The Message Remix (334 page)

INTRODUCTION
ROMANS

 

The event that split history into “before” and “after” and changed the world took place about thirty years before Paul wrote this letter.
The event—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—took place in a remote corner of the extensive Roman Empire: the province of Judea in Palestine.
Hardly anyone noticed, certainly no one in busy and powerful Rome.

And when this letter arrived in Rome, hardly anyone read it, certainly no one of influence. There was much to read in Rome—imperial decrees, exquisite poetry, finely crafted moral philosophy—and much of it was world-class. And yet in no time, as such things go, this letter left all those other writings in the dust. Paul’s letter to the Romans has had a far larger impact on its readers than the volumes of all those Roman writers put together.

The quick rise of this letter to a peak of influence is extraordinary, written as it was by an obscure Roman citizen without connections. But when we read it for ourselves, we begin to realize that it is the letter itself that is truly extraordinary, and that no obscurity in writer or readers could have kept it obscure for long.

The letter to the Romans is a piece of exuberant and passionate thinking. This is the glorious life of the mind enlisted in the service of God. Paul takes the well-witnessed and devoutly believed fact of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and thinks through its implications. How does it happen that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, world history took a new direction, and at the same moment the life of every man, woman, and child on the planet was eternally affected? What is God up to? What does it
mean
that Jesus “saves”? What’s behind all this, and where is it going?

These are the questions that drive Paul’s thinking. Paul’s mind is supple and capacious. He takes logic and argument, poetry and imagination, Scripture and prayer, creation and history and experience, and weaves them into this letter that has become the premier document of Christian theology.

 

 

From:
Unlike the peasants who had traveled with Jesus, Paul was an intellectual. Schooled by the rabbis to analyze a Bible passage and exposed also to Greek logic, he bent his skills to the story of Jesus. But he didn’t do this in some comfortable scholar’s study. He worked out his ideas while walking mile after mile across rugged Turkey, sunburned and rain-soaked, camping in the middle of nowhere or occasionally staying in a flea-infested inn. He puzzled about the Cross while trying to light a cooking fire in a wooden ship that might go up in flames were it not for the sea water that kept splashing over the bow.

 

To:
Paul had never even seen Rome when he wrote to the several hundred Christians there. He had met a few of them traveling through other cities, but he wanted to introduce himself and his thinking to those who had only heard the gossip (not all of it good) about him. Some of them were Jews who thought of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Many were non-Jews sorting out what Jesus had to do with them. All debated how a follower of Jesus ought to live, and they were keen to hear Paul’s account first hand.

 

Re:
Probably A.D. 57. Rome was immense for its time—over a million people packed into dense housing blocks, elegant villas for the rich, and imposing marble public areas. The emperor’s palace was a massive complex, because most of the bureaucrats who ran the empire were officially servants in his household. Temples—some to the traditional gods, others to deified men like Julius Caesar—were everywhere. Nero, now twenty years old, had become emperor at seventeen after his mother murdered her husband, Emperor Claudius.