characteristic of letters that is surely relevant here is that authors expected the specified audience of their letters to understand them. Whether authors always communicated adequately or readers always understood adequately is another question, but most authors at least tried to communicate so as to be clearly understood. Paul thus writes to his audience in Greek. (Greek was the first language of many non-Italians in Rome, including the majority of Jews and of Christian ministers who had come from the east; only in the second century is it clear that many lower-class, Latin-speaking Romans joined the church.) Paul also apparently writes with what he assumes will be shared cultural assumptions regarding language and concepts that he uses without detailed explanation. Informing ourselves about these shared cultural assumptions will help us understand his language; this objective is one of the primary purposes of this commentary (like many others). Better understanding the local situation in Rome does not mean that Paul would expect the principles he articulates there to be applicable there only; he does, after all, apply many of the same principles to other situations in other congregations. But noting these situations will help us better understand his argument and better identify the principles he is applying.
Paul and Rhetoric
Scholars today often read Paul’s letters in light of ancient rhetoric, a mostly positive development. Although some scholars have carried rhetorical analysis too far, as we shall observe, the development is mostly positive because ancient rhetoric offers a much more concrete basis for analyzing Paul’s arguments than modern guesses would.
Two forms of advanced education existed in the Greco-Roman world: philosophy and rhetoric. The former concerned itself especially with truth and reality, and the latter with communication and persuasion. Despite traditional, stereotypical hostility between the two disciplines, most educated people recognized the value in and made use of both. Nevertheless, rhetoric was the dominant discipline, being considered more practical for public life (politics, speeches in the courts, and so forth). Although only a small minority of people had advanced training of any kind, rhetoric pervaded society and shaped the way urban people thought and argued. Not only could passersby listen to speakers practicing in the marketplace, but oratory dominated civic assemblies and was even the subject of some public competitions.
Because such oratorical training became even more dominant in the second century, church fathers often read Paul in light of rhetoric, and Renaissance and Reformation interpreters like Melanchthon continued this practice. By the higher rhetorical standards of the second century, Paul was not an expert rhetorician, but he probably fared better by the standards of his era. Despite objections to his delivery (cf. 1 Cor 2:3; 2 Cor 10:10; 11:6), Paul’s letters include numerous rhetorical devices that would have been familiar to his contemporaries. In fact, Paul might have overcompensated to silence his critics; rhetoricians (such as Cicero) tended to limit rhetorical devices in letters, which were intended to be more like conversation than public speech.
Where scholars have overplayed rhetoric is in seeking to structure Paul’s letters as if they were speeches. Rhetorical handbooks in this period do not address letters, but when they later do, they do not treat them like speeches. Most genuine speeches do not fit the precise outlines we find in rhetorical handbooks, and we should expect such outlines to prove even less relevant to letters. They do not even fit the letters of rhetorically sophisticated letter writers like Cicero, Pliny, or Fronto.
Nevertheless, Paul’s extant letters are not normal letters (though they are comparable in some ways to some letter-essays, e.g., by Seneca).4 While Paul often includes conversational elements, many of his letters include substantial argumentation—which was characteristically the domain of rhetoric rather than of letters. While rhetoric may rarely provide us detailed outlines for his letters, therefore, it does provide abundant insights into how Paul argues his case.5
Scholars differ as to whether Paul had any rhetorical training or simply absorbed practices dominant in his environment.6 Certainly Paul did not have advanced (tertiary) training in a Greek rhetorical school with the goal of becoming a Greek orator; orators exhibited their skills by lavishly citing classical Greek texts, which appear in Paul only very rarely. By contrast, many of Paul’s letters (notably including Romans) lavishly display the Jewish Scriptures, typically in the forms dominant in the Greek Diaspora. Paul’s display of biblical knowledge suggests the combination of a brilliant mind with the best of training in the Scriptures, probably in the ancient world’s best center for such training, namely Jerusalem. If Paul, presumably from a well-off family who could afford such training, studied with Gamaliel in Greek (as suggested in Acts 22:3; cf. t. Sotah 15:8), he probably also had some additional training in delivering sermons in acceptable Greek style. Today’s equivalent might be advanced study in Bible with a few homiletics courses. If so, Paul masterfully developed the basic skills he received at this level of training.
If Paul used Greek techniques because they were a part of the milieu in which he and Diaspora Judaism (and to a somewhat reduced extent, Palestinian Judaism) moved, Paul’s more specifically “Jewish” context informs what he would have viewed as the core of his cultural identity (cf. Rom 9:1–5; 11:1).
Paul, Judaism, and the Law
When we speak of Paul and “Judaism,” we are usually thinking in anachronistic terms. Paul, like most of the earliest Christian movement even in the Diaspora, was Jewish. Modern Western readers distinguish “Judaism” and “Christianity” as distinct religions, but the Christian movement, as it came to be called, viewed itself as carrying on the biblical faith of patriarchs and prophets in view of end-time fulfillment in Christ, demonstrated by the eschatological gift of the Spirit.
As scholars today emphasize, first-century Judaism was itself highly diverse; some even speak of “Judaisms” (though emphasizing the wide variation in Jewish practice should make the point sufficiently). Its rabbinic form (which evolved into traditional Orthodox Judaism as we know it today) evolved from Pharisaism, but that evolution postdates Paul’s ministry. Paul’s faith is, in a sense, an earlier development of Pharisaism (albeit a minority one) than rabbinic Judaism is, as some Jewish scholars have recently pointed out. Jews as a people affirmed circumcision, the temple, the Torah, and other traits (many of these, like distinctive food customs, highlighted over the previous two centuries as costly marks of distinctive Jewish identity). Yet some (more often in the Holy Land) expected the imminent end of the age, whereas others denied it. The degree of Jewish Diaspora assimilation to the surrounding culture varied from one place to another and according to the attitudes of their host cultures.7 Views about messianic figures varied more widely than we have space to narrate here. Paul has been compared to apocalyptic, mystic, and Pharisaic streams of Judaism, among others.
E. P. Sanders on “the Law”
The dominant current arguments surrounding Paul’s relationship with his Jewish context most relevant to Romans, however, involve his own approach to the law versus that of his contemporaries. Views of Paul’s relationship to what we call Judaism have varied widely over the centuries, from Marcion’s proto-gnostic Paul (who rejected anything Jewish) to W. D. Davies’ Paul (who was a Pharisee who believed that the messianic era had dawned). Most scholars today would agree more with Davies than Marcion, but some aspects of Paul’s relation to Judaism—and the character of ancient Judaism—remain debated.
E. P. Sanders’s work Paul and Palestinian Judaism, published in 1977, shook New Testament scholarship in general and Pauline studies in particular. Many New Testament scholars (particularly in the German scholarly tradition—at least according to Anglophone scholars), depicted Judaism as legalistic and seeking to be justified by works. (This grid for reading the sources persisted from debates at the time of the Reformation.) Scholars of Judaism had long challenged the sufficiency
