Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Speaker A: I want you to, as we start, just want you to picture something for me.
I want you to consider a town that has this incredible, well coordinated fire brigade team that's world renowned for their efficiency and speed. And the town really only has two distinct neighborhoods. There's one that's constructed and filled with wooden houses. Another is filled with brick buildings. These are the two neighborhoods. One day, the dispatcher receives a panicked call, comes into the fire station about a blazing fire. The caller is urgently describing the fire's ferocity, the billowing smoke, the desperate need for water and for the firefighters to get there. And the fire brigade's dispatcher, hearing this, makes the decision.
He realizes he has to jump to quick action to save property and lives. And without acquiring really any of the actual information about who the audience was. On the other line sends all of the firefighters to the wooden house neighborhood. He issues the instruction, grab the wood firefighting stuff, get there quickly. These houses are going up in flames. They rush to the scene. They arrive to the neighborhood to find that the fire is not at all where it was assumed to be. They look, and all of the wooden houses are completely intact. But they look across town. Now the smoke is beginning to billow from the brick neighborhood, passing from building to building, and they realize not only are they in the wrong place, they have all of the wrong stuff. To fight fires in a brick neighborhood, they brought wood implements.
They needed high powered hoses with a certain kind of thing. And this, the result is from one thing, the dispatcher's confusion about who he was talking to and not taking the time to acquire the proper information, the fire spreads uncontrollably, causing massive destruction. Because he misunderstood the situation, the needs, and specifically the audience, and the point.
In the very same way, if you misinterpret the audience of the book of Romans, the audience of Paul's letter to the Romans, which has been done for approaching 2000 years.
When that happens, when we can then misapply the teachings, misunderstand the arguments, misrepresent the purpose of the letter, and most importantly, we cause damage. And that damage is very literally been done. The relationship between Jews and Christians for centuries has been like a house burned to the ground because the Jews became the enemies of God, due in large part to interpretations drawn from where the Book of Romans.
Now this is being reconstructed, thankfully, due in large part to a reconsideration of Paul and understanding as a major starting point in this reconsideration of Paul, who he's actually talking to. In the Book of Romans, the audience to whom he was writing. Paul wrote to a specific group with specific concerns, using rhetorical dividing specifically for that audience.
If we think he's writing to a different group or with a different intention, our entire approach to understanding the message will be flawed, and that has happened.
Systematic theology. Who knows what systematic theology is? Any seminary students in here? Anyone ever been okay? Good. Systematic theology. You can't pass seminary without it. It's a method of studying the Bible. It seeks to organize and summarize theological concepts into a coherent system. Systematic theology. The intention, then, is that you have this comprehensive framework. That is explaining the doctrines of the christian faith. God, sin, salvation, eschatology. The goal is that you tie the Bible together systematically and you interpret the scripture according to this formula. The Romans road is basically, in a sense, it's supposed to be like a mini version of systematic theology. And in turn, Paul's writing there is viewed as his super theological treatise, systematic theology. On original sin, on human depravity, on the futility of Judaism, the preeminence of grace, the necessity for Jesus. And all of it points one personal salvation, individual salvation.
That's the systematic theology supposed for Paul in the writing of Romans. Now, there are those pesky chapters we run into in Romans nine through eleven about those doggone Jews. Then we run into chapters in 1415 through 16, which are all peranetic in nature, which that just means teaching, exhorting, moral instruction.
But part of the traditional opinion of Romans, in large degree, is that this systematic theology about the individual path to salvation, a retreat from law and Torah, and that it applies to everyone in the world. It's your story of how to be saved.
This dates back millennia.
This is not the case.
Again, to be very clear, because this is so important. What I'm laying down here today is so important that you deposit this into your series takeaway. Paul is writing to address a specific community in a specific place with a specific situation, causing specific problems.
There are problems here, and if we don't see that, if we don't dismiss the idea up front that this is Paul's universal, doctrinal theological masterpiece, you got to get rid of that.
And I'm going to help you do that. I'm going to show you why that's not the case.
But understand, speaking to a specific group, an audience, that the letter makes very clear about specific problems that the letter makes very clear. And if we don't do that, you know what we're doing? We're showing up in the wrong neighborhood with the wrong tools, while the fire burns it to the ground across town.
So first and foremost, issue number, who is Paul talking to?
Paul's audience in Romans, the epistle or letter of Paul to the Romans. And I said this was going to be a challenging series. Right.
So first big challenge. We answered it last week. Paul's epistle to the Romans. Who's his audience?
The Romans. Shabbat Shalom. You got it. It's this easy. I told you I'd make them short.
The epistle to the Romans. Well, that's also easy. Right? We know who the Romans are. Caesar, Nero, Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula.
Not those Romans. Paul's Romans are a lot different. They're a different lot. A lot different. Like us, we are a lot different.
And first things first. We need to understand something. There are Jews, a fair number of Jews in Rome, and a lot of Gentiles.
A lot of Gentiles. So first thing, let's understand the position of Judaism in Rome and how it affected the Romans that I just told you, Jews and Gentiles that Paul is writing, that are to the Jews, the foundation of Judaism, where these gentiles have come in Judah Maccabee, who knows Judah Maccabee of Hanukkah fame. Right. Judah is said to have sent envoys to Rome about 160 BCE. That's before YESHUA.
It's actually to establish an alliance and peace. And Rome agreed with this. It's in one. Maccabees, chapter eight. You can read it. By the first century BCE, it is possible that some 50,000 jews were living in Rome. Okay, 50,000. Many of who may have been brought as slaves by POMPeY after his conquest in the east. Philo tells how, in the time of AUgusTus, who knows who AUgustus CaeSar is? In his time, he was very favorable to the Jews. He supported the jewish communities that the Jews occupied, quote, the great section of Rome across the Tiber. And most were emancipated roman citizens. This is potentially at least a way that Paul the Jew became a roman citizen, that somewhere in his lineage, someone had been granted their freedom from slavery, having been brought to Rome or something like it. We're not gonna get into that.
But the point is, the jewish community was relatively organized. Prosuke, you had prayer places. You had synagogue different than this. This was like the center of the jewish community. Business within the jewish community was settled there. So. And those communities maintain ties with Jerusalem. It's very, very likely that on Shavuot, the most famous Shavuot in Jerusalem, when those 3000 came to know Yeshua, some of them. The text in acts tells us, were from Rome. They went back to Rome and started a community of, we'll say, Christ followers, jewish disciples of Jesus.
It was. And that, by the way, we're talking about as early as the thIrties, in the first cEntury. Paul's writing in the late fifties, mid to late fifties.
It was, as we would expect, a very, very jewish movement at its foundation, comprised of Jews and proselytes. What's a proselyte? A proselyte is a convert gone through the legal conversion into Judaism. Jews and proselytes. Even then?
Even then. I want you to understand this. According to William Campbell, incredible commentary on the Book of Romans, there's no evidence that these Christ following Jews messed messianic Jews. Yeshua connected jews would have worshiped separately from traditional jews. So in Rome, you have this BiG collection of Jews, some following YEsHua, some not. There's Jews. Okay.
Furthermore, when non Jews joined the Jesus movement, they also associated with Jews, as God fearers tended to do. So when Romans, gentile roman citizens, came into a relationship, an understanding of YEshua, where did they go?
Where do you think they went? The synagogue. They went to the jewish foundations, where it all started.
And we know this. We know this from the book of ACtS. This was indisputably a Jewish movement which met in Jewish space, filled with Jews who never stopped or tried to shed the Jewish identity. Because here's the thing about Judaism in Rome. Rome was generally accepting of judaism and its customs. That was rare, actually, Judaism was recognized, though they found him as strange and off putting. But it was an ancestral and ancient, which were both roman requirements. To be recognized as a cult, a club, whatever the term was, had to be ancient and ancestral. And so this was a respectable cult in Rome, which was generally tolerated. So here's the point. It's very obvious it's been made. Jews in Rome, thousands of them, established the messianic community which functioned within the synagogue. So what's up with all the geNtiles?
How'd they get in the story?
Well, this also we derive from history.
Roman gentiles had an attraction to Judaism. The initial inclusion of gentiles had more to do with Judaism than it did to do with Jesus. Okay, I'm going to summarize my notes by telling you this. In greco roman thought, stoicism, the philosophers, all of them, self mastery was a massively important component of greco roman learning. That one would master one's passions, that you'd learn to temper the things that drove you to excess. It sounds very familiar, right?
That's sort of like what we talk about with the Torah and the Yetzer hara and the Yetzer Hatov, the good and evil inclination. Stanley Stowers wrote a phenomenal book that's called a rereading of Romans, which, among many topics, dives into why these Romans, these pagans, would have been attractive, attracted. Judaism was particularly attractive to them who were exploring different philosophical and religious traditions, because the Torah is centered in, in a large degree on self mastery about how to live in a proper and healthy culture, its structured, disciplined way of life that aligned with these self mastery concepts. So as a result, many pagans were drawn to jewish communities, participating in synagogue activities, even adopting jewish practices. Maybe they became proselytes, maybe they became, were God fearers, which meant they didn't convert. They were just hanging out there. Cornelius, for an example, was one we read in acts, right? God fears.
So what we have occurring in Rome is a community of Jews, and ethne is the term in Greek. Ethne, the nations, the nations, okay.
Functioning within the guidelines of Judaism under jewish leadership. And it is into that space that the message of Yeshua is imported. That's where it came in, into these jewish communities. And from then the message expands. Here's a Roman. Well, I don't know who he is. He's a monk or something. Ambrosiaster. Who knows Ambrosiaster?
I think he's not actually a real person. It's a collection of writings, but I may have him confused. Anyway. Commentator on pauline epistles Ambroseaster. Listen to what he writes.
It's evident then that there were jews living in Rome in the time of the apostles. Some of these Jews who had come to believe in Christ passed on to the Romans that they should acknowledge Christ and keep the law.
One ought not to be angry with the Romans, but praise their faith, because without seeing any signs or miracles and without any of the apostles, they came to embrace faith in Christ, though according to a jewish rite.
Okay, it's a long quote. Summary.
Jews talked to all these gentiles and brought them in. And Ambrosiaster saying, it's a great thing they did, even though they did it wrong, because they were acting like Jews.
They were acting like Jews. Get that? Notice it, mark it.
Paula Fredrickson also another great book called Paul, the Pagan's apostle. This idea of the gospel of Yeshua spreading to gentiles in Rome, it's massively important for Paul's mission, purpose, calling and writing this letter. And here we begin to get a picture of Paul's intended audience. Okay, this was, first of all, a huge decision for gentiles to make because you need to understand how much they had to lose in their respective gentile jobs and families and every other thing.
Paula, as I said, paula Paul, he is telling these pagans, you have to stop worshiping the cult of the gods that you have been worshiping your whole life. And understand for a gentile, when they stop doing that, when they acknowledge solely the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel, they put themselves in jeopardy in their towns, families and communities, because if you're not worshiping the gods, they're going to do bad things to you and to me and to our town.
That's the perspective they were having to face. Rejecting family gods. They had ostracism, alienation, hostility from family members and their broader community. Because in these societies we talk about, we have our segmented religion in this world where we. This is what we do on Saturday, the other times we do this, and sometimes we do religious things and work things.
That's just not how it worked. Religion as a concept was intertwined with everything you did in the second Temple period.
The decision to become a God fearer or a full proselyte was therefore not something you took lightly. It required substantial commitment and willingness to endure these hardships, which makes all the more important. The idea that Judaism had to have something very attractive to these people, that they would choose this life and face these kinds of difficulties.
The allure, we could say, of jewish moral and spiritual framework was powerful enough to outweigh the personal and social costs. They had a lot of skin in the game, these gentiles, these taethne, the nations that Paul is speaking to in this letter, the disciples, the ethne and Christ. Though it is pretty easy to determine that, all you have to do is read the book, because when you come along to Romans one, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name, including you, who are called to belong to Jesus. Who is he talking to? The Gentiles.
He goes on. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I have often intended to come to you, but thus far have been prevented in order that I may reap some harvest among you, as I have among the rest of the Gentiles.
Paul. He's talking to the ones to whom he has been called. Paul is the apostle to who?
The Gentiles. He reminds them in 1113. Now I am speaking to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am an apostle to the Gentiles.
In 15, on some points, I have written to you rather boldly because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles.
Okay, it's not complicated, but wasn't he also writing to the Jews? Didn't he also have them in focus?
Right. I mean, they were causing all the problems, apparently, this Torah thing and works of the law, and it seems like he speaks directly to them. And I'll point that out to you in a couple of weeks. But guess what? He doesn't ever talk to the Jews in Romans.
He never does.
And that's going to be difficult for some of you when you read romans two and Romans seven. But I'll take you there. Were the Jews.
Were the Jews going to hear the letter? To hear the letter, that's a different question than whether the letter was written to them.
And what I mean is, it's expected that when Paul writes a letter and sends it to a community, that it's going to be circulated, it's going to be read to the audience there, they're going to pass it on to the other Ethne and another community, and it's going to be read. But where did I tell you the ethnae were?
In the synagogues with the Jews. So would the Jews hear this letter? Would Paul want them to hear? Probably. Was it written to them? No, it was not written to them.
This may seem like the most boring, belabored, obvious point, and you might be wondering, why did you take 30 minutes to tell us what the text already says? Because that's not a widely held belief.
There are so many schools of thought who suggest that, yeah, he's writing to the Gentiles, but it's really the Jews he's talking to. He's really trying to correct the Jews.
He's not even talking to him.
It's so important, foundational, to following Paul's logic and approach through this entire book. The point is controversial. As I said, all of romans two presumed to be with a prideful jew. Romans seven. Do you not know, brothers and sisters? For I'm speaking to those who know the law. How can he be speaking to anyone but Jews?
Right.
It's confusing.
I will return to that.
But I want to tell you just a little bit more about Taethane, the nations.
They had been and were deeply connected to the jewish community. We got that. We can derive this from the text of Romans itself. First of all, a faith that's called Christianity. As I told you last week, it didn't even exist. There was no such thing that didn't even exist. And it would have had very, very significant difficulty trying to exist in the time period we're writing about. Do you know why Julius Caesar, who goes back, outlawed anything like that? Judaism was where you needed to be. If you were either in the synagogue looking, like, acting, like worshiping with the Jews, or you were worshiping the pantheon of roman gods and declaring the caesars to be God, those are the options. You couldn't just randomly start a new thing and say, hey, we're christians now, Caesar, can we do it?
We found out not even that much later what happened to the christians when they tried to step out on their own and do something. Nero didn't like that very much. But anyway. Anyway, it is assumed by Paul that he is. As he's addressing the nations, he presents himself in a particular way as the jewish apostle, presenting a jewish messiah who delivers a gospel concerning the God of Israel. And again, even in Taethane, the nations, it is assumed by Paul that they understand the bible from a jewish perspective, the Septuagint issues of boundaries and purity. Where else would they learn torah other than at the synagogue where the jewish scriptures were read, studied and accepted? It's obviously understanding the explicit audience of the letter as jewishly influenced gentiles existing in jewish space. Great. But why?
Why did he write the letter? That's who. That's who he's talking to. But why?
There's a term in medicine, it's called a critical exigency.
A critical exigency. A trauma, a heart attack, something, some severe trauma that requires. It's a life threatening condition. It takes immediate action. A critical exigency.
Why would Paul need to write this letter and specifically to these people? Gentile Messiah followers takes us into the purpose of Romans, of course, which I'll devote a week to soon. But we can answer this question just by looking at history.
The critical exigency. One very popular consideration has to do with a roman emperor named Claudius and the edict of Claudius, which was issued in 49.
The roman historian Suetonius, in his work the lives of the Twelve Caesars, the Book of acts also mentions this.
This Paul left Athens, went to Corinth. There he found a jew named Aquila from Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all the jews to leave Rome.
Emperor Claudius. 49 CE, the edict of Claudius.
Claudius edict expelled jews from Rome due to disturbances allegedly caused by someone known as Crestus.
C H r e s t u s. Crestus.
Since the Jews. Suetonius writes, since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Crestus, he, emperor Claudius, expelled them from Rome. Okay, Crestus, Claudius. This has been taken by many scholars, historians, to say that at that point, every single jew in Rome was kicked out.
First of all, it'd be very difficult to know who every single jew was. But anyway, let me just say, every jew kicked out of Rome because of trouble stirring within the jewish communities about the messianic claims of Jesus, who is assumed to be represented by the name Crustus. That's the. That's the historical thought. Okay.
Mark Nanos has a pretty good rebuttal to that. But because Crustus is actually a very popular name, it's very easy to just connect it and say, well, they just misspelled Christ. But Crustus was a pretty familiar roman name. So it may not be that simple. But here's what matters.
The fact that all of the Jews were kicked out of Rome because of this. It's very hard to believe that.
It's very hard to believe that neither Josephus nor Tacitus, who's the roman historian who's officially documenting this period, none of them even mention that Josephus. If 20,000 to 50,000 Jews were kicked out of Rome, don't you think that would make the news a little bit in someone's news story? Josephus, Tacitus, somebody. It's not even mentioned.
There are a number of proposed considerations about what the edict of Claudius really meant. Okay, here are some suggestions. He restricted jewish worship and expelled some rioters. Option one, he closed one synagogue and expelled some members. He closed some synagogues and expelled rioters. He closed all synagogues but expelled no one. He closed synagogues and threatened expulsion. He closed all the synagogues, threatened expulsion, and some jews left. Or he closed all the synagogues and expelled everyone. There's all your historical options on what actually happened with Claudius. Which one do you want?
It doesn't matter. There are a lot of possibilities. But the likelihood still that all the jews gone and all the synagogues gone, that's hard to see as historical. Before, as I said, gentiles were only able to avoid being conscripted into roman worship if they were a part of some synagogue, Rome would not have allowed it.
So what we can agree on is this. For some reason, some number of jews were expelled from Rome.
And we can find that in acts. I mean, it mentions it.
And that those Jews who were absent, who had been serving as leaders of house communities that had once provided leadership or teaching or direction or oversight to these. These, what we'll call baby christians, these new gentile Christ followers. They were under this jewish leadership. Well, now, if they're gone, their absence leaves a hole there. There's a challenge, there's a problem. And quite possibly this new and growing community of disciples from the nations, they continue to meet and take on bigger, broader roles, leadership roles, directional roles, influencing the practices, the theology of these assemblies. But I want you to hear this. It's going to come as a shock.
They did all of this within jewish space, synagogues. That's where they were.
They remained there. There was no christianity. As Paul writes to this audience, Paul approaches them as if they are familiar with many concepts that would have been completely foreign to non jews. He writes to GEntiles who in some significant way had been connected to, influenced by Judaism and still were. They were Torah followers. That's a big word. That's a big topIc. We'll get to it. JewiSh gentile relations all addressed significantly in this letter. So there is apparently some situation that is occurring related to gentiles and their place in the synagogue, in the community of Messiah.
It is a critical exigency that Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles says, I better get involved.
The edict of Claudius expired under Nero. Jews came back, but the situation had changed somehow. Gentiles had become more present in what was originally jewish led assemblies. Okay. And while there is no reason at all to assume that right there, we have this jewish christian split and the church is born, it is very conceivable that some difference of opinion had developed, maybe regarding the leadership of the synagogue, or the direction of the community, or how much Torah, or should we do any Torah, or all of these things under or when the vacuum of jewish leadership, we have these struggles, and very importantly, it centers on the spiritual identity of the members. What it meant to be a Gentile in the synagogue, what it meant to be a follower of Yeshua as a member of the nations jewish space, which is an incredible consideration. Why?
Because 2000 years later, we're still having that conversation.
We talk about it all the time.
Now, this is not a roman history class, though you may have felt like you just sat through world history 101 in your freshman year of college, but whatever happened in Rome after Claudius, and as Paul is writing this letter, in the mid to late fifties, the Gentiles were in some sense affected, and apparently the jewish community as well.
I've illustrated in this very. You may not even believe this for a minute. But this very condensed message, I've thrown so much information at you in such a short amount of time because I have to condense it. But it's illustrated how incredibly connected the jewish experience and the Gentile experience were. Proselytes, God fearers, disciples of Yeshua and jewish space. And apparently, based on history, we've got trouble brewing. If some leaders were expelled, it may have created this vacuum and in turn, potentially new attitudes. And you know what? The Gentiles probably had some leg to stand on as they're thinking, listen, they messed us up and got kicked out. We put our entire lives on the line to come into this thing.
We should be able to set the direction of some things. We like the way this works. They had been raised up understanding some things about Torah and the synagogue as believers in Messiah. Now they probably could say, we can do this.
Maybe we need to make some changes around here.
I wish I had a good gentile accent I could use, but I don't. And Paul.
There's Paul from a distance. He's never been. It's not his community. He didn't set it up from a distance. There's Paul, who's heard the news. Paul had no authority over the jewish community in Rome.
Hear that? Paul had no authority over the jewish community in Rome.
But he had God given authority over the gentile community in Rome.
As the apostle to the Gentiles, he has an obligation to sort things out for the nations. And most importantly, he has the authority appointed by Yeshua, given bye by God. So remember the term critical exigency. The problem, the audience. This is who he's talking to and what is he sorting out and why? It's just as important for us to know that Paul's mission and purpose, and that's where we'll go very soon.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom please visit our website, shalommakin.org, to learn more about us. Join our live services, access other teachings, sign up for our newsletter, join our private network that will connect you with our greater community from around the world, or contribute to the work of Shalom, Macon, thank you for watching and we look forward to connecting with.
