report; they do not imply the presence of friends upon the spot who kept him supplied with information. On the other hand, the circle of people addressed in xvi. 1-23, with its wealth of individual colour and personal detail, presupposes a sphere where Paul had worked for long. He can appeal to these Christians. He can speak sharply with authority to them. Now, as he wrote from Corinth, the only other city which answers to this description is Ephesus, the centre of Paul's long Asiatic mission. With that city and district several of the names in xvi. 1-23 are more or less directly connected, e.g. Epaenetus (5), Aquila and Priscilla (3), who were at Ephesus immediately before Romans was written (Acts xviii. 18, 26; cf. 1 Cor. xvi. 19), and apparently were there (cf. 2 Tim. iv. 19) not long afterwards. These are the first people mentioned in the note, nor is there any likelihood that they or the rest of Paul's friends[1] had made a sudden migration to the capital. Doubtless, there was fairly constant communication between Rome and the provinces, and in the course of time these friends may have gradually followed the apostle thither. Hence it is not remarkable that almost all the names mentioned in this note have been found by archaeologists (cf. Lightfoot's Philippians, pp. 171 f.) within the Roman Corpus Inscriptionum. Most of them, anyhow, are fairly common throughout the Roman world (cf. Lietzmann, p. 73), whilst half are to be found in the Greek Corpus Inscriptionum for Asia Minor (e.g. Epaenetus, Hermes, Hermas).[2] Furthermore, the sharp warning against terrorists and heretics (xvi. 17-20) suits Rome at this period much less aptly than Ephesus (cf. 1 Cor. xvi. 8-9; Acts xx. 29 f.; Rev. ii. 2 f.), where trouble of this kind was in the air. Controversy against false teachers is conspicuously absent from Romans. Nor is it possible to regard (with Zahn) such counsels as merely prophylactic; they are too definite and pointed. They imply the existence of a community with which Paul was personally acquainted, and to which he felt himself bound and free to address keen, authoritative reproaches.
The textual phenomena of the doxology (xvi. 25-27), which occurs in some MSS. after xiv. 23, are sufficiently strange; they suggest that the epistle must have passed through a certain process of editing, during the 2nd century, previous to its final incorporation in the canon of the epistles.[3] It may further be conjectured that the epistle does not lie before the modern reader in the precise shape in which it left Paul and his amanuensis at Corinth. Opinions, indeed, vary on the doxology. Either it is authentic but irrelevant, added by Paul as a postscript, or it is unauthentic,[4] due to some copyist who added it as a suitable finale at the close. In the Pauline canon Romans originally occupied the last place. It would therefore be natural that a note like that of xvi. 1-23 should be put in here, especially if this canon was drawn up at Rome, whither Phoebe probably travelled eventually. The doxology would then be shifted from after xiv. 23 or inserted for the first time for ecclesiastical purposes. The material conditions of such a process are lucidly stated by Dr C. R. Gregory in his Canon and Text of the New Testament (1907), pp. 319 f.
The problems presented by the structure of these chapters[5] cannot be solved adequately by the mere hypothesis, worked out variously by critics like Paulus, Griesbach (Curarum in historiam textus Graeci epistolarum Pauli spec. i. pp. 45 f.), Eichhorn and Flatt, that they are a series of postscripts or afterthoughts, much less by the conjecture that, in whole or in part, they are unauthentic (Baur, Volkmar, &c.). The only tenable line of argument, in the present state of criticism, is to regard their phenomena as due to compilation, at the time when the canon (perhaps of Paul's epistles) was first formed. If the hypothesis already outlined is set aside, it is open to the critic to regard large portions of the canonical Romans as having originally occupied a separate setting,[6] or to ascribe the textual variations to the exigencies of church reading after the formation of the canon (which might explain the absence of ἐν Ῥώμῃ in i. 7, 15, and the duplicate position of the doxology).[7]
The uncertainty as to the literary structure of the epistle naturally renders it hazardous to infer the character of the Christians who are addressed, but it may be said that the results of the long debate on this point are converging upon the belief that the predominant class in the local church or churches were Gentile Christians, while proselytes must have swelled the ranks to no inconsiderable degree. Since Weizsäcker wrote, the older view of Baur (cf. his Paul, Eng. tr. i. pp. 321 f.) has steadily lost ground. Zahn is now its main supporter, and his contentions are not convincing. Even were ix.-xi. taken as the kernel of the epistle, its obvious motive is to be found in the need of explaining to Gentile Christians the reasons for Israel's apparent rejection, and passages like i. 5 f., 13, xi. 13, xv. 15 f., are, if not decisive, at any rate superior to any references which can be urged fairly on the opposite side. To a church of this kind, in the capital of the Empire, Paul writes out his gospel more fully than in any other of his extant epistles. It is the essence of the gospel that he treats, and that is the revelation of God's righteousness to man by faith in Jesus Christ. Neither sacraments nor organization come within his purview. Even eschatology lies quite in the background. Paul writes of the
- ↑ Erbes (Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 1901, 224-231) makes xvi. 1-16a a note forwarded by Paul to Rome during his last voyage thither, in order to advise some of the local Christians of his arrival (Acts xxviii. 15), but this theory is no improvement upon that of Semler, who regarded xvi. 3-16 as designed for Paul's friends outside Rome, to introduce the bearers of the larger epistle. The point of such hypotheses is to explain how the note came to be attached to Romans, but this can be shown otherwise (cf. Deissmann's Licht vom Osten, 1908, pp. 164, 201). Eichhorn (Einleit. in das N.T. iii. 243 f.) regarded xvi. 1-20 as addressed to Corinth, while Schenkel viewed it as designed for all the churches which Phoebe was to visit.
- ↑ In the Ephesian Acta Johannis (c. A.D. 160) the house of Andronicus (Rom. xvi. 7?) is one centre of Christian activity. E. H. Gifford (pp. 27-30) evades the difficulty by taking xvi. 3-20 as part of a second letter written by Paul after, not before, his release from imprisonment.
- ↑ The most recent and radical analyses are those of Spitta (Urchristentum, iii. 1902) and Völter (Paulus u. seine Briefe, 1905). The former detects a short letter written (xii.-xv. 7, xvi. 1-20) after Acts xxviii. 30, during a tour of the Gentile churches (A.D. 63-64), and another (i.-xi. 10, xv. 14-33) written to believing Jews in order to justify the Gentile mission and afterwards edited for Gentile readers with the addition of xi. 11 f., xv. 8-13, &c., Völter (pp. 135 f.) distinguishes an original letter (in i. 1, 5b-7, 8-17, v. 1-12, 15-19, 21, vi. 1-13, 16-23, xii.-xv. 6, xv. 14-16, 23b-33, xvi. 21-24) from editorial additions, and also from still later accretions in ii. 14-15, iii. 23-26, vii. 25b, xi. 11 f., xv. 7-13, 17-23a, xvi. 17 f., 25 f. Spitta's views are properly set aside by Feine and Bahnsen (Protest. Manatshefte, 1902, 331 f.) amongst others.
- ↑ It suggests a stereotyped form (cf. Mangold, Der Römerbrief, 44-81, and Holtzmann, Ephes. Col. Brief, 307-310). “In spite of the vindication of the style word by word, the impression it bears upon the mind is hardly Pauline. It seems artificial rather than inspired” (Denney, p. 582). Proofs of its Pauline authorship are led fully by Zahn (Einleitung in das N.T. § 21 f.) and Jacquier (Histoire des livres du N.T., 1903, pp. 271 f.); cf. also Bacon in Journal of Biblical Literature (1899), pp. 184 f. The entire data of xv.-xvi. are discussed fully by Lightfoot and Hort, in the former's Biblical Essays (pp. 287 f.) and in the latter's admirable volume (Romans and Ephesians), as well as in Sanday and Headlam's edition (pp. lxxxv. f.).
- ↑ Ryder (Journal of Biblical Literature, 1898, pp. 184 f.) suggests that xv.-xvi. 24 form a letter or part of a letter written not by Paul but by his amanuensis, Tertius, to his friends at Rome, c. A.D. 64, previous to the Neronic persecution.
- ↑ So J. Weiss (in Theologische Studien, 1897, p. 182 f.), as well as those who, like Renan (S. Paul, lxiii-lxxv), find different editions in the canonical epistle, one meant for Thessalonica (i.-xiv. 33, xvi. 25-27), one for Ephesus (i.-xiv., xvi. 1-20) and one for Rome (i.-xi., xv.), or who, like Lightfoot (Biblical Essays), see a double recension, the original draft having been meant for Rome (i.-xvi. 23), the later being, like Ephesians, a circular epistle.
- ↑ The epistle was so systematic in treatment and wide in scope that it lent itself readily to this “catholicizing” manipulation; thus the fact that xv.-xvi. are very rarely quoted in primitive tradition may be due to their fullness of local detail, which would have less interest for the later church. But the question of course arises, May not the epistle, in whole or in part, have originally been more of a treatise in epistolary form than at first sight appears? For various suggestions as to the problem of i. 7 see Harnack in Zeitschrift für die neutest. Wissenschaft (1902), 83-86; R. Steinmetz (ibid., 1908, 177 f.); and Schmiedel in Hibbert Journal (1903), pp. 537 f.
