται.1 Peter 2:6-8; 1 Peter 2:6-8 Ἰδού, τίθημι ἐν Σιὼν λίθον�

Romans 12:1 παραστῆσαι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν θυσίαν ζῶσαν, ἁγίαν, εὐάρεστον τῷ Θεῷ, τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν. 1 Peter 2:5�

Romans 12:2 μὴ συσχηματίζεσθε τῷ αἰὼνι τούτῳ. 1 Peter 1:14 μὴ συσχηματιζόμενοι ταῖς πρότερον ἐν τῇ�

The following passages seem to be modelled on St. Paul`s thoughts and words:

Romans 12:3�

6 ἔχοντες δὲ χαρίσματα κατὰ τὴν χάριν τὴν δοθεῖσαν ἡμῖν διάφορα ̣ ̣ ̣ εἴτε διακονίαν, ἐν τῇ διακονίᾳ …

3 ἑκάστῳ ὡς ὁ Θεὸς ἐμέρισε μέτρον πίστεως.

Cf. also Romans 13:11-14; 8-10; Romans 12:9, Romans 12:13. 1 Peter 4:7-11 πάντων δὲ τὸ τέλος ἤγγικε· σωφρονήσατε οὖν καὶ νήψατε εἰς προσευχάς· πρὸ πάντων τὴν εἰς ἑαυτοὺς�

Romans 12:9 ἡ�1 Peter 1:22 τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν ἡγνικότες ̣ ̣ ̣ εἰς φιλαδελφίαν�

Romans 12:16 τὸ αὐτὸ εἰς�

17 μηδενὶ κακὸν�

Cf. also vv. 9, 14. 1 Peter 3:8, 1 Peter 3:9 τὸ δὲ τέλος, πάντες ὁμόφρονες, ουμπαθεῖς, φιλάδελφοι, εὔσπλαγχνοι, ταπεινόφρονες, μὴ�

11 ἐκκλινάτω δὲ�

Romans 13:1 πασα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω· οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ Θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ὑπὸ Θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν …

3 οἱ γὰρ ἄρχοντες οὐκ εἰσὶ φόβος τῷ�

7�1 Peter 2:13-17 ὑποτάγητε πάση�

Although equal stress cannot be laid on all these passages the resemblance is too great and too constant to be merely accidental. In 1 Peter 2:6 we have a quotation from the O.T. with the same variations from the LXX that we find in Romans 9:32 (see the note). Not only do we find the same thoughts, such as the metaphorical use of the idea of sacrifice (Romans 12:1; 1 Peter 2:5), and the same rare words, such as συσχηματίζεσθαι,�Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-17) we have what must be accepted as conclusive evidence, the same ideas occurring in the same order. Nor can there be any doubt that of the two the Epistle to the Romans is the earlier. St. Paul works out a thesis clearly and logically; St. Peter gives a series of maxims for which he is largely indebted to St. Paul. For example, in Romans 13:7 we have a broad general principle laid down, St. Peter, clearly influenced by the phraseology of that passage, merely gives three rules of conduct. In St. Paul the language and ideas come out of the sequence of thought; in St. Peter they are adopted because they had already been used for the same purpose.

This relation between the two Epistles is supported by other independent evidence. The same relation which prevails between the First Epistle of St. Peter and the Epistle to the Romans is also found to exist between it and the Epistle to the Ephesians, and the same hypothesis harmonizes best with the facts in that case also. The three Epistles are all connected with Rome: one of them being written to the city, the other two in all probability being written from it. We cannot perhaps be quite certain as to the date of 1 Peter, but it must be earlier than the Apostolic Fathers who quote it; while it in its turn quotes as we see at least two Epistles of St. Paul and these the most important. We may notice that these conclusions harmonize as far as they go with the view taken in § 3, that St. Peter was not the founder of the Roman Church and had not visited it when the Epistle to the Romans was written. In early church history arguments are rarely conclusive; and the even partial coincidence of different lines of investigation adds greatly to the strength of each.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews again was probably indebted to the Romans, the resemblance between Romans 4:17 and Hebrews 11:11 is very close and has been brought out in the notes, while in Romans 12:19, Hebrews 10:30, we have the same passage of Deuteronomy quoted with the same marked divergences from the text of the LXX. This is not in itself conclusive evidence; there may have been an earlier form of the version current, in fact there are strong grounds for thinking so; but the hypothesis that the author of the Hebrews used the Romans is certainly the simplest. We again notice that the Hebrews is a book closely connected with the Roman Church, as is proved by its early use in that Church, and if it were, as is possible, written from Rome or Italy its indebtedness to this Epistle would be accounted for. The two passages referred to are quoted below; and, although no other passages resemble one another sufficiently to be quoted, yet it is quite conceivable that many other of the words and phrases in the Hebrews which are Pauline in character may have been derived from an acquaintance with this Epistle.

The passages referred to are the following:

Romans 4:17-21 κατέναντι οὗ ἐπίστευσε Θεοῦ τοῦ ζωοποιοῦντος τοὺς νεκροὺς ̣ ̣ ̣ καὶ μὴ άσθειήσας τῇ πίστει κατενόησε τὸ ἑαυτοῦ σῶμα ἤοη νενεκρωμένον (ἑκατοι ταέτης που ὑπάρχων), καὶ τὴν νέκρωσιν τῆς μήτρας Σαρρας· εἰς δὲ τήν ἐπαγγελίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐ διεκρίθη τῇ�Hebrews 11:11, Hebrews 11:12 πίστει καὶ αὐτὴ Σάρρα δύναμιν εἰς καταβολὴν σπέρματος ἔλαβεν καὶ παρὰ καιρὸν ἡλικίας, ἐπεὶ πιστὸν ἡγήσατο τὸν ἐπαγγειλάμενον· διὸ καὶ�

19 λογισάμενος ὅτι καὶ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἐγείρειν δυνατὸς ὁ Θεός.

Romans 12:19 ἐμοὶ ἐκδίκησις, ἐγὼ�Hebrews 10:30 ἐμοὶ ἐκδίκησις, ἐγὼ�

When we pass to the Epistle of St. James we approach a much more difficult problem. The relation between it and the Epistle to the Romans has been often and hotly debated; for it is a theological as well as a literary question. The passages which resemble one another in the two Epistles are given at length by Prof. Mayor in his edition of the Epistle of St. James, p. xciii, who argues strongly in favour of the later date of the Romans. The following are among the most important of these; we have not thought it necessary to repeat all his instances:

Romans 2:1 διὸ�James 4:11 μὴ καταλαλεῖτε�

Romans 2:13 οὐ γὰρ οἱ�James 1:22 γίνεσθε δὲ ποιηταὶ λόγου, καὶ μὴ μόνον�

Romans 4:1 τί οὖν ἐροῦμεν εὑρηκέναι Ἁβραὰμ τὸν προπατορα ἡμῶν κατὰ σάρκὰ εἰ γὰρ Ἁβραὰμ ὲξ ἔργων ἐδικαιώθη, ἔχει καύχημα. James 2:21 Ἁβραὰμ ὁ πατὴρ ἡμῶν οὐκ ἐξ ἔργων ἐδικαιώθη.�

Romans 4:20 εἰς δὲ τὴν ἐπαγγελίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐ διεκρίθη τῇ�James 1:6 αἰτείτω δὲ ἐν πίστει μηδὲν διακρινόμενος· ὁ γὰρ διακρινόμενος ἔοικε κλύδωνι θαλάσσης�

Romans 5:3-5 καυχώμεθα ἐν ταῖς θλίψεσιν, εἰδότες ὅτι ἡ θλῖψις ὑπομονὴν κατεργάζεται, ἡ δὲ ὑπομονὴ δοκιμήν, ἡ δὲ δοκιμὴ ἐλπίδα· ἡ δὲ ἐλπὶς οὐ καταισχύνει, ὅτι ἡ�James 1:2-4 πᾶσαν χαρὰν ἡγήσασθε ὅταν πειρασμοῖς περιπέσητε ποικίλοις, γινώσκοντες ὅτι τὸ δοκίμιον ὑμῶν τῆς πίστεως κατεργάζεται ὑπομονήν. ἡ δὲ ὑπομονὴ ἔργον τέλειον ἐχέτω, ἵνα ἦτε τέλειοι.

Romans 7:23 βλέπω δὲ ἕτερον νόμον ἐν τοῖς μέλεσί μου,�James 4:1 πόθεν πόλεμοι καὶ πόθεν μάχαι ἐν ὑμῖν; οὐκ ἐντεῦθεν, ἐκ τῶν ἡδονῶν ὑμῶν τῶν στρατευομένων ἐν τοῖς μέλεσιν ὑμῶν;

Romans 13:12�James 1:21�

We may be expressing an excessive scepticism, but these resemblances seem to us hardly close enough to be convincing, and the priority of St. James cannot be proved. The problem of literary indebtedness is always a delicate one; it is very difficult to find a definite objective standpoint; and writers of competence draw exactly opposite conclusions from the same facts. In order to justify our sceptical attitude we may point out that resemblances in phraseology between two Christian writers do not necessarily imply literary connexion. The contrast between�Romans 5:3-5 = James 1:2-4 and in Romans 7:23 = James 4:1, but these are not sufficient by themselves to establish a case.

Again, if we turn to the polemical passages, we may admit that ‘Paul betrays a consciousness that Abraham had been cited as an example of works and endeavours to show that the word λογίζομαι is inconsistent with this.’ But the controversy must have been carried on elsewhere than in these writings, and it is equally probable that both alike may be dealing with the problem as it came before them for discussion or as it was inherited from the schools of the Rabbis (see further the note on p. 102). There is, we may add, no marked resemblance in style in the controversial passage further than would be the necessary result of dealing with the same subject-matter. There is nothing decisive to prove obligation on the part of either Epistle to the other or to prove the priority of either. The two Epistles were written in the same small and growing community which had inherited or created a phraseology of its own, and in which certain questions early acquired prominence. It is quite possible that the Epistle of St. James deals with the same controversy as does that to the Romans; it may even possibly be directed against St. Paul’s teaching or the teaching of St. Paul’s followers; but there is no proof that either Epistle was written with a knowledge of the other. There are no resemblances in style sufficient to prove literary connexion.

One other book of the N.T. may just be mentioned. If the doxology at the end of Jude be compared with that at the end of Romans it is difficult to believe that they are quite independent. It may be that they follow a common form derived from Jewish doxologies, but it is more probable that the concluding verses of the Romans formed a model which was widely adopted in the Christian Church. We certainly seem to find doxologies of the same type as these two in 1 Clem.-Rom. 64, 65:2; Mart. Polyc. xx; it is followed also in Ephesians 3:20. The resemblance in form of the doxologies may be seen by comparing them with one another.

Romans 16:25-27 τῷ δὲ δυναμένῳ ὑμᾶς στηρίξαι ̣ ̣ ̣ μόνῳ σοφῷ Θεῷ, διὰ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, [ῷ] ῇ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. Jude 1:24, Jude 1:25 τῷ δὲ δυναμένῳ φυλαξαι ὑμᾶς�

When we enter the sub-apostolic age the testimony to the use of the Epistle is full and ample. The references to it in Clement of Rome are numerous. We can go further than this, the discussions on πίστις and δικαιοσύνη (see p. 147) show clearly that Clement used this Epistle at any rate as a theological authority. Bishop Lightfoot has well pointed out how he appears as reconciling and combining four different types of Apostolic teaching. The Apostles belong to an older generation, their writings have become subjects of discussion. Clement is already beginning to build up, however inadequately, a Christian theology combining the teaching of the different writers of an earlier period. If we turn to Ignatius’ letters what will strike us is that the words and ideas of the Apostle have become incorporated with the mind of the writer. It is not so much that he quotes as that he can never break away from the circle of Apostolic ideas. The books of the N.T. have given him his vocabulary and form the source of his thoughts. Polycarp quotes more freely and more definitely. His Epistle is almost a cento of N.T. passages, and among them are undoubted quotations from the Romans. As the quotations of Polycarp come from Rom., 1 Cor., 2 Cor., Gal., Eph., Phil., 1 Tim., 2 Tim., it is difficult not to believe that he possessed and made use of a collection of the Pauline Epistles. Corroborative evidence of this might be found in the desire he shows to make a collection of the letters of Ignatius. He would be more likely to do this if he already possessed collections of letters; and it is really impossible to maintain that the Ignatian letters were formed into one collection before those of St. Paul had been. Assuming then, as we are entitled to do, that the Apostolic Fathers represent the first quarter of the second century we find the Epistle to the Romans at that time widely read, treated as a standard authority on Apostolic teaching, and taking its place in a collection of Pauline letters.

The following are quotations and reminiscences of the Epistle in Clement of Rome:

Romans 1:21 ἐσκοτίσθη ἡ�

Clem. 51 διὰ τὸ σκληρυνθῆναι αὐτῶν τὰς�

Romans 2:24 τὸ γὰρ ὄνομα τοῦ Θεοῦ διʼ ὑμᾶς βλασφημεῖται ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, καθὼς γέγραπται.

Romans 4:7 "Μακάριοι ὧν�

8 μακάριος�

Romans 6:1 τί οὖν ἐροῦμεν; ἐπιμένωμεν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ, ἵνα ἡ χάρις πλεονάσῃ; μὴ γένοιτο. Clem. 33 τί οὖν ποιήσωμεν,�

Romans 1:29 πεπληρωμένους πάσῃ�

Romans 9:4, Romans 9:5 ὧν ̣ ̣ ̣ ἡ λατρεία καὶ αἱ ἐπαγγελίαι, ὧν οἱ πατέρες, καὶ ἐξ ὧν ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα. Clem. 32 ἐξ αὐτοῦ γὰρ ἱερεῖς καὶ Λευῖται πάντες οἱ λειτουργοῦντες τῷ θυσιαστηρίῳ τοῦ Θεοῦ· ἐξ αὐτοῦ ὁ Κύριος Ἰησοῦς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα· ἐξ αὐτοῦ βασιλεῖς καὶ ἄρχοντες καὶ ἡγούμενοι κατὰ τὸν Ἰούδαν.

Romans 13:1, Romans 13:2 πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω· οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ Θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὗσαι ὑπὸ Θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν. ὥστε ὁ�

References in the letters of Ignatius are the following:

Romans 1:3 τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαβὶδ κατὰ σάρκα, τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν δυνάμει. Smyr. 1�

Romans 2:24. Cf. Trall. 8 (both quote O. T.).

Romans 3:27 ποῦ οὖν ἡ καύχησισ; Eph. 18 ποῦ καύχησις τῶν λεγομένων συνετῶν;

(Close to a quotation of 1 Corinthians 1:20.)

Romans 6:4 οὕτω καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς περιπατήσωμεν. Eph. 19 Θεοῦ�

Romans 6:5; Romans 8:17, Romans 8:29. Mag. 5 διʼ οὗ ἐὰν μὴ αὐθαιρέτως ἔχωμεν τὸ�

Trall. 9 κατὰ τὸ ὁμοίωμα ὅς καὶ ἡμᾶς τοὺς πιστεύοντας αὐτῷ οὕτως ἐγερεῖ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ ἐν Χ. Ἰ., οὗ χωρὶς τὸ�

Romans 6:17 εἰς ὂν παρεδόθητε τύπον διδαχῆς. Mag. 6 εἰς τύπον καὶ διδαχὴν�

Romans 7:6 ὥστε δουλεύειν ἡμᾶς ἐν καινότητι πνεύματος καὶ οὐ παλαιότητι γράμματος. Mag. 9 οἱ ἐν παλαιοῖς πράγμασιν�

Romans 8:11 ὁ ἐγείρας Χ. Ἰ. ἐκ νεκρῶν. Trall. 9 ὅς καὶ�

Romans 9:23 σκεύη ἐλέους ἃ προητοίμασεν εἰς δόξαν. Eph. 9 προητοιμασμένοι εἰς οἰκοδομὴν Θεοῦ πατρός.

Romans 14:17 οὐ γάρ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ βρῶσις καὶ πόσις. Trall. 2 οὐ γὰρ βρωμάτων καὶ ποτῶν εἰσιν διάκονοι.

Romans 15:5 τὸ αὐτὸ φρονεῖν ἐν�Ephesians 1:0 ὅν εὔχομαι κατὰ Ἰ. Χ. ὑμᾶς�

The following resemblances occur in the Epistle of Polycarp:

Romans 6:13 καὶ τὰ μέλη ὑμῶν ὅπλα δικαιοσύνης.

Romans 13:12 ἐνδυσώμεθα δὲ τὰ ὅπλα τοῦ φωτός. Pol. 4 ὁπλισώμεθα τοῖς ὅπλοις τῆς δικαιοσύνης.

Romans 12:10 τῇ φιλαδελφίᾳ εἰς�

Romans 13:8 ὁ γὰρ�

12 ἄρα [οὖν] ἕκαστος ἡμῶν περὶ ἑαυτοῦ λόγον δώσει2 [τῷ Θεῷ]3. Pol. 6 καὶ πάντας δεῖ παραστῆναι τῷ βήματι τοῦ Χριστοῦ, καὶ ἕκαστον ὑπὲρ ἑαυτοῦ λόγον δοῦναι.

It is hardly worth while to give evidence in detail from later authors. We find distinct reminiscences of the Romans in Aristides and in Justin Martyr4. Very interesting also is the evidence of the heretical writers quoted by Hippolytus in the Refutatio omnium haeresium; it would of course be of greater value if we could fix with certainty the date of the documents he makes use of. We find quotations from the Epistle in writings ascribed to the Naassenes5 , the Valentinians of the Italian school6 , and to Basileides7. In the last writer the use made of Romans 5:13, Romans 5:14 and 8:19, 22 is exceedingly curious and interesting.

If we turn to another direction we find interesting evidence of a kind which has not as yet been fully considered or estimated. The series of quotations appended from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs can hardly be explained on any other hypothesis than that the writer was closely acquainted with the Epistle to the Romans. This is not the place to enter into the various critical questions which have been or ought to be raised concerning that work, but it may be noticed here—

(1) That the writer makes use of a considerable number of books of the N. T. The resemblances are not confined to the writings of St. Paul.

(2) That the quotations occur over a very considerable portion of the book, both in passages omitted in some MSS. and in passages which might be supposed to belong to older works.

(3) The book is probably older than the time of Tertullian, while the crude character of the Christology would suggest a considerably earlier date.

Romans 1:4 τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν δυνάμει κατὰ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης … Test. Leviticus 18:0 καὶ πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης ἔσται ἐπʼ αὐτοῖς …

Romans 2:13 οὐ γὰρ οἱ�

Test. Benj. 3�

Romans 6:1 ἐπιμένωμεν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ. Test. Leviticus 4:0 οἱ ἄνθρωποι�

Romans 6:7 ὁ γὰρ�

Romans 7:8�

Romans 8:28 οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι τοῖς�

Romans 9:21 ἢ οὐκ ἔχει ἐξουσίαν ὁ κεραμεὺς τοῦ πηλοῦ, ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ φυράματος ποιῆσαι ὃ μὲν εἰς τιμὴν σκεῦος, ὃ δὲ εἰς�

Romans 12:1 παραστῆσαι τὰ σώματα ὑμῶν θυσίαν ζῶσαν, ἁγίαν, εὐάρεστον τῷ Θεῷ, τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν ὑμῶν. Test. Leviticus 3:0 προσφέρουσι δὲ Κυρίῳ ὀσμὴν εὐωδίας λογικὴν καὶ�

Romans 12:21 μὴ νικῶ ὑπὸ τοῦ κακοῦ, ἁλλὰ νίκα ἐν τῷ�

Romans 13:12�

Romans 15:33 ὁ δὲ Θεὸς τῆς εἰρήνης μετὰ πάντων ὑμῶν. Test. Daniel 5:0 ἔχοντες τὸν Θεὸν τῆς εἰρήνης.

Romans 16:20 ὁ δὲ Θεὸς τῆς εἰρήνης συντρίψει τὸν Σατανᾶν ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας ὐμῶν ἐν τάχει. Test. Aser. 7 καὶ ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ συντρίβων τὴν κεφαλὴν τοῦ δράκοντος διʼ ὕδατος.

So far we have had no direct citation from the Epistle by name. Although Clement refers expressly to the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and Ignatius may refer to an Epistle to the Ephesians, neither they nor Polycarp, nor in fact any other writer, expressly mentions Romans. It is with Marcion (c. 140) that we obtain our first direct evidence. Romans was one of the ten Epistles he included in his Apostolicon, ascribing it directly to St. Paul. Nor have we any reason to think that he originated the idea of making a collection of the Pauline Epistles. The very fact, as Zahn points out, that he gives the same short titles to the Epistles that we find in our oldest MSS. (πρὸς ῥωμαίους) implies that these had formed part of a collection. Such a title would not be sufficient unless the books were included in a collection which had a distinguishing title of its own. In the Apostolicon of Marcion the Epistles were arranged in the following order: (1) Gal., (2) 1 Cor., (3) 2 Cor., (4) Rom., (5) 1 Thess., (6) 2 Thess., (7) Laodic. = Ephes., (8) Col., (9) Phil., (10) Philem. The origin of this arrangement we cannot conjecture with any certainty; but it may be noted that the Epistle placed first—the Galatians—is the one on which Marcion primarily rested his case and in which the anti-judaism of St. Paul is most prominent, while the four Epistles of the Captivity are grouped together at the conclusion. Another interesting point is the text of the Epistles used by Marcion. We need not stop to discuss the question whether the charge against Marcion of excising large portions of the Epistles is correct. That he did so is undoubted. In the Romans particularly he omitted chaps. 1:19-2:1; 3:31-4:25; 9:1-33; 10:5-11:32; 15-16. Nor again can we doubt that he omitted and altered short passages in order to harmonize the teaching with his own. For instance, in 10:2, 3 he seems to have read�

Loman (1882) denied the historical reality of Christ, and considered that all the Pauline Epistles dated from the second century. Christianity itself was the embodiment of certain Jewish ideas. St. Paul was a real person who lived at the time usually ascribed to him, but he did not write the Epistles which bear his name. That he should have done so at such an early period in the history of Christianity would demand a miracle to account for its history; a statement which we need not trouble ourselves to refute. Loman’s arguments appear to be the silence of the Acts, and in the case of the Romans the inconsistency of the various sections with one another; the differences of opinion which had arisen with regard to the composition of the Roman Church prove (he argues) that there is no clear historical situation implied3. Steck (1888) has devoted himself primarily to the Epistle to the Galatians which he condemns as inconsistent with the Acts of the Apostles, and as dependent upon the other leading Epistles, but he incidentally examines these also. All alike he puts in the second century, arranging them in the following order:—Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians. All alike are he says built up under the influence of Jewish and Heathen writers, and he finds passages in the Romans borrowed from Philo, Seneca, and Jewish Apocryphal works to which he assigns a late date—such as the Assumptio Mosis and 4 Ezra 4:0. Akin to these theories which deny completely the genuineness of the Epistle, are similar ones also having their origin for the most part in Holland, which find large interpolations in our present text and profess to distinguish different recensions. Earliest of these was Weisse (1867), who in addition to certain more reasonable theories with regard to the concluding chapters, professed to be able to distinguish by the evidence of style the genuine from the interpolated portions of the Epistle5. His example has been followed with greater indiscreetness by Pierson and Naber (1886), Michelsen (1886), Voelter (1889, 90), Van Manen (1891).

Pierson and Naber6 basing their theory on some slight allusions in Josephus, consider that there existed about the beginning of the Christian era a school of elevated Jewish thinkers, who produced a large number of apparently fragmentary works distinguished by their lofty religious tone. These were made use of by a certain Paulus Episcopus, a Christian who incorporated them in letters which he wrote in order to make up for his own poverty of religious and philosophical ideas. An examination of their treatment of a single chapter may be appended. The basis of ch. 6 is a Jewish fragment (admodum memorabile) which extends from ver. 3 to ver. 11. This fragment Paulus Episcopus treated in his usual manner. He begins with the foolish question of ver. 2 which shows that he does not understand the argument that follows. He added interpolations in ver. 4. Itidem odoramur manum eius ver. 5. If we omit τῷ ὁμοιώματι in ver. 5 the difficulty in it vanishes. Ver. 8 again is feeble and therefore was the work of Paulus Episcopus: non enim credimus nos esse victuros, sed novimus nos vivere (ver. 11). vv. 11-23 with the exception apparently of ver. 14, 15 which have been misplaced, are the work of this interpolator who spoiled the Jewish fragment, and in these verses adapts what has preceded to the uses of the Church1. It will probably not be thought necessary to pursue this subject further.

Michelsen2 basing his theory to a certain extent on the phenomena of the last two chapters considered that towards the end of the second century three recensions of the Epistle were in existence. The Eastern containing ch. 1-16:24; the Western ch. 1-14 and 16:25-27; the Marcionite ch. 1-14. The redactor who put together these recensions was however also responsible for a considerable number of interpolations which Michelsen undertakes to distinguish. Völter’s3 theory is more elaborate. The original Epistle according to him contained the following portions of the Epistle. 1:1a, 7; 5, 6; 8-17; 5 and 6 (except 5:13, 14, 20; 6:14, 15); 12, 18; 15:14-32; 16:21-23. This bears all the marks of originality; its Christology is primitive, free from any theory of pre-existence or of two natures. To the first interpolator we owe 1:18; 3:20 (except 2:14, 15); 8:1, 3-39; 1:1b-4. Here the Christology is different; Christ is the pre-existent Son of God. To the second interpolator we owe 3:21-4:25; 5:13, 14, 20; 6:14, 15; 7:1-6; 9, 10; 14:1-15:6. This writer who worked about the year 70 was a determined Antinomian, who could not see anything but evil in the Law. A third interpolator is responsible for 7:7-25; 8:2; a fourth for 11; 2:14, 15; 15:7-13; a fifth for 16:1-20; a sixth for 16:24; a seventh for 16:25-27.

Van Manen4 is distinguished for his vigorous attacks on his predecessors; and for basing his own theory of interpolations on a reconstruction of the Marcionite text which he holds to be original.

It has been somewhat tedious work enumerating these theories, which will seem probably to most readers hardly worth while repeating; so subjective and arbitrary is the whole criticism. The only conclusion that we can arrive at is that if early Christian documents have been systematically tampered with in a manner which would justify any one of these theories, then the study of Christian history would be futile. There is no criterion of style or of language which enables us to distinguish a document from the interpolations, and we should be compelled to make use of a number of writings which we could not either trust or criticize. If the documents are not trustworthy, neither is our criticism.

But such a feeling of distrust is not necessary, and it may be worth while to conclude this subject by pointing out certain reasons which enable us to feel confident in most at any rate of the documents of early Christianity.

It has been pointed out that interpolation theories are not as absurd as they might prima facie be held to be, for we have instances of the process actually taking place. The obvious examples are the Ignatian letters. But these are not solitary, almost the whole of the Apocryphal literature has undergone the same process; so have the Acts of the Saints; so has the Didache for example when included in the Apostolic Constitutions. Nor are we without evidence of interpolations in the N. T.; the phenomenon of the Western text presents exactly the same characteristics. May we not then expect the same to have happened in other cases where we have little or no information? Now in dealing with a document which has come down to us in a single MS. or version, or on any slight traditional evidence this possibility must always be considered, and it is necessary to be cautious in arguing from a single passage in a text which may have been interpolated. Those who doubted the genuineness of the Armenian fragment of Aristides for example, on the grounds that it contained the word Theotokos, have been proved to be wrong, for that word as was suspected by many has now been shown to have been interpolated. But in the case of the N. T. we have so many authorities going back independently to such an early period, that it is most improbable that any important variation in the text could escape our knowledge. The different lines of text in St. Paul’s Epistles must have separated as early as the beginning of the second century; and we shall see shortly that one displacement in the text, which must have been early, and may have been very early, has influenced almost all subsequent documents. The number, the variety, and the early character of the texts preserved to us in MSS., Versions, and Fathers, is a guarantee that a text formed on critical methods represents within very narrow limits the work as it left its author’s hands.

A second line of argument which is used in favour of interpolation theories is the difficulty and obscurity of some passages. No doubt there are passages which are difficult; but it is surely very gratuitous to imagine that everything which is genuine is easy. The whole tendency of textual criticism is to prove that it is the custom of ‘redactors’ or ‘correctors’ or ‘interpolators’ to produce a text which is always superficially at any rate more easy than the genuine text. But on the other side, although the style of St. Paul is certainly not always perfectly smooth; although he certainly is liable to be carried away by a side issue, to change the order of his thoughts, to leap over intermediate steps in his argument, yet no serious commentators of whatever school would doubt that there is a strong sustained argument running through the whole Epistle. The possibility of the commentaries which have been written proves conclusively the improbability of theories implying a wide element of interpolation. But in the case of St. Paul we may go further. Even where there is a break in the argument, there is almost always a verbal connexion. When St. Paul passes for a time to a side issue there is a subtle connexion in thought as in words which would certainly escape an interpolator’s observation. This has been pointed out in the notes on 11:10; 15:20, where the question of interpolation has been carefully examined; and if any one will take the trouble to go carefully through the end of ch. 5 and the beginning of ch. 6, he will see how each sentence leads on to the next. For instance, the first part of 5:20, which is omitted by some of these critics, leads on immediately to the second (πλεονάσῃ … ἐπλεόνασεν), that suggests ὑπερεπερίσσευσεν, then comes πλεονάσῃ in 6:1; but the connexion of sin and death clearly suggests the words of ver. 2 and the argument that follows. The same process may be worked out through the whole Epistle. For the most part there is a clear and definite argument, and even where the logical continuity is broken there is always a connexion either in thought or words. The Epistles of St. Paul present for the most part a definite and compact literary unit.

If to these arguments we add the external evidence which is given in detail above, we may feel reasonably confident that the historical conditions under which the Epistle has come down to us make the theories of this new school of critics untenable1.

We have laid great stress on the complete absence of any textual justifications for any of the theories which have been so far noticed. This absence is made all the more striking by the existence of certain variations in the text and certain facts reported on tradition with regard to the last two chapters of the Epistle. These facts are somewhat complex and to a certain extent conflicting, and a careful examination of them and of the theories suggested to explain them is necessary2.

It will be convenient first of all to enumerate these facts:

(1) The words ἐν Ῥώμῃ in 1:7 and 15 are omitted by the bilingual MS. G both in the Greek and Latin text (F is here defective). Moreover the cursive 47 adds in the margin of ver. 7 τὸ ἐν Ῥώμῃ, οὔτε ἐν τῇ ἐξηγήσει οὔτε ἐν τῷ ῥητῷ μνημονεύει. Bp. Lightfoot attempted to find corroborative evidence for this reading in Origen, in the writer cited as Ambrosiaster, and in the reading of D ἐν�

d. In Fgr. G codd. ap. Hieron. (in Ephesians 3:5), g, Marcion (vide infra) it is entirely omitted. It may be noted that G leaves a blank space at the end of chap. 14, and that f is taken direct from the Vulgate, a space being left in F in the Greek corresponding to these verses. Indirectly D and Sedulius also attest the omission by placing the Benediction after ver. 24, a transposition which would be made (see below) owing to that verse being in these copies at the end of the Epistle.

In reviewing this evidence it becomes clear (i) that the weight of good authority is in favour of placing this doxology at the end of the Epistle, and there only. (ii) That the variation in position—a variation which must be explained—is early, probably earlier than the time of Origen, although we can never have complete confidence in Rufinus’ translation. (iii) That the evidence for complete omission goes back to Marcion, and that very probably his excision of the words may have influenced the omission in Western authorities.

(3) There is very considerable evidence that Marcion omitted the whole of the last two chapters.

a. Origen (int. Ruf.) x. 43, vol. vii, p. 453, ed. Lomm. writes: Caput hoc Marcion, a quo Scripturae Evangelicae atque Apostolicae interpolatae sunt, de hac epistola penitus abstulit; et non solum hoc, sed et ab eo loco, ubi scriptum est: omne autem quod non est ex fide, peccatum est: usque ad finem cuncta dissecuit. In aliis vero exemplaribus, id est, in his quae non sunt a Marcione temerata, hoc ipsum caput diverse positum invenimus, in nonnullis etenim codicibus post eum locum, quem supra diximus hoc est: omne autem quod non est ex fide, peccatum est: statim coherens habetur: ei autem, qui potens est vos confirmare. Alii vero codices in fine id, ut nunc est positum, continent. This extract is quite precise, nor is the attempt made by Hort to emend it at all successful. He reads in for ab, having for this the support of a Paris MS., and then emends hoc into hic; reading et non solum hic sed et in eo loco, &c., and translating ‘and not only here but also,’ at 14:23 ‘he cut out everything quite to the end.’ He applies the words to the Doxology alone. The changes in the text are slight and might be justified, but with this change the words that follow become quite meaningless: usque ad finem cuncta dissecuit can only apply to the whole of the two chapters. If Origen meant the doxology alone they would be quite pointless.

b. But we have other evidence for Marcion’s text. Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 5:14, quoting the words tribunal Christi (14:10), states that they occur in clausula of the Epistle. The argument is not conclusive but the words probably imply that in Marcion’s copy of the Epistle, if not in all those known to Tertullian, the last two chapters were omitted.

These two witnesses make it almost certain that Marcion omitted not only the doxology but the whole of the last two chapters.

(4) Some further evidence has been brought forward suggesting that an edition of the Epistle was in circulation which omitted the last two chapters.

a. It is pointed out that Tertullian, Marcion, Irenaeus, and probably Cyprian never quote from these last two chapters. The argument however is of little value, because the same may be said of 1 Corinthians 16:0. The chapters were not quoted because there was little or nothing in them to quote.

b. An argument of greater weight is found in certain systems of capitulations in MSS. of the Vulgate. In Codex Amiatinus the table of contents gives fifty-one sections, and the fiftieth section is described thus: De periculo contristante fratrem suum esca sua, et quod non sit regnum Dei esca et potus sed iustitia et pax et gaudium in Spiritu Sancto; this is followed by the fifty-first and last section, which is described as De mysterio Domini ante passionem in silentio habito, post passionem vero ipsius revelato. The obvious deduction is that this system was drawn up for a copy which omitted the greater part at any rate of chaps. 15 and 16. This system appears to have prevailed very widely. In the Codex Fuldensis there are given in the table of contents fifty-one sections: of these the first twenty-three include the whole Epistle up to the end of chap. 14, the last sentence being headed Quod fideles Dei non debeant invicem iudicare cum unusquisque secundum regulas mandatorum ipse se debeat divino iudicio praeparare ut ante tribunal Dei sine confusione possit operum suorum praestare rationem. Then follow the last twenty-eight sections of the Amiatine system, beginning with the twenty-fourth at 9:1. Hence chaps. 9-14 are described twice. The scribe seems to have had before him an otherwise unrecorded system which only embraced fourteen chapters, and then added the remainder from where he could get them in order to make up what he felt to be the right number of fifty-one.

Both these systems seem to exclude the last two chapters, whatever reason we may give for the phenomenon.

(5) Lastly, some critics have discovered a certain amount of significance in two other points.

a. The prayer at the end of chap. 15 is supposed to represent, either with or without the�

The arguments in favour of this view are as follows: 1. It is pointed out that it is hardly likely that St. Paul should have been acquainted with such a large number of persons in a church like that of Rome which he had never visited, and that this feeling is corroborated by the number of personal details that he adds; references to companions in captivity, to relations, to fellow-labourers. All these allusions are easily explicable on the theory that the Epistle is addressed to the Ephesian Church, but not if it be addressed to the Romans 2:0. This opinion is corroborated, it is said, by an examination of the list itself. Aquila and Priscilla and the church that is in their house are mentioned shortly before this date as being at Ephesus, and shortly afterwards they are again mentioned as being in the same city (1 Corinthians 16:19; 2 Timothy 4:19). The very next name Epaenetus is clearly described as a native of the province of Asia. Of the others many are Jewish, many Greek, and it is more likely that they should be natives of Ephesus than natives of Rome. 3. That the warning against false teachers is quite inconsistent with the whole tenor of the letter, which elsewhere never refers to false teachers as being at work in Rome.

In examining this hypothesis we must notice at once that it does not in any way help us to solve the textual difficulties, and receives no assistance from them. The problems of the concluding doxology and of the omission of the last two chapters remain as they were. It is only if we insert a benediction both at ver. 20 and at ver. 24 that we get any assistance. In that case we might explain the duplicate benediction by supposing that the first was the conclusion of the Ephesian letter, the second the conclusion of the Roman. As we have seen, the textual phenomena do not support this view. The theory therefore must be examined on its own merits, and the burden of proof is thrown on the opponents of the Roman destination of the Epistle, for as has been shown the only critical basis we can start from, in discussing St. Paul’s Epistles, is that they have come down to us substantially in the form in which they were written unless very strong evidence is brought forward to the contrary.

But this evidence cannot be called very strong. It is admitted by Weiss and Mangold, for instance, that the a priori arguments against St. Paul’s acquaintance with some twenty-four persons in the Roman community are of slight weight. Christianity was preached amongst just that portion of the population of the Empire which would be most nomadic in character. It is admitted again that it would be natural that, in writing to a strange church, St. Paul should lay special stress on all those with whom he was acquainted or of whom he had heard, in order that he might thus commend himself to them. Again, when we come to examine the names, we find that those actually connected with Ephesus are only three, and of these persons two are known to have originally come from Rome, while the third alone can hardly be considered sufficient support for this theory. When again we come to examine the warning against heretics, we find that after all it is perfectly consistent with the body of the Epistle. If we conceive it to be a warning against false teachers whom St. Paul fears may come but who have not yet done so, it exactly suits the situation, and helps to explain the motives he had in writing the Epistle. He definitely states that he is only warning them that they may be wise if occasion arise.

The arguments against these verses are not strong. What is the value of the definite evidence in their favour? This is of two classes. (i) The archaeological evidence for connecting the names in the Epistle with Rome. (ii) The archaeological and literary evidence for connecting any of the persons mentioned here with the Roman Church.

(i) In his commentary on the Philippians, starting from the text Philippians 4:22�Romans 16:0 in the light of Roman inscriptions. We happen to have preserved to us almost completely the funereal inscriptions of certain columbaria in which were deposited the ashes of members of the imperial household. Some of these date a little earlier than the Epistle to the Romans, some of them are almost contemporary. Besides these we have a large number of inscriptions containing names of freedmen and others belonging to the imperial household. Now examples of almost every name in Romans 16:3-16 may be found amongst these, and the publication of the sixth volume of the Corpus of Latin Inscriptions has enabled us to add to the instances quoted. Practically every name may be illustrated in Rome, and almost every name in the Inscriptions of the household, although some of them are uncommon.

Now what does this prove? It does not prove of course that these are the persons to whom the Epistle was written; nor does it give overwhelming evidence that the names are Roman. It shows that such a combination of names was possible in Rome: but it shows something more than this. Mangold asks what is the value of this investigation as the same names are found outside Rome? The answer is that for the most part they are very rare. Lipsius makes various attempts to illustrate the names from Asiatic inscriptions, but not very successfully; nor does Mangold help by showing that the two common names Narcissus and Hermas may be paralleled elsewhere. We have attempted to institute some comparison, but it is not very easy and will not be until we have more satisfactory collections of Greek inscriptions. If we take the Greek Corpus we shall find that in the inscriptions of Ephesus only three names out of the twenty-four in this list occur; if we extend our survey to the province of Asia we shall find only twelve. Now what this comparison suggests is that such a combination of names—Greek, Jewish, and Latin—could as a matter of fact only be found in the mixed population which formed the lower and middle classes of Rome. This evidence is not conclusive, but it shows that there is no a priori improbability in the names being Roman, and that it would be difficult anywhere else to illustrate such an heterogeneous collection.

To this we may add the further evidence afforded by the explanation given by Bishop Lightfoot and repeated in the notes, of the households of Narcissus and Aristobulus: evidence again only corroborative but yet of some weight.

(ii) The more direct archaeological evidence is that for connecting the names of Prisca, Amplias, Nereus, and Apelles definitely with the early history of Roman Christianity. These points have been discussed sufficiently in the notes, and it is only necessary to say here that it would be an excess of scepticism to look upon such evidence as worthless, although it might not weigh much if there were strong evidence on the other side.

To sum up then. There is no external evidence against this section, nor does the exclusion of it from the Roman letter help in any way to solve the problems presented by the text. The arguments against the Roman destination are purely a priori. They can therefore have little value. On being examined they were found not to be valid; while evidence not conclusive but considerable has been brought forward in favour of the Roman destination. For these reasons we have used the sixteenth chapter without hesitation in writing an account of the Roman Church, and any success we have had in the drawing of the picture which we have been able to present must be allowed to weigh in the evidence.

4. Reiche (in 1833) suggested that the doxology was not genuine, and his opinion has been largely followed, combined in some cases with theories as to the omission of other parts, in some cases not. It is well known that passages which did not originally form part of the text are inserted in different places in different texts; for instance, the pericope adulterae is found in more than one place. It would still be difficult to find a reason for the insertion of the doxology in the particular place at the end of chap. 14, but at the same time the theory that it is not genuine will account for its omission altogether in some MSS. and its insertion in different places in others. We ask then what further evidence there is for this omission, and are confronted with a large number of arguments which inform us that it is clearly unpauline because it harmonizes in style, in phraseology, and in subject-matter with non-pauline Epistles—that to the Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles. This argument must tell in different ways to different critics. It will be very strong, if not conclusive, to those who consider that these Epistles are not Pauline. To those however who accept them as genuine these arguments will rather confirm their belief in the Pauline authorship.

5. But there is an alternative hypothesis which may demand more careful consideration from us, that although it comes from St. Paul it belongs to rather a later period in his life. It is this consideration amongst others which forms the basis of the theory put forward by Dr. Lightfoot. He considers that the original Epistle to the Romans written by St. Paul contained all our present Epistle except 16:25-27; that at a somewhat later period—the period perhaps of his Roman imprisonment, St. Paul turned this into a circular letter; he cut off the last two chapters which contained for the most part purely personal matter, he omitted the words ἐν Ῥώμῃ in 1:7 and 15; and then added the doxology at the end because he felt the need of some more fitting conclusion. Then, at a later date, in order to make the original Epistle complete the doxology was added from the later recension to the earlier.

Dr. Lightfoot points out that this hypothesis solves all the problems. It explains the existence of a shorter recension, it explains the presence of the doxology in both places, it explains the peculiar style of the doxology. We may admit this, but there is one point it does not explain; it does not explain how or why St. Paul made the division at the end of chap. 14. There is nothing in the next thirteen verses which unfits them for general circulation. They are in fact more suitable for an encyclical letter than is chap. 14. It is to us inconceivable that St. Paul should have himself mutilated his own argument by cutting off the conclusion of it. This consideration therefore seems to us decisive against Dr. Lightfoot’s theory.

6. Dr. Hort has subjected the arguments of Dr. Lightfoot to a very close examination. He begins by a careful study of the doxology and has shown clearly first of all that the parallels between it and passages in the four acknowledged Epistles are much commoner and nearer than was thought to be the case; and secondly that it exactly reproduces and sums up the whole argument of the Epistle. On his investigation we have based our commentary, and we must refer to that and to Dr. Hort’s own essay for the reasons which make us accept the doxology as not only a genuine work of St. Paul, but also as an integral portion of the Epistle. That at the end he should feel compelled once more to sum up the great ideas of which the Epistle is full and put them clearly and strongly before his readers is quite in accordance with the whole mind of the Apostle. He does so in fact at the conclusion of the Galatian letter, although not in the form of a doxology.

Dr. Hort then proceeds to criticize and explain away the textual phenomena. We have quoted his emendation of the passage in Origen and pointed out that it is to us most unconvincing. No single argument in favour of the existence of the shorter recension may be strong, but the combination of reasons is in our opinion too weighty to be explained away.

Dr. Hort’s own conclusions are: (1) He suggests that as the last two chapters were considered unsuitable for public reading, they might be omitted in systems of lectionaries while the doxology—which was felt to be edifying—was appended to chap. 14, that it might be read. (2) Some such theory as this might explain the capitulations. ‘The analogy of the common Greek capitulations shows how easily the personal or local and as it were temporary portions of an epistle might be excluded from a schedule of chapters or paragraphs.’ (3) The omission of the allusions to Rome is due to a simple transcriptional accident. (4) ‘When all is said, two facts have to be explained, the insertion of the Doxology after 14 and its omission.’ This latter is due to Marcion, which must be explained to mean an omission agreeing with the reading in Marcion’s copy. ‘On the whole it is morally certain that the omission is his only as having been transmitted by him, in other words that it is a genuine ancient reading.’ Dr. Hort finally concludes that though a genuine reading it is incorrect and perhaps arises through some accident such as the tearing off of the end of a papyrus roll or the last sheet in a book.

While admitting the force of some of Hort’s criticisms on Lightfoot, and especially his defence of the genuineness of the doxology, we must express our belief that his manner of dealing with the evidence is somewhat arbitrary, and that his theory does not satisfactorily explain all the facts.

7. We ourselves incline to an opinion suggested first we believe by Dr. Gifford.

As will have already become apparent, no solution among those offered has attempted to explain what is really the most difficult part of the problem, the place at which the division was made. We know that the doxology was in many copies inserted at the end of chap. 14; we have strong grounds for believing that in some editions chaps. 15 and 16 were omitted; why is it at this place, certainly not a suitable one, that the break occurs? As we have seen, a careful examination of the text shows that the first thirteen verses of chap. 15 are linked closely with chap. 14—so closely that it is impossible to believe that they are not genuine, or that the Apostle himself could have cut them off from the context in publishing a shorter edition of his Epistle intended for a wide circulation. Nor again is it probable that any one arranging the Epistle for church services would have made the division at this place. The difficulty of the question is of course obscured for us by the division into chapters. To us if we wished to cut off the more personal part of the Epistle, a rough and ready method might suggest itself in the excision of the last two chapters, but we are dealing with a time before the present of probably any division into chapters existed.

Now if there were no solution possible, we might possibly ascribe this division to accident; but as a matter of fact internal evidence and external testimony alike point to the same cause. We have seen that there is considerable testimony for the fact that Marcion excised the last two chapters, and if we examine the beginning of chap. 15 we shall find that as far as regards the first thirteen verses hardly any other course was possible for him, if he held the opinions which are ascribed to him. To begin with, five of these verses contain quotations from the O. T.; but further ver. 8 contains an expression λέγω γὰρ Χριστὸν διάκονον γεγενῆσθαι περιτομῆς ὑπὲρ�

Arminius (Jakob Harmensen), 1560-1609, Professor at Leyden, 1603. As a typical example of the opposite school of interpretation to that of Calvin may be taken Arminius. His works were comparatively few, and he produced few commentaries. Two tracts of his however were devoted to explaining Romans 7:0 and 9. He admirably illustrates the statement of Hallam that ‘every one who had to defend a cause, found no course so ready as to explain the Scriptures consistently with his own tenets.’

The two principal Roman Catholic commentators of the seventeenth century were Estius and Cornelius a Lapide.

Cornelius a Lapide (van Stein), ob. 1637, a Jesuit, published his Commentaria in omnes d. Pauli epistolas at Antwerp in 1614.

Estius (W. van Est), ob. 1613, was Provost and Chancellor of Douay. His In omnes Pauli et aliorum apostolor. epistolas commentar. was published after his death at Douay in 1614-1616.

Grotius (Huig van Groot), 1583-1645. His Annotationes in N. T. were published at Paris in 1644. This distinguished publicist and statesman had been in his younger days a pupil of J. J. Scaliger at Leyden, and his Commentary on the Bible was the first attempt to apply to its elucidation the more exact philological methods which he had learnt from his master. He had hardly the philological ability for the task he had undertaken, and although of great personal piety was too much destitute of dogmatic interest.

The work of the philologists and scholars of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century on the Old and New Testament was summed up in Critici Sacri, first published in 1660. It contains extracts from the leading scholars from Valla and Erasmus to Grotius, and represents the point which philological study in the N. T. had up to that time attained.

Two English commentators belonging to the seventeenth century deserve notice

Hammond, Henry (1605-1660), Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. Hammond was well known as a royalist. He assisted in the production of Walton’s Polyglott. His Paraphrase and Annotations of the New Testament appeared in 1653, a few years before his death, at a time when the disturbances of the Civil War compelled him to live in retirement. He has been styled the father of English commentators, and certainly no considerable exegetical work before his time had appeared in this country. But he has a further title to fame. His commentary undoubtedly deserves the title of ‘historical.’ In his interpretation he has detached himself from the dogmatic struggles of the seventeenth century, and throughout he attempts to expound the Apostle in accordance with his own ideas and those of the times when he lived.

Locke, John (1662-1704), the well-known philosopher, devoted his last years to the study of St. Paul’s Epistles, and in 1705-1707 were published A Paraphrase and Notes to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians, the first and second Epistles to the Corinthians, and the Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians. Appended is an Essay for the understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles by consulting St. Paul himself. A study of this essay is of great interest. It is full of acute ideas and thoughts, and would amply vindicate the claim of the author to be classed as an ‘historical’ interpreter. The commentaries were translated into German, and must have had some influence on the future development of Biblical Exegesis.

Bengel, J. A. (Beng.), 1687-1752; a Lutheran prelate in Würtemberg. His Gnomon Novi Testamenti (1742) stands out among the exegetical literature not only of the eighteenth century but of all centuries for its masterly terseness and precision and for its combination of spiritual insight with the best scholarship of his time.

Wetstein (or Wettstein), J. J., 1693-1754; after being deposed from office at Basel on a charge of heterodoxy he became Professor in the Remonstrants’ College at Amsterdam. His Greek Testament appeared 1751, 1752. Wetstein was one of those indefatigable students whose first-hand researches form the base of other men’s labours In the history of textual criticism he deserves to be named by the side of John Mill and Richard Bentley; and besides his collation of MSS. he collected a mass of illustrative matter on the N. T. from classical, patristic, and rabbinical sources which is still of great value.

4. Modern Period

Tholuck, F. A. G., 1799-1877; Professor at Halle. Tholuck was a man of large sympathies and strong religious character, and both personally and through his commentary (which came out first in 1824 and has been more than once translated) exercised a wide influence outside Germany; this is specially marked in the American exegetes.

Fritzsche, C. F. A. (Fri.), 1801-1846, Professor at Giessen. Fritzsche on Romans (3 vols. 1836-1843), like Lücke on St. John and Bleek on Hebrews, is a vast quarry of materials to which all subsequent editors have been greatly indebted. Fritzsche was one of those philologists whose researches did most to fix the laws of N. T. Greek, but his exegesis is hard and rationalizing. He engaged in a controversy with Tholuck the asperity of which he regretted before his death. He was however no doubt the better scholar and stimulated Tholuck to self-improvement in this respect.

Meyer, H. A. W. (Mey.), 1800-1873; Consistorialrath in the kingdom of Hanover. Meyer’s famous commentaries first began to appear in 1832, and were carried on with unresting energy in a succession of new and constantly enlarged editions until his death. There is an excellent English translation of the Commentary on Romans published by Messrs. T. and T. Clark under the editorship of Dr. W. P. Dickson in 1873, 1874. Meyer and De Wette may be said to have been the founders of the modern style of commenting, at once scientific and popular: scientific, through its rigorous—at times too rigorous—application of grammatical and philological laws, and popular by reason of its terseness and power of presenting the sifted results of learning and research. Since Meyer’s death the Commentary on Romans has been edited with equal conscientiousness and thoroughness by Dr. Bernhard Weiss, Professor at Berlin (hence ‘Mey.-W.’). Dr. Weiss has not all his predecessor’s vigour of style and is rather difficult to follow, but especially in textual criticism marks a real advance.

De Wette, W. M. L. (De W.), 1780-1849; Professor for a short time at Berlin, whence he was dismissed, afterwards at Basel. His Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Neuen Testament first appeared in 1836-1848. De Wette was an ardent lover of freedom and rationalistically inclined. but his commentaries are models of brevity and precision.

Stuart, Moses, 1780-1852; Professor at Andover, Mass. Comm. on Romans first published in 1832 (British edition with preface by Dr. Pye-Smith in 1833). At a time when Biblical exegesis was not being very actively prosecuted in Great Britain two works of solid merit were produced in America. One of these was by Moses Stuart, who did much to naturalize German methods. He expresses large obligations to Tholuck, but is independent as a commentator and modified considerably the Calvinism of his surroundings.

Hodge, Dr. C., 1797-1878; Professor at Princeton, New Jersey. His Comm. on Romans first published in 1835, rewritten in 1864, is a weighty and learned doctrinal exposition based on the principles of the Westminster Confession. Like Moses Stuart, Dr. Hodge also owed much of his philological equipment to Germany where he had studied.

Alford, Dr. H. (Alf.), 1810-1871; Dean of Canterbury. His Greek Testament (1849-1861, and subsequently) was the first to import the results of German exegesis into many circles in England Nonconformists (headed by the learned Dr. J. Pye-Smith) had been in advance of the Established Church in this respect. Dean Alford’s laborious work is characterized by vigour, good sense, and scholarship, sound as far as it goes; it is probably still the best complete Greek Testament by a single hand.

Wordsworth, Dr. Christopher, 1809-1885; Bishop of Lincoln. Bishop Wordsworth’s Greek Testament (1856-1860, and subsequently) is of an older type than Dean Alford’s, and chiefly valuable for its patristic learning. The author was not only a distinguished prelate but a literary scholar of a high order (as may be seen by his Athens and Attica, Conjectural Emendations of Ancient Authors, and many other publications) but he wrote at a time when the reading public was less exigent in matters of higher criticism and interpretation.

Jowett, B., 1817-1893; widely known as Master of Balliol College and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford. His edition of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans first appeared in 1855; second edition 1859; recently re-edited by Prof. L. Campbell. Professor Jowett’s may be said to have been the first attempt in England at an entirely modern view of the Epistle. The essays contain much beautiful and suggestive writing, but the exegesis is loose and disappointing.

Vaughan, Dr. C. J. (Va.); Dean of Llandaff. Dr. Vaughan’s edition first came out in 1859, and was afterwards enlarged; the edition used for this commentary has been the 4th (1874). It is a close study of the Epistle by a finished scholar with little further help than the Concordance to the Septuagint and Greek Testament: its greatest value lies in the careful selection of illustrative passages from these sources.

Kelly, W.; associated at one time with the textual critic Tregelles. His Notes on the Epistle to the Romans (London, 1873), are written from a detached and peculiar standpoint; but they are the fruit of sound scholarship and of prolonged and devout study, and they deserve more attention than they have received.

Beet, Dr. J. Agar; Tutor in the Wesleyan College, Richmond. Dr. Beet’s may be described as the leading Wesleyan commentary: it starts from a very careful exposition of the text, but is intended throughout as a contribution to systematic theology. The first edition appeared in 1877, the second in 1881, and there have been several others since.

Godet, Dr. F. (Go.), Professor at Neuchatel. Commentaire sur l’Epître aux Romains, Paris, &c., 1879, English translation in T. and T. Clark’s series, 1881. Godet and Oltramare are both Franco-Swiss theologians with a German training; and their commentaries are somewhat similar in character. They are extremely full, giving and discussing divergent interpretations under the names of their supporters. Both are learned and thoughtful works, strongest in exegesis proper and weakest in textual criticism.

Oltramare, Hugues (Oltr.), 1813-1894; Professor at Geneva Commentaire sur l’Epître aux Romains, published in 1881, 1882 (a volume on chaps. 1-5:11 had appeared in 1843). Resembling Godet in many particulars, Oltramare seems to us to have the stronger grip and greater individuality in exegesis, though the original views of which he is fond do not always commend themselves as right.

Moule, Rev. H. C. G. (Mou.); Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Mr. Moule’s edition (in the Cambridge Bible for Schools) appeared in 1879. It reminds us of Dr. Vaughan’s in its elegant scholarship and seeming independence of other commentaries, but it is fuller in exegesis. The point of view approaches as nearly as an English Churchman is likely to approach to Calvinism. Mr. Moule has also commented on the Epistle in The Expositor’s Bible.

Gifford, Dr. E. H. (Gif.); sometime Archdeacon of London. The Epistle to the Romans in The Speaker’s Commentary (1881) was contributed by Dr. Gifford, but is also published separately. We believe that this is on the whole the best as it is the most judicious of all English commentaries on the Epistle. There are few difficulties of exegesis which it does not fully face, and the solution which it offers is certain to be at once scholarly and well considered: it takes account of previous work both ancient and modern, though the pages are not crowded with names and references. Our obligations to this commentary are probably higher than to any other.

Liddon, Dr. H. P. (Lid.); Explanatory Analysis of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, published posthumously in 1893, after being in an earlier form circulated privately among Dr. Liddon’s pupils during his tenure of the Ireland Chair (1870-1882). The Analysis was first printed in 1876, but after that date much enlarged. It is what its name implies, an analysis of the argument with very full notes, but not a complete edition. It is perhaps true that the analysis is somewhat excessively divided and subdivided; in exegesis it is largely based on Meyer, but it shows everywhere the hand of a most lucid writer and accomplished theologian.

Barmby, Dr. James; formerly Principal of Bishop Hatfield’s Hall, Durham. Dr. Barmby contributed Romans to the Pulpit Commentary (London, 1890); a sound, independent and vigorous exposition.

Lipsius, Dr. R. A. (Lips.), 1830-1892; Professor at Jena. This most unwearied worker won and maintained his fame in other fields than exegesis. He had however written a popular commentary on Romans for the Protestantenbibel (English translation, published by Messrs. Williams & Norgate in 1883), and he edited the same Epistle along with Galatians and Philippians in the Handcommentar zum Neuen Testament (Freiburg i. B., 1891). This is a great improvement on the earlier work, and is perhaps in many respects the best, as it is the latest, of German commentaries; especially on the side of historical criticism and Biblical theology it is unsurpassed. No other commentary is so different from those of our own countrymen, or would serve so well to supplement their deficiencies.

Schaefer, Dr. A.; Professor at Münster. Dr. Schaefer’s Erklärung d. Briefes an die Römer (Münster i. W., 1891) may be taken as a specimen of Roman Catholic commentaries. It is pleasantly and clearly written, with fair knowledge of exegetical literature, but seems to us often just to miss the point of the Apostle’s thought. Dr. Schanz, the ablest of Roman Catholic commentators, has not treated St. Paul’s Epistles.

We are glad to have been able to refer, through the kindness of a friend, to a Russian commentary.

Theophanes, ob. 1893; was Professor and Inspector in the St. Petersburgh Ecclesiastical Academy and afterwards Bishop of Vladimir and Suzdal. He early gave up his see and retired to a life of learning and devotion. His commentary on the Romans was published in 1890. He is described as belonging to an old and to a certain extent antiquated school of exegesis. His commentary is based mainly on that of Chrysostom. Theophanes has both the strength and weakness of his master. Like him he is often historical in his treatment, like him he sometimes fails to grasp the more profound points in the Apostle’s teaching.

ABBREVIATIONS

————

Ecclesiastical Writers (see p. xcviii ff.).

Amb. Ambrose.

Ambrstr. Ambrosiaster.

Ath. Athanasius.

Aug. Augustine.

Bas. Basil.

Chrys. Chrysostom.

Clem.-Alex. Clement of Alexandria.

Clem.-Rom. Clement of Rome.

Cypr. Cyprian.

Cyr.-Alex. Cyril of Alexandria.

Cyr.-Jerus. Cyril of Jerusalem.

Epiph. Epiphanius.

Eus. Eusebius.

Euthym.-Zig. Euthymius Zigabenus.

Hippol. Hippolytus.

Ign. Ignatius.

Jer. (Hieron.) Jerome.

Jos. Josephus.

Method. Methodius.

Novat. Novatian.

Oecum. Oecumenius.

Orig. Origen.

Orig.-lat. Latin Version of Origen

Pelag. Pelagius.

Phot. Photius.

Ruf. Rufinus.

Sedul. Sedulius.

Tert. Tertullian.

Theod.-Mops. Theodore of Mopsuessia.

Theodrt. Theodoret.

Theoph. Theophylact.

Versions (see p. lxvi f.).

Aegyptt. Egyptian.

Boh. Bohairic.

Sah. Sahidic.

Aeth. Ethiopic.

Arm. Armenian.

Goth. Gothic.

Latt. Latin.

Lat.Vet. Vetus Latina.

Vulg. Vulgate.

Syrr. Syriac.

Pesh. Peshitto.

Harcl. Harclean.

Cov. Coverdale.

Genev. Geneva.

Rhem. Rheims (or Douay).

Tyn. Tyndale.

Wic. Wiclif.

AV. Authorized Version

RV. Revised Version.

Editors (see p. cv ff.).

T. R. Textus Receptus.

Tisch. Tischendorf.

Treg. Tregelles.

WH. Westcott and Hort.

Alf. Alford.

Beng. Bengel.

Del. Delitzsch.

De W. De Wette.

Ell. Ellicott.

Fri. Fritzsche (C. F. A.).

Gif. Gifford.

Go. Godet.

Lft. Lightfoot.

Lid. Liddon.

Lips. Lipsius.

Mey. Meyer.

Mey.-W. Meyer-Weisa.

Oltr. Oltramare.

Va. Vaughan.

C.I.G. Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum.

C.I.L. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

Grm.-Thay. Grimm-Thayer’s Lexicon.

Trench, Syn. Trench on Synonyms.

Win. Winer’s Grammar.

Exp. Expositor.

JB Exeg. Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis.

ZwTh. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie.

add. addit, addunt, &c.

al. alii, alibi.

cat. (caten.) catena.

codd. codices.

edd. editores.

edd. pr. editores priores (older editors).

om. omittit, omittunt, &c.

pauc. pauci.

pler. plerique.

plur. plures.

praem. praemittit, praemittunt, &c.

rel. reliqui.

2/3, 4/5, &c. twice out of three times, four out of five times, &c.

In text-critical notes adverbs (bis, semel, &c.), statistics (2/3, 4/5) and cod. codd., ed. edd., &c., always qualify the word which precedes, not that which follows: ‘Vulg. codd.’ = some MSS. of the Vulgate, Epiph. cod. or Epiph. ed. = a MS. or some printed edition of Epiphanius.

N.B.—The text commented upon is that commonly known as the Revisers’ Greek Text (i. e. the Greek Text presupposed in the Revised Version of 1881) published by the Clarendon Press. The few instances in which the editors dissent from this text are noted as they occur.











אԠCod. Sinaiticus

אԠCod. Sinaiticus, corrector a

אԠCod. Sinaiticus, corrector b

אԠCod. Sinaiticus, corrector c

A Cod. Alexandrinus

B Cod. Vaticanus

1 Dr. Gregory would carry back the evidence further, to 1521 (Proleg.p. 360), but M. Batiffol could find no trace of the MS. in the earlier lists.

B Cod. Vaticanus, corrector 2

B Cod. Vaticanus, corrector 3

C Cod. Ephraemi Rescriptus

D Cod. Claromontanus

E Cod. Sangermanensis

F Cod. Augiensis

G Cod. Boernerianus

H Cod. Coislinianus

K Cod. Mosquensis

L Cod. Angelicus

P Cod. Porphyrianus

S Cod Athous Laurae

Latt. Latin.

Lat. Vetus Latina.

Vulg. Vulgate.

Boh. Bohairic.

Sah. Sahidic.

Syrr. Syriac.

Pesh. Peshitto.

Harcl. Harclean.

Arm. Armenian.

Goth. Gothic.

Aeth. Ethiopic.

WH. Westcott and Hort.

Tisch. Tischendorf.

1 A similar view is held by Corssen. He regards the modern text based on &א B as nur ein Spiegelbild einer willkürlich fixierten Recension des vierten Jahrhunderts(Der Cyprianische Text d. Acta Apostolorum, Berlin, 1892, p. 24)

1 Since the above was written all speculations on the subject of Euthalius have been superseded by Prof. Armitage Robinson’s admirable essay in Texts and Studies, iii. 3. Both the text of Euthalius and that of the Codex Pamphiliare shown to be as yet very uncertain quantities. Still it is probable that the authorities in question are really connected, and that there are elements in their text which may be traceable to Euthalius on the one hand and the Caesarean Library on the other.

Aug. Augustine.

&c. always qualify the word which precedes, not that which follows:

Chrys. Chrysostom.

Orig.-lat. Latin Version of Origen

al. alii, alibi.

rel. reliqui.

Epiph. Epiphanius.

Ambrstr. Ambrosiaster.

Theod.-Mops. Theodore of Mopsuessia.

* The LXX of Deuteronomy 32:35 reads ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ἐκδικήσεως�

2�

4 Romans 2:4 = Dial. 47; Romans 3:11-17 = Dial. 27; Romans 4:3 = Dial. 23; Romans 9:7 = Dial. 44; Romans 9:27-29 = Dial. 32, 55, 64; Romans 10:18 = Apol. 1:40; Romans 11:2, Romans 11:3 = Dial. 39.

5 Hipp. Ref.v. 7, pp. 138. 64-140. 76 = Romans 1:20-26

6 Ibid. 6:36, p. 286. 9-10 = Romans 8:11.

7 Ibid. vii. 25, p. 370. 80 = Romans 5:13, Romans 5:14; ibid. p. 368. 75 = Romans 8:19, Romans 8:22.

1 On Harnack’s theory that the Pauline Epistles had at the close of the second century less canonical authority than the Gospels, see Sanday, Bampton Lectures, pp. 20, 66.

1 On this subject see Zahn, Geschichte, &c., ii. p. 344.

1 Evanson (Edward), The Dissonance of the four generally received Evangelists examined, Ed. 1, 1792, pp. 257-261; Ed. 2, 1805, pp. 306-312.

2 Bruno Bauer, Kritik der Paul. Briefe, 1852. Christus und die Cäsaren, p. 372.

3 Loman (a.d.), Quaestiones Paulinae, Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1882, 1883, 1886.

4 Steck (Rudolf), Der Galaterbrief nach seiner Echtheit untersucht. Berlin, 1888.

5 Weisse (C. H.), Beiträge zur Kritik der Paulinischen Briefe an die Galater, Römer, Philipper und Kolosser. Leipzig, 1867.

6 Verisimilia, Laceram conditionem Novi Testamenti exhibentia.A. Pierson, et S. A. Naber, Amstelodami, 1886.

1 Op. cit., pp. 139-143.

2 Michelsen (J. H. A.), Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1886, pp. 372 ff., 473 ff.; 1887, p. 163 ff.

3 Voelter (Daniel), Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1889, p. 265 ff.; and Die Composition der paul. Hauptbriefe, I. Der Römer- und Galaterbrief, 1890.

4 Van Manen (W. C.), Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1887. Marcion’s Brief van Paulus aan de Galaties, pp. 82 404, 451-533; and Paulus II, De brief aan de Romeinen. Leiden, 1891.

1 The English reader will find a very full account of this Dutch school of critics in Knowling, The Witness of the Epistles, pp. 133-243. A very careful compilation of the results arrived at is given by Dr. Carl Clemen, Die Einheitlichkeit der Paulinischen Briefe. To both these works we must express our obligations, and to them we must refer any who wish for further information.

2 The leading discussion on the last two chapters of the Romans is contained in three papers, two by Bp. Lightfoot, and one by Dr. Hort first published in the Journal of Philology, vols. ii, iii, and since reprinted in Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, pp. 287-374.

codd. codices.

d Latin version of D

e Latin version of E

f Latin version of F

g Latin version of G

Ruf. Rufinus.

1 Theologische Zeitung, 1836, pp. 97, 144. Paulus, 1866, pp. 393 ff.

2 St. Paul, p. lxxi. quoted by Lightfoot, Biblical Essays, p. 290.

1 Lucht, Uber die beiden letzten Capitel des Römerbriefs, 1871.

2 Renan, St. Paul, pp. lxiii ff. This theory is examined at great length by Bp. Lightfoot, op. cit. pp. 293 ff.

Orig. Origen.

Theodrt. Theodoret.

Oecum. Oecumenius.

Phot. Photius.

Theoph. Theophylact.

Euthym.-Zig. Euthymius Zigabenus.

Pelag. Pelagius.

Beng. Bengel.

Fri. Fritzsche (C. F. A.).

Mey. Meyer.

Mey.-W. Meyer-Weisa.

De De Wette.

Alf. Alford.

Va. Vaughan.

Go. Godet.

&c. always qualify the word which precedes, not that which follows:

Oltr. Oltramare.

Gif. Gifford.

Lid. Liddon.

Lips. Lipsius.