A rhetorical approach to the christological crux in Romans 9:5

You say that, in practice, the “basic choice” is between two options: a period after “according to the flesh,” yielding an independent doxology, or a continuous clause that predicates the blessing language of the Messiah. As a heuristic, this is serviceable. But as an exegetical frame it is slightly too compressed, and that compression affects the force of your later rhetorical arguments.
The reason this matters is not pedantic. It is that the more finely one states the possibilities, the more obvious it becomes that the decisive question is not simply “Is this doxology or Christology?” but “Has Paul signaled a subject shift strongly enough to justify taking an articular participial clause away from the immediately preceding referent?” That is a narrower and more difficult question than your opening contrast suggests. Once framed that way, your later appeal to parallelism and formula preservation has to do far more work than your essay acknowledges.
You do, to your credit, admit the key grammatical datum: ὁ ὢν is naturally read as qualifying what immediately precedes. But then the practical effect of your framing is to treat that as merely one factor among others, which rhetoric may simply “overrule.” That is not impossible in principle, but it is a much stronger claim than your opening presentation suggests. In Greek prose, especially in compressed Pauline syntax, a participial-relative continuation of this type carries a default presumption of continuity. If one wishes to rebut that presumption, one usually needs a clear subject marker, a conjunctional cue, or a syntactic break stronger than what your proposal actually identifies. Your essay never really supplies that. It supplies instead a network of thematic and liturgical echoes, which may enrich interpretation but do not, by themselves, constitute grammatical subject-markers.
In other words, your essay sounds as though it is weighing grammar and rhetoric in parallel. In practice, it grants grammar first place and then asks rhetoric to reverse the verdict without a local syntactic trigger. That is the methodological weakness running through the whole piece.

You explicitly acknowledge that grammatical considerations favor the Christological reading. I want to press that admission more precisely than you do. The phrase in question is not just “the one being” in the abstract; it is the articular participle ὁ ὢν following immediately upon ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα. In this position, the participial expression naturally continues, specifies, or qualifies the immediately preceding referent. That is not an iron law, but it is the normal syntactic pull.
Your essay repeatedly seeks to neutralize this by widening the frame: Paul’s rhetoric, Paul’s doxological habits, Paul’s larger thought-world, the narrative shape of Romans, and so on. But none of those things changes the fact that your proposed reading requires the reader to perform a subject shift at precisely the point where the grammar least encourages one. If Paul had written a fresh nominative head-noun with article (for example, explicitly introducing “God” as the subject in a new clause), your case would be much stronger. If he had used a conjunction that naturally marks transition, your case would be stronger. If he had placed the blessing in a more standard benedictory order without the appositional pressure created by ὁ ὢν, your case would be stronger. But the text as written does none of those things.
This is why your appeal to “rhetorical intention” finally feels underdetermined. Rhetorical intention is not self-interpreting. We infer it through the verbal form. When the verbal form gives a prima facie syntactic direction, rhetoric may deepen that direction, but it should not overturn it unless the text itself signals the turn. The kind of signal your view needs is simply not present.
You rightly observe that the doxological subject “typically” follows εὐλογητός, and that Romans 9:5 does not conform to that pattern if read as an independent doxology. You then explain the deviation by appeal to rhetorical echo and formula preservation. I will address that argument directly below. For now, the key point is that this explanation is secondary and inferential, while the participial continuity is immediate and local. In difficult texts, local syntax normally carries greater exegetical weight than reconstructed rhetorical motive, unless the rhetorical reading is strongly overdetermined by independent textual cues. Your essay does not supply such cues.

You argue that a high Christological reading is improbable because, in Romans, Jesus is the Messiah, raised, enthroned, seated at God’s right hand, and designated “Son of God in power” by resurrection. You then ask why Paul would make the “unprecedented and very un-Jewish claim” that this Messiah is “the God who is blessed forever.” This is the most important move in your essay because it is what makes the rhetorical reversal seem necessary.
But notice what happens in the argument. You do not merely describe Paul’s distinctions between God and Christ. You convert those distinctions into an exclusion principle. The sequence is effectively this: Paul often distinguishes God and Christ; therefore a reading that predicates θεός of Christ is unlikely; therefore the syntactically natural reading should be set aside; therefore the doxological reading becomes preferable. Yet the proposition under dispute is precisely whether Paul can, in a particular rhetorical moment, predicate θεός of Christ without collapsing the Father-Son distinction. If that is the question, then “Paul distinguishes them elsewhere” is relevant but not decisive. It cannot function as a veto unless one has already assumed that divine predication entails personal collapse.
That assumption is precisely the mistake. To say that Christ is “God over all” is not to say that Christ is the Father. Paul can maintain personal differentiation, relational ordering, and economic roles, while still attributing to Christ divine predicates in a climactic context. You may reject that theological grammar, but you cannot simply assume its impossibility and then treat the assumption as if it were a neutral “flow of thought” criterion. Once you do that, “flow” ceases to be a literary observation and becomes a dogmatic filter.
This is why your phrase “very un-Jewish” needs far more argument than your essay gives it. Second Temple Jewish monotheism is not reducible to a simple rule that no divine predicate can be shared in any way by a messianic figure. The debate in scholarship is precisely over how early Christ-followers included Jesus within the unique identity, prerogatives, and cultic devotion of the God of Israel while maintaining monotheistic allegiance. You are entitled to reject the “Christ-inclusive monotheism” account, but in this essay you do not argue the point; you presuppose it. Then you use that presupposition to discount the syntactically stronger reading.
That is a methodological inversion. Syntax should test theological reconstruction here, not be subordinated to it at the start.

Your most original contribution is the proposed parallelism between Romans 1:24–25 and Romans 9:4–5. You argue that both passages describe communal religious failure (Greeks and Jews), both involve a hoitines characterization, and both terminate with “blessed forever, amen.” You then propose that Romans 1:25 supplies a rhetorical template that explains the “aberrant” word order in Romans 9:5: Paul preserves the decisive concluding cadence εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν by fronting the subject.
This is the strongest rhetorical part of your essay, and it is still not sufficient.
The first difficulty is the one you yourself acknowledge: the syntactic relation is not the same in the two passages. In Romans 1:25, the blessing is attached by an unambiguous relative clause to “the Creator” (τὸν κτίσαντα … ὅς ἐστιν εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας). The subject is fixed before the benedictory language comes into view. There is no ambiguity to resolve, and no subject shift to infer. In Romans 9:5, the very point at issue is whether the participial clause continues the immediately preceding referent (“the Messiah according to the flesh”) or initiates a new independent benediction. That is not a minor formal difference; it is the central syntactic question. A parallel that leaves the key ambiguity unresolved cannot by itself decide the ambiguous text.
The second difficulty is rhetorical, and here I think your own insight cuts against your conclusion. If Paul is indeed capable of shaping endings and cadences across distant sections of the letter, that tells us he can echo formulas. It does not tell us that he will do so at the cost of creating an unmarked subject shift where the local syntax points in the opposite direction. The very fact that Romans 1:25 secures its doxological subject syntactically makes it a poor analogue for a reading of Romans 9:5 that requires readers to infer a new subject without such anchoring. In Romans 1:25, form and syntax cooperate. In your reading of Romans 9:5, rhetoric must compensate for syntax.
The third difficulty concerns the kind of “religious failure” narrative you see in Romans 9:4–5. Romans 1:24–25 is part of an explicit indictment, describing divine handing-over in response to idolatrous exchange. Romans 9:1–5 is not framed that way. It is a lament over Israel’s privileges and the painful paradox of unbelief in relation to Christ. To call both passages simply “narratives of religious failure” is not false at a very high level of abstraction, but the tonal and argumentative functions differ. Romans 1 climaxes in exposure of culpability and divine judgment; Romans 9:1–5 climaxes in grief before the theological explanation begins in 9:6ff. A sudden doxology to the Father at the very moment of the privileges list’s climax is rhetorically more disruptive here than in Romans 1. By contrast, a Christological continuation intensifies the lament: the privileges culminate not merely in the Messiah’s descent from Israel, but in the Messiah whose identity exceeds that descent. That reading heightens the tragedy without changing subjects.
So yes, your parallel is real at the level of phrase recurrence and thematic contrast. But no, it does not “overrule” the grammatical objections you admit. At most it provides a plausible literary echo that could coexist with either punctuation. It is not decisive evidence for the independent doxology.

You propose that the abnormal order in Romans 9:5 (if read as a doxology) is explained by rhetorical necessity: Paul wanted to preserve the cadence εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν as the decisive concluding expression, so he brought the subject forward. This is a clever explanatory model. The problem is that it only works if one has already decided that Romans 9:5 is an independent doxology and that the phrase must function formulaically in the same way as Romans 1:25.
That is precisely what is disputed.
If Romans 9:5 is read Christologically, the word order is no longer an “aberration” in need of rhetorical rescue. It becomes an ascriptive continuation attached to Christ in an appositional/predicative sequence. The burden of explanation shifts. The unusual order is then explained not by a suppressed doxological template but by the clause’s syntactic continuity with the preceding mention of Christ and by the rhetorical density of the climax. In other words, your explanation is elegant only within the very reading it is meant to prove.
This matters because your essay presents the rhetorical explanation as if it solved an otherwise stubborn anomaly. But a solution that presupposes the disputed categorization (independent doxology) does not adjudicate between readings. It redescribes your preferred reading from within.
It is also worth emphasizing that “formula preservation” is not a sufficient reason to accept a syntactically less natural parse when a syntactically more natural parse already produces a coherent rhetorical and theological sense. Paul is capable of variation, compression, and stylistic tension in emotionally charged contexts. Romans 9:1–5 is exactly such a context. The argument that he altered expected order to preserve a remembered cadence is possible; the argument that he therefore must have done so, despite the participial attachment to Christ, is much stronger than your evidence warrants.

You note that Romans 11:36, 15:33, and 16:27 close with “amen” (with “forever” in some cases), and that in each instance God is the subject. You then infer that the distinctive form “blessed forever, amen” in Romans 9:5 is more likely to apply to God than to the Messiah as God. As a pattern observation, this is fair. As a controlling argument, it is overstated.
The basic problem is one of category. Romans 11:36, 15:33, and 16:27 are not syntactically parallel to Romans 9:5. They are explicit doxologies/benedictions or closing liturgical ascriptions in contexts where the subject and addressee are unambiguous. Romans 9:5 is a notoriously compressed clause in the middle of a lament, with an articular participial segment immediately following “the Christ according to the flesh.” To say that “amen” elsewhere in Romans belongs to God does not decide whether the clause in 9:5 is a new doxology or an ascription attached to Christ. It sets a background expectation; it does not resolve the local ambiguity.
More importantly, your argument quietly moves from “Paul often uses amen in God-directed doxological statements” to “therefore the form in 9:5 applies to God alone.” That “alone” is the crucial overreach. Even on a Trinitarian reading, Paul’s monotheism is not denied if a divine ascription appears once in this climactic form. The category “doxological/benedictory language” is not a fenced zone into which Christ can never enter. The question is whether this specific clause, in this specific syntax, continues the Christ referent. Once grammar and context favor that continuation, the broader doxology pattern cannot simply negate it.
You also mention Romans 16:27 and interpret the glory as given to the only wise God “through the agency of Jesus the messiah,” with a comparison to Philippians 2:11. Even granting your reading, this does not help your case in Romans 9:5. At most it reinforces Paul’s frequent distinction of Father and Son in doxological language. That is not disputed by a Trinitarian reading of Romans 9:5. The question remains whether, at this one point, Paul predicates θεός of Christ in a climactic apposition. Your pattern argument shows a dominant habit; it does not establish an absolute exclusion.

Your appeal to 2 Corinthians 11:31 is perhaps the most striking section of your essay because it links “I am not lying” (οὐ ψεύδομαι) in Romans 9:1 with “I am not lying” in 2 Corinthians 11:31, and then notes the presence of a blessing with ὁ ὢν εὐλογητός in the latter passage. You suggest that Paul may have had a habit of blessing God in this way when avowing truthfulness under contention. This is a clever intertextual observation. It does, however, cut against your syntactic claim in Romans 9:5.
In 2 Corinthians 11:31, the subject is explicitly stated before the participial blessing phrase: “The God and Father of the Lord Jesus knows … ὁ ὢν εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας …” There is no ambiguity about the antecedent of ὁ ὢν. The articular participle is transparently attached to the noun phrase already named. The structure, precisely because it is clear, demonstrates what Paul does when he wants ὁ ὢν + εὐλογητός to qualify God in a context involving an avowal of truthfulness: he names God as the antecedent.
That is exactly what your reading of Romans 9:5 lacks. On your punctuation, the reader is asked to infer God as a new subject after “the Christ according to the flesh,” and then to take ὁ ὢν as introducing that new subject. But in the parallel you cite, Paul does not leave the reader to infer the subject; he supplies it explicitly. The analogy therefore strengthens, not weakens, the argument that in Romans 9:5 the participial phrase should be read with its nearest antecedent, namely Christ.
You try to offset this by saying that 2 Corinthians 11:31 shows how Paul “consistently thinks about these relations,” differentiating the God and Father of the Lord Jesus from the Messiah. But again, that proves more than the data can bear. Of course Paul can differentiate them in one text. The question is whether he can also predicate θεός of Christ in another text without erasing that differentiation. A Trinitarian reading says yes, and 2 Corinthians 11:31 does nothing to disprove it.
Your observation about the oath-setting is still worth keeping. It may well be that Paul’s solemn truth-claims can attract liturgical language. But if so, that does not decide the referent in Romans 9:5. The syntactic structure of the alleged parallel actually underscores the weakness of your subject-shift proposal.

You raise, as an afterthought, the possibility that ὁ ὢν in these benedictions recalls Exodus 3:14 (LXX) and cite Philo for comparable usage. This is a stimulating suggestion. It could indeed be part of the ambient scriptural-linguistic background for how Hellenistic Jewish writers heard or deployed ὁ ὢν. But even if the allusion is granted, it does not deliver the conclusion you want in Romans 9:5.
The reason is simple: the allusion is semantically compatible with both readings unless the subject is settled by syntax. If ὁ ὢν evokes the God of Israel, then on your reading the clause blesses Israel’s covenant God over all. On a Christological reading, the same language can function as part of a high ascription that places the Messiah within divine identity language. The allusion does not determine whether the phrase is attached to Christ or launches a new sentence to the Father. The syntactic question remains prior.
Indeed, given the local grammar, the allusion may intensify the Christological reading rather than undermine it. If Paul deliberately uses an expression resonant with divine self-designation immediately after naming Christ “according to the flesh,” the rhetorical effect is precisely the kind of antithetical intensification a Christological construal captures well: from Israel according to flesh, yet identified in language resonant with the one who is. I am not saying this is proven. I am saying your proposed allusion is not a one-way argument.
Your use of Philo similarly proves possibility, not direction. Philo shows that ὁ ὢν can bear substantial theological resonance in Hellenistic Jewish discourse. It does not show that, in Romans 9:5, Paul must have intended an independent benediction to the Father. Once again, the local participial attachment is the controlling issue. Background resonance cannot substitute for syntactic marking.

Your conclusion states the methodological principle plainly: “the grammatical objections” to the independent benediction are “overruled” by rhetorical intention. That formulation is admirably candid, and it brings the core issue into focus. I do not think this is a sound exegetical principle in this case.
Rhetoric does not stand outside grammar. It is realized through grammar, syntax, clause sequencing, and discourse signals. When you say rhetoric overrules grammar here, what you actually mean is that a reconstructed literary parallel and a set of thematic/doxological associations should take precedence over the most immediate syntactic relation in the clause. That is possible only if the rhetorical evidence is exceptionally strong and textually explicit. Yours is not. It is interesting, cumulative, and imaginative, but not explicit enough to justify reversing the default reading of ὁ ὢν.
The point can be put another way. A good rhetorical reading should increase coherence at multiple levels simultaneously: local syntax, immediate context, broader discourse, and theological plausibility. Your proposal improves one level (your perceived macro-parallel with Romans 1 and liturgical recurrence) by weakening two others (local syntax and immediate rhetorical momentum in Romans 9:1–6). The Christological reading, by contrast, preserves the local syntax and the immediate climactic flow while remaining theologically coherent within a Trinitarian account of Paul’s Christology. Even if you dislike that theological account, the fact remains that your reading requires more syntactic resistance and more inferential supplementation.
This is why your conclusion feels stronger rhetorically than exegetically. It announces a principle of priority (“rhetorical intention”) at precisely the point where the textual signals for that intention are least capable of carrying the load.

Your essay describes Romans 9:4–5 as part of a narrative of Jewish religious failure that ends, like Romans 1:25, in a benediction to God. This framing obscures the specific rhetorical work of Paul’s privileges list. Romans 9:1–5 is not simply an inventory plus a pious closure. It is a grief-saturated buildup to the theological problem Paul addresses in 9:6: “It is not as though the word of God has failed.”
That matters because the list of Israel’s prerogatives is arranged to intensify the pathos of the situation. Adoption, glory, covenants, lawgiving, worship, promises, patriarchs—and then, climactically, the Messiah from them “according to the flesh.” If the sentence ends at “according to the flesh” and the following phrase becomes an independent doxology to the Father, the rhetorical crescendo is interrupted just before the most loaded theological contrast available to Paul. The phrase “according to the flesh” naturally invites a further qualification. Paul repeatedly uses κατὰ σάρκα as a limiting descriptor that calls for an additional determination or contrast, whether stated with κατὰ πνεῦμα or supplied in another form. In Romans 9:5, the participial continuation offers exactly such a completion.
You might object that your reading supplies its own theological focus: the God of the covenant “over all” remains blessed despite Jewish failure. But that is a much looser rhetorical fit to the local clause. It shifts attention from the Messiah—introduced as the climax of the list—to God in an unmarked way and leaves the κατὰ σάρκα phrase rhetorically underdeveloped. The Christological reading, by contrast, makes full use of the immediate syntax and deepens the tragedy: Israel’s privileges culminate in the Messiah from them according to the flesh, and that Messiah is described in the highest possible terms. The grief is thereby intensified, not diluted.
This is important because your essay repeatedly presents the Christological reading as the one that allegedly produces the theological/rhetorical anomaly. In the local context, the opposite is at least equally true. The independent doxology introduces a sharper discontinuity in the clause-flow and emotional trajectory than the Christological construal does. If you want to prefer that discontinuity, you need more than a macro-level parallel and doxological recurrence. You need a local signal of subject change. The text does not provide it.

You write that Trinitarianism does not make sense “on Jewish or Jewish-Christian terms” and describe it as a fitting Greek model for relations among transcendent persons once the apocalyptic narrative had been abandoned. That is a large thesis, and in your essay it functions rhetorically as a backdrop rather than an argued conclusion. It may describe your wider narrative-historical framework, but it is too sweeping to do exegetical work in Romans 9:5 without substantial demonstration.
The problem is not simply that many scholars disagree, though they do. The problem is that your claim bypasses the actual question in Romans 9:5: whether Paul can make a divine ascription to Christ while preserving monotheism and personal distinction. A Trinitarian reading says yes, and it does so by distinguishing person and essence (or, more modestly in Pauline terms, personal relation and shared divine identity/prerogative). That is not a post hoc escape hatch; it is precisely the conceptual clarification developed to explain why texts that distinguish Father and Son can nevertheless speak of Christ in divine terms.
You may reject later Trinitarian formulations as metaphysically excessive or historically conditioned. But even if one grants that later doctrine developed in Greek conceptuality, it does not follow that the exegetical instinct behind the Christological reading of Romans 9:5 is alien to Jewish-Christian categories. Early Christian devotion to Jesus, the application of YHWH-scriptures to Christ, and the inclusion of Jesus in monotheistic confession and worship-patterns are widely recognized features of earliest Christian sources and are not products of a post-apocalyptic abandonment in the sense your essay suggests. The debate is about how to describe that development, not whether it exists.
What this means for Romans 9:5 is straightforward: your global historical claim cannot function as a local interpretive veto unless you first establish that Paul’s Jewish Christology excludes any predicative use of θεός for Christ. Your essay does not establish that. It asserts it in passing (“very un-Jewish,” “very certainly not” in Titus 2:13) and then lets that assertion tilt the punctuation.
That is the reverse order of proof. The text should constrain the historical model, not merely be filtered through it.

You briefly say, “I think that Christ is very certainly not called God in Titus 2:13.” I appreciate the candor, but the certainty of that statement is unwarranted, and in your essay it functions strategically. You invoke it while constructing the prior improbability of Romans 9:5 as a Christological θεός-text. In other words, Titus 2:13 is not an incidental comment; it is part of the cumulative atmosphere in which you ask readers to find the Christological reading implausible.
The problem is that Titus 2:13 is itself one of the classic debated passages in which many grammarians and commentators judge the most natural reading to identify Jesus Christ as “our great God and Savior,” especially in view of Greek article-noun coordination patterns and the broader Pastoral usage. You are entitled to dissent. But when a passage is genuinely disputed and defended by serious scholarship on grammatical grounds, it cannot responsibly be invoked as “very certainly not” to construct a probability argument against another disputed text. Doing so front-loads the conclusion.
Let me be clear: Romans 9:5 does not stand or fall with Titus 2:13. Even if one set Titus aside entirely, the local syntactic and contextual arguments in Romans 9:5 remain strong. My point is narrower. Your invocation of Titus 2:13 as settled evidence reinforces the same methodological pattern visible elsewhere in your essay: a prior theological-linguistic map is treated as firm ground, and then Romans 9:5 is read so as not to disturb that map.
A more cautious method would acknowledge that both texts are disputed, that Paul and the Pauline tradition overwhelmingly use θεός for the Father, and that this dominance does not by itself preclude exceptional or climactic divine predication of Christ. That would leave Romans 9:5 to be decided primarily on its own syntax and context—which, by your own admission, already lean Christological.

Your concluding language suggests that the independent benediction is “theologically conventional,” whereas the Christological reading would imply something theologically extraordinary or unstable. This contrast is misleading. The Christological reading is indeed extraordinary in rhetorical elevation, but it is not theologically incoherent, and it does not require collapsing the Father and the Son.
The reason is basic but crucial: personal distinction and divine predication are not mutually exclusive. Paul can speak of “God” and “the Lord Jesus Christ” in differentiated roles, relationships, and missions, and yet also describe Christ in terms that participate in divine identity. This is visible in a range of Pauline and Pauline-tradition texts where Jesus is associated with preexistence, creation, universal lordship, worship-language, and YHWH-scriptural resonance. You may interpret these differently within your narrative-historical framework, but they demonstrate that the category “very un-Jewish” is too blunt an instrument to settle the issue.
In Romans 9:5, therefore, the Christological reading need not be treated as a violation of Paul’s monotheism. It can be read instead as a compressed ascription in which Paul, at the climax of Israel’s privileges, names both the Messiah’s Israelite descent (κατὰ σάρκα) and the Messiah’s transcendent status. A Trinitarian reading then explains how such language can coexist with Paul’s many passages distinguishing Father and Son: the distinction is personal and economic, not an absolute prohibition on shared divine predication.
Your essay’s theological force comes from making readers feel that if Paul says θεός here of Christ, he must be doing something alien to Jewish monotheism or proto-Trinitarian distinctions. Once that false dilemma is removed, the argument shifts back where it belongs—to syntax and immediate rhetoric. And there, as you admit, the Christological reading has the stronger local case.

I do not think your rhetorical observations should be discarded. On the contrary, several of them are worth keeping, but in a different role than the one you assign them.
Your Romans 1:24–25 comparison is genuinely suggestive as a study in Pauline cadence and strategic phrase recurrence. It may help explain why εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν carries rhetorical resonance beyond a bare lexical meaning. Your observation about the oath-like frame and 2 Corinthians 11:31 is also helpful in highlighting how solemn truth-claims and benedictory language can coexist in Paul’s discourse. Your Exodus 3:14/Philo note is valuable as a reminder that ὁ ὢν can carry theological overtones in Greek-speaking Jewish contexts.
But these should function as secondary interpretive enrichments, not as a set of macro-level devices authorized to reverse the local syntactic current. Once placed in that proper role, they become more useful and less overstated. For example, on a Christological reading, one can still acknowledge a rhetorical echo to Romans 1:25—not as a proof of independent doxology, but as part of Paul’s broader strategy of God-language and climactic ascription in moments of theological compression. One can still note 2 Corinthians 11:31—not as a parallel that dictates the referent, but as evidence that Paul can deploy ὁ ὢν + blessing language solemnly. One can still explore an Exodus 3:14 resonance—not as a one-way Father marker, but as a possible intensifier of the divine register in which Christ is described.
In other words, your rhetoric works better once it stops trying to “overrule” grammar and instead begins to illuminate the rhetorical density of whichever reading best satisfies the grammar. On that order of priority, the Christological reading remains superior.

In conclusion, your essay does not fail because rhetoric is irrelevant. It fails because it asks rhetoric to do what only syntax can do at the decisive point: clearly signal a subject shift. You rightly identify Romans 9:5 as a christological crux. You rightly concede that grammar favors the Christological construal. You then propose a sophisticated rhetorical framework—Romans 1 parallelism, “amen” doxology patterns, a 2 Corinthians oath-blessing parallel, and a possible Exodus 3:14 resonance—to justify reading the clause as an independent, theologically conventional benediction to the Father.
The cumulative result is ingenious, but still insufficient. The parallels are real but non-identical. The doxology pattern is relevant but not determinative. The 2 Corinthians analogy is striking but structurally strengthens the case for nearest-antecedent attachment rather than weakening it. The Exodus/Philo suggestion is evocative but directionally ambiguous. Most importantly, the methodological claim that rhetorical intention “overrules” grammatical objections reverses the proper order of exegesis in a passage where the grammar already gives a clear prima facie reading.
The Christological reading is not a doctrinal imposition designed to flatten Paul’s distinctions between Father and Son. It is the reading that best respects the participial-relative construction, the immediate clause flow, and the rhetorical climax of Romans 9:1–6. It allows Paul’s lament to reach its full tragic force: Israel’s privileges culminate in the Messiah from them according to the flesh—and the one so named is described in language of supreme divine status. That does not require saying Jesus is the Father. It requires only the recognition that Paul’s monotheism and Paul’s Christology are not in a zero-sum relation.
So the decisive point is this: your rhetorical proposal keeps the doxology reading possible, but it does not make it preferable. And because you yourself grant the local grammatical pressure toward the Christological reading, the burden of proof remains unmet. The most natural reading of Romans 9:5, even after taking your rhetorical observations seriously, is still that Paul continues speaking of the Messiah and ascribes to him the climactic predicate: “who is over all, God blessed forever.”