of the word "nations" is most suitable to the opening address, the natural meaning which includes all the readers without distinction, or the technical meaning which pointedly excludes a portion of them?

An impartial student, who has no à priori theory to support, will be disposed to admit that, in a letter addressed to a mixed community of Jewish and Gentile Christians, St. Paul could not possibly mean to exclude any by words which might be so understood as to include them all.

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This comprehensive sense of the words "among all nations" is confirmed by the true meaning of v. 6, Among whom are ye also [the] called of Jesus Christ." Neither Baur nor his critics have seen the true connexion between this and the preceding verse. For while it would be superfluous to inform Gentiles as such that they were included "among all the Gentiles" (Godet), and equally superfluous to inform Jewish Christians that they as Jews were in cluded "among all the nations" (Baur), it is neither superfluous nor irrelevant to remind both Jewish and Gentile Christians that their being already "called of Jesus Christ" is an actual proof that they are included in the commission of one who had received through Jesus Christ Himself "grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations.”

The great mass of the Gentile world was not as yet so called: the great mass of the Jews had rejected the calling. Thus the Apostle gracefully acknowledges the position of privilege which his readers had already attained, and turns it into a proof of his right to address them.

This meaning of v. 6 is well expressed by M. Reuss: "et vous aussi, vous vous trouvez dans ce nombre comme appelés de Jésus-Christ."

Another much disputed passage is i. 13, 14, "that I might have some fruit among you also, even as among other Gentiles," where the last words are better rendered "as among the rest of the Gentiles."

Here also Baur and Volkmar (p. 73) assume that ἔθνεσιν means simply

"nations," and draw the conclusion that St. Paul "speaks of the Jews as one people under the general term ovn." But we have not here the same emphatic universality which in v. 5 demands the comprehensive sense "all nations."

Even if we admit that here also vn may mean simply "nations" without reference to the distinction between Jew and Gentile, we are still far from the conclusion that the Apostle has any thought in his mind of the Jews as a nation, or of Christians at Rome as Jewish Christians. For the antithesis must then have been "among you (Jews), as among the rest of the nations": whereas now it is clearly this-" among you (Romans), as among the rest of the nations." Even with this sense of Ovn therefore, the readers are regarded not as Jewish Christians, but simply as Romans.

However, we cannot but agree with the great majority of both ancient and modern interpreters (including among the latter Meyer, Reuss, Weizsäcker, Godet, Davidson) that this passage, v. 13, distinctly proves the Christian Community at Rome to have consisted mainly of Gentiles. See note on the verse.

In connexion with these two passages and the introduction of which they form part (i. 1-15), we must notice another mistake into which many writers have fallen in the eagerness of their opposition to Baur and his school. According to these latter, St. Paul wishes "to meet the objection that he was an Apostle of the Gentiles and had nothing to do with Jewish Christians" (Baur, 'Paul,' p. 333).

"Paul the Apostle of the Messiah Jesus wishes grace and peace to the Church of God in the capital of the World! I seem indeed to you to be merely an Apostle of the Greeks, but I am called by God Himself through Jesus Christ, to preach the Gospel of God's Son in the Spirit to all nations, even Non-Hellenes, as ye Mosaic followers of Messiah for the most part are" (Volkmar, p. 1; compare p. 141).

"Moreover he brings forward in new forms of speech the universality of his office as an Apostle for the obedience of

faith among all nations. For he, who at first had grounded his Apostolic claim upon the fact that he was called by God to be the Apostle of the Gentiles, as Peter to be the Apostle of the Jews (Gal. ii. 7), could now win the right to send a letter of Apostolic preaching to the Jewish Christians at Rome only in such a form by bringing prominently forward the universality of his commission " (Holsten, "Der Gedankengang des Römerbriefs," in the 'Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie,' 1879, No. 1, p. 101).

This representation of St. Paul as having been hitherto exclusively an Apostle of the Gentiles has been too lightly accepted by those who seek to draw from it an exactly opposite conclusion. It will be sufficient to quote as an example of this view the words of Weizsäcker in his excellent article "Upon the earliest Christian Church at Rome" in the 'Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie,' 1876, Part ii. p. 250: "Here it is not a question of the interpretation of the word (v) in itself merely. He appeals to his own proper Apostolic mission, consequently to his Gentile Apostleship. By that alone the meaning is at once decided beyond question. St. Paul could not possibly express himself as he does in this introduction to the Epistle, if the Christians at Rome were even but for the more part a Jewish Christian Church. They belong to him because he is a Gentile Apostle. As such he has not to do with the circumcised, as is shown by his conversation with Peter, Gal. ii. 7, 8."

We may confidently say that St. Paul never took so limited and narrow a view of his Apostleship as is implied in the words which we have printed in italics. When he says that through Jesus Christ he "received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations" (v. 5), he is certainly not thinking of the arrangement made with St. Peter (Gal. ii. 7–9), but of that Apostleship which was "not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead" (Gal. i. 1), of that voice which had said to Ananias, "Go thy way: for

he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel" (Acts ix. 15), and of the words of Ananias himself" Thou shalt be his witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard" (Acts xxii. 15).

It is true that each Apostle chose for his missionary labours a special field, one going unto the heathen, another unto the circumcision (Gal. ii. 9); but as Apostles they all dealt with all members of the Churches, irrespective of their race, knowing that "in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile" (Gal. iii. 28).

To imagine St. Paul implying that because he was an Apostle of the Gentiles he had as such nothing to do with the Jews, is to impute to him a thought of which he was incapable, and one which is directly opposed to his own statements in various passages of this Epistle, such as i. 16, ii. 9, iii. 19. The error has in fact arisen from the very general misinterpretation of his words in xi. 13, which distinctly imply that he was not an Apostle of the Gentiles only, but that this was one part (uév), though doubtless the chief part, of his office: see our note on the passage, and Introduction to 1 Peter, § 3, note 3.

This same passage xi. 13 is misinterpreted in another respect by Baur, p. 332.

"The very fact that when the Apostle turns to the Gentile Christians, he makes it appear that he does so, and addresses them specially (xi. 13-24) shows that in the rest of the Epistle he had Jewish much more than Gentile Christians before his mind. The main argument being concluded, they are singled out as a part of the community, they are addressed specially (iμiv yàp Aéyw Toîs Oveσw, xi. 13), and thus appear as subordinate to the general body, in addressing which no special designation is required."

This bold stroke of interpretation will not bear examination.

In the first place there is no turning from a general body of readers to a portion specially singled out. The words uîv roîs Oveσw do not mean, as Baur supposes," you the Gentile part of my readers," but "you my readers

who are Gentiles": see our note on the passage, and compare Green, 'Grammar of the N. T. Dialect,' p. 199.

Throughout the whole section, ix.-xi., though so deeply interesting to every Jew, there is not the slightest indication that St. Paul "had Jewish more than Gentile Christians before his mind," as Baur asserts. Only once before in this section are the readers described, and then simply, as "brethren" (x. i.): they are distinguished throughout from the Jews, of whom he speaks "as third persons" (Meyer). He calls them "my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh," not "our brethren, our kinsmen," as would be natural if his readers were for the most part Jews.

Baur himself writes: "The whole section which concludes this part of the Epistle, xi. 13-36, is certainly devoted to the Gentile Christians: this is shewn by the repeated iμeîs in vv. 28, 30, 31, and by the drift of the passage vv. 15-29, when correctly understood. But this section is of the nature of a digression, and the argument then returns to its proper object" (p. 333). This concession is fatal: for no one who has impartially studied the train of thought in ix-xi. and the close connexion between ch. xi. and xii. 1, will be easily persuaded that xi. 13-36 is a mere digression or anything less than the grand conclusion of the whole argument upon the destiny of Israel, nor will believe that the readers addressed in the repeated ucis in vv. 28, 30, 31 are only a small Gentile fraction of the whole body to whom the Apostle says in xii. 1, "I beeseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God": see the notes there.

Having now examined all the passages specially alleged by Baur as proving that the readers were for the most part Jewish Christians, we must notice more briefly a few other passages which may be supposed to support the same view.

In ii. 17-39 it is too obvious to need more than a passing remark that the Jew so sternly and sarcastically addressed cannot possibly be thought of as one of the readers; nor is there any need to dwell on Volkmar's strange notion that the passage iii. 1-8 "is a dialogue

between the Jew in the Jewish Christian and the man who is slandered as wishing to overthrow the Law that through this evil good may come."

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In iv. 1, Abraham is called " our father," or our forefather." Does the pronoun "our" imply, as is alleged, the Jewish origin of the Christians of Rome? "Yes," replies M. Godet, "if the translation were: our father according to the flesh."

M. Godet accordingly has recourse to the forced and unsuitable connexion, "What shall we say that Abraham hath found according to the flesh?"-and gives to mроráτора the sense of "spiritual forefather." There is however nothing in the immediate context to justify such an anticipation of the spiritual fatherhood of Abraham, which first comes into notice in v. 11; and without such anticipation the supposed difficulty is not removed by the change of construction.

The very simple explanation is that the question is naturally put from the standing-point of a Jew, whether St. Paul himself or an imaginary objector is of no consequence. What else then could he say than "our" forefather? Speaking to Gentiles concerning the Jews in general, a Jew would say, as St. Paul says in ix. 3, "my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh "; but in speaking of Abraham, or of Isaac, as in ix. 16, no one Jew could separate himself from his nation and say my forefather Abraham," or my father Isaac."

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Weizsäcker (ib. p. 259) puts the question rightly: "In 1 Cor. x. 1 Paul speaks of the Israelites in the wilderness, and there calls them quite in the same way all our fathers.' But who would thence wish to conclude, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that the Corinthian Church was an especially Jewish Christian one?" See our foot-note and additional note on iv. I.

In vii. I the Apostle writes "Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law) &c." and the parenthesis is supposed to point to Jewish readers. But Meyer's answer is complete : "Looking to the close connexion subsisting

between the Jewish and Gentile-Christian portions of the Church, to the custom borrowed from the Synagogue of reading from the Old Testament in public, and to the necessary and essential relations which Evangelical instruction and preaching sustained to the O. T., so that the latter was the basis from which they started, the Apostle might designate his readers generally as yvú σκοντες [τὸν] νόμον, and predicate of them an acquaintance with the Law." This strong argument becomes even stronger, when for the A. V. we substitute the more correct rendering required by the absence of the Article before yvσкovσw and vóμov: see foot-note on the

verse.

We may add that in the case of born Jews a knowledge of the Law would have been too much a matter of course to require this special mention, which is on the other hand perfectly natural in the case of Gentile converts who had not always known the law. Thus in Galatians iv. 21, St. Paul asks, "Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?" Yet who would infer from this that the Galatian Churches were of Jewish origin?

Volkmar indeed ventures to say (p. xi.) that in Rom. vii. 1 "born Hebrews are directly addressed, as the root-stem of the Church": but we may confidently reply, with Weizsäcker (p. 259) that "If anyone will lay stress upon this expression, it speaks much more in favour of Gentile than of Jewish readers." The passage xv. 14-16 is usually and justly regarded as a clear proof that the readers addressed were for the most part Gentiles. Dr. Davidson does not admit this (Introduction to N. T.' i. 125): "Here Paul announces himself the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable to God. But the context does not necessarily limit the offering of the Gentiles to that of the Roman Christians, as is assumed." This objection is quite beside the mark: it is not assumed at all that the offering is limited to Roman Christians: but it is manifest that St. Paul justifies himself for writing boldly to the Romans on

the ground that he is a minister of Christ to the Gentiles. The conclusion is inevitable, that the readers thus addressed were Gentiles.

This passage is treated in a different way by the Tübingen critics, who represent it as an addition made by one of the Pauline party at a later period to remove or soften "the bad impression made by the genuine Epistle upon a Jewish Christian Church which was already gaining pre-eminence over other Churches, and claiming another Apostle, St. Peter, as its founder. See Baur, Paulus,' pp. 355, 365. Apart, however, from this passage we have found abundant evidence in that portion of the Epistle of which the genuineness has not been questioned, to prove that the majority of the Christians at Rome, when St. Paul wrote to them, were not of Jewish but of Gentile origin: and herewith we have removed the corner-stone of Baur's own theory and many subsequent modifications of it.

Without dwelling on these various theories, we proceed to consider the several historical circumstances, which tend to throw light on the purpose of the Epistle.

In doing this we cannot limit our view, as Baur has done (p. 310), to the special circumstances and doctrinal tendencies of the readers addressed. We must look also to the position of St. Paul himself at this time in relation to Rome, to Jerusalem, to the Gentile Churches, to the whole course of his Apostolic work, and to to the great questions which were at that time most intimately connected with the truth of the Gospel which he preached.

(a). It is universally admitted that there were both Jewish and Gentile Christians in the Roman Community. From evidence furnished by the Epistle we have concluded that the Jewish element was not predominant. Bp. Lightfoot, who at one time admitted "the existence of a large, perhaps preponderant, Jewish element in the Church of the Metropolis before St. Paul's arrival" (" Philippians' p. 17), seems to withdraw this opinion in a subsequent essay in the 'Journal of Philology,' 1869,

No. 4, p. 228: "St. Paul, if I mistake not, starts from the fact that the Roman Church stood on Gentile ground, and that very large and perhaps preponderating numbers of its members were Gentiles. This is his justification for writing to them, as the Apostle of the Gentiles. It never once occurs to him that he is intruding on the province of others."

If the majority of the Roman Christians were, as we believe, of Gentile origin, it may still be thought that they had been subject for the most part to Judaizing influences, and were strongly prejudiced against St. Paul. "M. Renan insists that the Roman brotherhood must have been founded and built up by emissaries from Palestine. But why should the Christianity of Rome be due to Jerusalem solely, and not also to Antioch and Corinth and Ephesus, with which cities communication must have been even more frequent? Why at Rome alone should the Judaic element be all-powerful and the Pauline insignificant?" (Bp. Lightfoot, 'Journal of Philology,' p. 289.)

There is in the whole Epistle only one short reference to false teachers (xvi. 17-20), and in this, if the persons meant were, as is assumed and that with great probability, Judaizing adversaries of St. Paul, we have a distinct proof, that the teaching hitherto prevalent in the community was not Judaistic but the contrary, in the words “mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned." In our notes on the passage we follow the usual supposition that it was written, like the rest of the Epistle, before St. Paul's imprisonment at Rome: but see the concluding paragraphs of § 8.

Bleek has treated this point with great clearness and moderation in his 'Introduction to the N. T.,' i. 442: "The probability is that it (Christianity) was not conveyed thither by any special or prominent teachers or missionaries sent for the purpose, but that residents in the city, Jews and Gentiles, became acquainted with it and were converted elsewhere, and upon their return made converts among their friends. This may

New Test-VOL. III.

have been the case especially with many Jews who either were driven from Rome by the edict of Claudius, and when this edict was forgotten or revoked, returned again, or went to reside there for the first time. They may have been converted to Christianity partly by St. Paul's preaching, or by that of his companions or in some of the Churches planted by him, and partly in other places, e. g. in Jerusalem itself."

We know beyond doubt that differences of belief and practice existed in Rome as in other Churches. One class would not eat flesh nor drink wine (xiv. 2, 21) lest they should be defiled (v. 14), and also observed certain days as more holy than others (v. 5); while another class regarded all kinds of food, and all days, alike. These were inclined to despise the former as superstitious, the former to condemn them as profane (vv. 3, 10). Bp. Lightfoot thinks that the asceticism here described may possibly be due to Essene influences (Colossians,' p. 169), while Baur asserts that the characteristics

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are such as are found nowhere else but with the Ebionites." The rigid observance of the Sabbath and other holy days, and extreme simplicity in eating and drinking, were common to both Essenes and Ebionites. Baur confesses that there is no express statement that the Ebionites abstained from wine.

Of the Essenes Josephus ('Bell. Jud.' ii. 8, 5) thus writes: "When they have taken their seats quietly, the baker sets loaves before them in order, and the cook sets one dish of one kind of food before each." The word "food" (edeoμa, 'pulmentum') does not exclude flesh (Plato, 'Timæus,' 73, A), and there is no mention of abstinence from wine either here, or as we believe in any of the other notices of the Essenes by Josephus (Vita,' 2; 'Ant.' xiii. 5, 9, xviii. 1, 5), or by Philo Judaeus ('Quod omnis probus liber,' xii., xiii.; Fragm. apud Euseb. 'Praepar. Evang.' viii. 8).

There is however a description of the Therapeutae, a Jewish sect whom Philo distinguishes from the Essenes (Vita Contempl.' iv.), which combines all the characteristic scruples mentioned by St. Paul: "They cat nothing of a costly

B