I really shouldn’t be going on about this, but I keep running into the same issue, and it is irksome. Reading Romans in Context: Paul and Second Temple Judaism (2015), edited by Blackwell, Goodrich, and Maston, ought to be a useful, if elementary, resource for exploring the abundant literary contexts for the letter. It is written from a cautious evangelical perspective, for Christians—the sort of people who listen to John Piper—who “remain suspicious of extracanonical literature and its value for biblical interpretation” (19). So it seems unlikely that the real potential for illuminating Paul’s thought will be realised, and the first chapter does nothing to dispel that suspicion.

There is an obvious contradiction—at least in the popular imagination—between the values of Jesus and the practices of Christendom, and it is not surprising that what is left of the Christendom church in the West now largely views its past with horror and shame. Surely, the conversion of the Roman Empire was just a ghastly mistake, a betrayal of the gospel, an insult to the memory of Jesus the pacifist, the lover of enemies, the friend of tax collectors and prostitutes, the anti-establishment prophet and social revolutionary?

I am writing this in hope of offering some encouragement to Liam, who is planning to go to university in September to study theology but is worried that he may be wasting his time.

Liam is caught on the horns of a classic dilemma and at risk of falling torn and bruised between them. One horn is the traditional trinitarian understanding of the relation of Jesus to the Father; the other is a historical reading of the New Testament that constructs its christology in quite different terms.

Paul is in Athens, waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him. His spirit is troubled by the profusion of idols in the city, and he gets into lively disputes about the phenomenon with Jews and God-fearing gentiles in the synagogue on the Sabbath and for the rest of the week with philosophers and other layabouts in the agora. This is the real Paul—not the letter writer so much—of whom we get no more than a glimpse in Acts and in the reconstruction of his quarrels with the Jews in Romans.

The idea of the “eschatological pilgrimage of the Gentiles” to a rebuilt temple and restored Zion is well attested in Isaiah especially but is found in other Old Testament and Hellenistic-Jewish writings. Here are three examples, but we could add Isaiah 56:6-7; 66:18-20; Zech. 14:16; Mic. 4:1-2; Sibylline Oracles 3:715-19; 772-75, and no doubt others.

When Paul says, “if you call yourself a Jew” (Rom. 2:17), the traditional understanding has been that this is addressed to a Jew whom he is about to charge with hypocrisy: “You call yourself a Jew but you do this, that, and the other! Shame on you!”

It is sometimes argued, however, in keeping with the position generally taken by the “Paul within Judaism” school, that the critique in Romans 2 is directed not against Jews but against Gentiles, and that Paul’s interlocutor here is a non-Jew who mimics Jewishness. I have just read two recent defences of this view by Jacob Mortenson and Matthew Novenson. It’s a striking piece of re-interpretation, we’ll go through what I have taken to be the main arguments, but I’m not persuaded.