The Book of Romans — Paul's Masterwork and Its Road Into the Canon

Every book in this series has had to fight for its place. The Epistle of James was called an “epistle of straw.” Hebrews spent three centuries under a cloud of doubt in the Latin West. Second Peter is the most contested letter in the New Testament. Romans is different. It is the one Pauline letter that no serious critic, ancient or modern, has ever managed to take away from Paul — the fixed point around which the whole argument about the rest of the corpus turns.

And yet the letter that was never doubted also happens to carry the most tangled manuscript history in the New Testament. The last three chapters float. A doxology of three verses wanders through the tradition like a paragraph that cannot find its home, surfacing in at least six different positions. A heretic in the second century cut the thing in half. Two of the oldest witnesses disagree about where the letter even ends. To read Romans closely is to discover that the most secure book in the canon is also, textually, one of the strangest.

That double character — unshakably authentic, textually restless — is what this essay is about. Not the theology of justification, which I have treated elsewhere, but the letter itself: who wrote it and when, how it was transmitted, how the Church received it, why the Council of Trent named it first among Paul’s fourteen letters, and why it has re-made Christianity at the great turning points of its history ever since. I came into the Catholic Church from the evangelical world, and Romans was the beating heart of that world — the book on which Augustine, Luther, Wesley, and Barth all pivoted. Learning its real history did not diminish it for me. It made the letter larger.

A letter to a church Paul had never seen

Romans announces its author in its first word. “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God”⁠¹ — the self-identification that opens the letter is the fullest and most formal of any Paul wrote, and the note in the New American Bible observes that this apostolic self-description “is more developed in Romans than in any other letter.”⁠² Paul did not, however, hold the pen. Near the close the actual scribe steps forward in his own voice: “I, Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.”⁠³ Dictation to a secretary was ordinary practice in the Greco-Roman world, and the detail does nothing to unsettle Pauline authorship; it simply lets us watch the letter being made.

The circumstances of its making can be reconstructed with unusual precision. Paul wrote near the end of his third missionary journey, during the three-month stay in Greece recorded in Acts, and the internal evidence points to Corinth.⁠⁴ He commends to the Romans “Phoebe our sister, who is [also] a minister of the church at Cenchreae” — Cenchreae being Corinth’s eastern port — and almost certainly entrusted the letter to her to carry.⁠⁵ His host, “Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church,” is plausibly the Gaius he had baptized at Corinth, and “Erastus, the city treasurer” fits the same city.⁠⁶ The firmest anchor of all is the relief fund. Paul writes that he is on the point of departure: “Now, however, I am going to Jerusalem to minister to the holy ones. For Macedonia and Achaia have decided to make some contribution for the poor among the holy ones in Jerusalem.”⁠⁷ That collection places the letter at the very end of the third journey, just before the arrest in Jerusalem narrated in Acts 21 — which is to say, around A.D. 57, within a range the American bishops give as 56 to 58.⁠⁸

What makes Romans unlike Paul’s other letters is that he was writing to strangers. He had neither founded the Roman church nor visited it; he was introducing himself. “That is why I have so often been prevented from coming to you,” he explains near the end. “I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain and to be sent on my way there by you.”⁠⁹ Rome was to be a staging-post — a base of support for a mission to Spain, the western edge of the known world. That purpose accounts for the letter’s unusual character. A man commending himself and his gospel to a community that had only heard of him has reason to set out his message at length, in order, and with care. Romans is the nearest thing Paul left to a considered statement of his gospel, and its occasion explains why.

Scholars have proposed several complementary reasons for the letter beyond the self-introduction: that Paul wrote to prepare the Roman Christians to underwrite the Spanish mission; that he was rehearsing, for a wider audience, the argument he had fought out with the Galatians over law and gospel; and that he was addressing real tensions between Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome.⁠¹⁰ That last reading has a concrete historical setting. The Roman historian Suetonius records that the Emperor Claudius, around A.D. 49, expelled the Jews from Rome over disturbances “at the instigation of Chrestus” — almost certainly a garbled reference to disputes over Christ.⁠¹¹ Among those expelled were Aquila and Priscilla, whom Paul had met in Corinth; when the edict lapsed after Claudius’s death in 54, Jewish Christians returned to a church that had become largely Gentile in their absence. The delicate negotiation of “the weak” and “the strong” in Romans 14 and 15 reads naturally against that background. These purposes are not rivals. A letter this rich was doing several things at once.

A letter, not a system of theology

For four centuries the standard way to read Romans was as a summary of the faith entire. When Philip Melanchthon composed the first Protestant systematic theology, the Loci Communes of 1521, he drew its headings straight out of Romans and described the letter as a doctrinae christianae compendium — a “compendium of Christian doctrine.” Even Melanchthon meant something narrower than the phrase would later be made to bear. “In the Epistle to the Romans,” he wrote, “when he drew up a compendium of Christian doctrine, did Paul the author philosophize about the mysteries of the Trinity, the mode of the Incarnation…? On the contrary, what does Paul do? He reasons most certainly about the Law, Sin, and Grace.”⁠¹² Melanchthon’s “compendium” was the saving core — law, sin, grace — not a table of everything a Christian must hold. But the phrase escaped its author, and Romans came to be read as though it were a treatise: Paul’s dogmatics, lifted clear of the occasion of any letter, a system in epistolary dress.

The twentieth century took that reading apart. The decisive observation was almost embarrassingly simple: every other letter Paul wrote was addressed to a concrete situation, and there is no good reason to make Romans the exception. Karl Donfried, whose collection The Romans Debate gathered the argument, laid down the governing rule — that any study of the letter “should proceed on the initial assumption that this letter was written by Paul to deal with a concrete situation in Rome.”⁠¹³ And the situation, as the opening of this essay described, was concrete indeed: the Spanish mission Paul hoped Rome would underwrite, the collection he was about to carry to Jerusalem, and the friction between Jewish and Gentile believers in a church still healing from the aftermath of Claudius’s expulsion. A. J. M. Wedderburn titled his study of the question, pointedly, The Reasons for Romans — plural — because the letter answers not one occasion but a cluster of them.⁠¹⁴

The compendium and its critics

If Romans were a compendium of Christian doctrine in the later, fuller sense, it would be a strange one, for it leaves a great deal out. It says next to nothing about the Eucharist — the sacrament at the center of Christian worship goes unmentioned, though the same Paul had devoted long paragraphs to it in writing to Corinth. It offers no order of ministry, none of the qualifications for bishops and elders that the Pastoral Epistles supply; its twelfth chapter lists gifts of grace — prophecy, service, teaching, mercy — but no offices. It contains nothing of the detailed timetable of the Lord’s return that Paul had given the Thessalonians, and no hymn to the cosmic Christ of the kind that opens Colossians or crowns the second chapter of Philippians.⁠¹⁵ This is not to say the letter is thin. It treats sin, the Law, grace, justification, baptism, the Holy Spirit, the destiny of Israel, and the shape of the Christian life with a fullness unmatched anywhere in Paul. But a document that passes over the Eucharist, church order, and the last things is not attempting a summa. It is pursuing what its occasion required, and letting the rest go.

Read this way, the famous architecture of Romans looks different. The letter is not a neutral outline of doctrine descending tidily from the general to the particular. It is an argument aimed at a target — and the target is the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the one people of God.

Chapters 9–11 are not a detour

Nowhere does the occasional reading change more than in how one takes chapters 9 through 11 — Paul’s long and anguished wrestling with the unbelief of Israel and the mystery of her final salvation. On the older, systematic reading these chapters were an appendix, a personal excursus set down after the “doctrinal” argument of chapters 1 through 8 had done its work; the Reformed dogmatic tradition often treated them as a self-contained treatise on predestination, detachable from the whole.

Krister Stendahl put the corrective as sharply as anyone: “Rom. 9–11,” he wrote, “is not an appendix to chs. 1–8, but the climax of the letter.”⁠¹⁶ If the letter’s occasion is the standing of Jew and Gentile before God, then Israel’s place is not a digression from the argument but its destination. Stendahl pressed the point further, and controversially. The West, he argued, had read Paul through Augustine and Luther as the physician of the introspective, guilty conscience — Paul as the man who found in justification by faith the cure for the torments of a scrupulous soul. But Paul himself, Stendahl observed, had what “in our eyes must be called a rather ‘robust’ conscience”; he could describe himself, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Paul had not reasoned his way to justification by testing its effect upon his conscience; he had arrived at it while “grappling with the question about the place of the Gentiles in the Church and in the plan of God.”⁠¹⁷ Justification, on this reading, is not first a theory about the anxious individual but the charter of a people — the ground on which Gentiles are received without becoming Jews.

A Catholic need not follow Stendahl, or the New Perspective on Paul that grew from his work, in every particular; the individual standing before God is not erased by the corporate one, and the tradition has always heard both. But the reframing is salutary, and it sits easily with the way Catholic theology has always read Paul — less as the prosecutor of the introspective conscience than as the apostle of a Church in which Jew and Gentile are made one. I have treated the theology of these chapters — election, predestination, the destiny of Israel — at length in a separate essay on Romans 9–11; here the point is simply structural. Nine through eleven are where the letter had been going all along.

The argument bends toward a shared table

If the doctrine serves an occasion, the occasion surfaces plainly in the letter’s last movement. Chapters 14 and 15 turn from the heights of Israel’s destiny to something startlingly concrete: what the Roman Christians should eat, and which days they should keep. “Welcome anyone who is weak in faith,” Paul begins, “but not for disputes over opinions.” The quarrel was real — “one person believes that one may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables”; “one person considers one day more important than another, while another person considers all days alike.” The “weak” were, in the main, Jewish Christians whose consciences still held to the dietary law and the sacred calendar; the “strong,” mostly Gentiles, knew the gospel had freed them. The Catholic study note to these chapters names the human cost exactly: because “Christ spells termination of the law… the jettisoning of long-practiced customs was traumatic for many Christians brought up under the Mosaic code.”⁠¹⁸

This is no appendix of general moral advice. It is the point toward which the whole letter has been bending. All the argument about law and grace, about Jew and Greek and the one God of both, exists to make possible a single sentence near the end: “Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you, for the glory of God.” The doctrine was in the service of a table — a table at which people who had every reason to despise one another might sit down together. That is what an occasional letter looks like when its occasion is the unity of the Church.

Reading an occasional letter as a Catholic

To see Romans as an occasional letter is not to diminish it, and here a balance is owed, for the occasional reading can be pressed too far — as though Romans were merely a memo about a first-century quarrel over food. It is nothing of the kind. N. T. Wright, who insists as firmly as anyone that Romans is “a letter addressed to a particular situation,” says in the same breath that it is “neither a systematic theology nor a summary of Paul’s lifework, but… by common consent his masterpiece,” an Alpine peak towering over hills and villages.⁠¹⁹ The letter is at once thoroughly occasional and unaccountably vast — the fullest thing Paul ever wrote, called forth by a concrete need. J. C. Beker caught the double character in a pair of words that have shaped Pauline study ever since: coherence and contingency. Paul has one coherent gospel, and he speaks it always into a contingent situation; Romans is that gospel meeting the situation in Rome.⁠²⁰ Günther Bornkamm could call the letter Paul’s “last will and testament,” his mature summing-up on the eve of a journey he might not survive, and mean at the same time that it remains a genuine letter and not a treatise.⁠²¹

For a Catholic reader there is a particular gain in all this. The temptation the Reformation bequeathed was to make one letter — Romans, with Galatians — the lens through which the whole of Scripture must be read, and to demote whatever would not fit the lens: the Letter of James, the sacraments, the visible Church. A canon within the canon. To read Romans as an occasional letter is to resist that reduction. It restores the letter to its place in the symphony instead of making it the single instrument to which every other must tune. The Catechism states the principle that governs the Catholic reading of any one book: the interpreter must “be especially attentive ‘to the content and unity of the whole Scripture,’” for, different as its books are, Scripture is one “by reason of the unity of God’s plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart.”⁠²² Romans is not that whole. It is one radiant part of it — the longest, in many ways the deepest, and precisely because it is a letter and not a system, a living word spoken to a real community, and through them to us.

The letter no critic could take from Paul

Here is the fact that sets Romans apart in any discussion of the canon: its authenticity has never been seriously in play. The modern academy sorts the thirteen letters bearing Paul’s name into three tiers — seven “undisputed” letters accepted across the entire scholarly spectrum, and six “disputed” or deutero-Pauline letters whose authorship is argued.⁠²³ Romans sits not merely among the undisputed seven but at their head. It is the anchor against which the authenticity of everything else is measured.

The strength of that position is best seen in the one place one would least expect to find it — the most corrosive New Testament criticism of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand Christian Baur, the founder of the Tübingen School, was as aggressive a skeptic as the discipline produced; he pushed the dates of most New Testament books deep into the second century and treated the tradition with relentless suspicion. Yet in his 1845 study of Paul, Baur conceded that four letters were beyond dispute — Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians, the letters German scholarship still calls the Hauptbriefe, the “chief letters.”⁠²⁴ The man who doubted nearly everything could not doubt Romans. If anything, the later history of criticism moved in Romans’ favor: scholars after Baur restored letters to the authentic column rather than removing them, so that the accepted core grew from four to seven.⁠²⁵

There was one fringe that went further. A small circle of Dutch radicals at the end of the nineteenth century — Allard Pierson, Abraham Loman, and above all Willem Christiaan van Manen — argued that no letter of Paul’s, Romans included, was genuine.⁠²⁶ The position is a curiosity in the history of scholarship, and it is instructive precisely because of what it cost. To doubt Romans, van Manen had to throw out the entire Pauline corpus — and essentially no one followed him. The letter is so firmly moored that pulling it loose requires pulling everything loose. That is a rare kind of security, and it is worth naming plainly: whatever else is contested about Paul, Romans is not.

The most complicated text in the New Testament

And now the paradox. The letter no one doubts is the letter whose text refuses to sit still.

Begin with the ending. Most modern Bibles close Romans with a resounding three-verse doxology: “Now to him who can strengthen you, according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ.”⁠²⁷ The trouble is that the manuscripts cannot agree on where those verses belong. In his standard Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger catalogues no fewer than six different arrangements attested in the tradition: the doxology after 16:23, as in our Bibles; after 14:23, in the great mass of Byzantine manuscripts; after 15:33, the placement of the oldest copy we possess; in two places at once, after both 14:23 and 16:23; omitted altogether; and, in a few Latin witnesses, after 14:23 followed later by the benediction.⁠²⁸ A single short passage occupies six positions across the witnesses. Nothing else in the New Testament wanders quite so freely.

The wandering doxology is a symptom of something larger. There is good evidence that Romans once circulated in a shorter, fourteen-chapter form, running through 14:23 and omitting the last two chapters along with the destination phrase “in Rome” at 1:7 and 1:15. Harry Gamble’s classic study of the letter’s textual history reconstructs this abridged edition and argues, persuasively, that it was a later “catholicizing” adaptation — chapters full of personal greetings and travel plans trimmed away to make the letter serve the whole Church rather than one congregation.⁠²⁹ The abridgement left fingerprints. The ninth-century codex known as Boernerianus lacks the destination “in Rome” at 1:15, and at 14:23 — the point where one form of the text placed the closing doxology — a scribe left a blank space, uncertain what belonged in the gap.⁠³⁰

The most consequential early editor of Romans was a heretic. Around 144, Marcion of Sinope — who taught that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser being than the Father of Jesus — assembled the first known Pauline collection and, in the process, took a knife to the text. Our witness for what he did to Romans is Origen, whose commentary survives in Rufinus’s Latin translation. Origen reports that Marcion “completely removed” the doxology from the letter, “and not only this, but from the place where it is written, ‘But everything that is not from faith is sin’ [14:23], right up to the end he cut everything away.”⁠³¹ Marcion, in other words, ended his Romans at chapter 14. It is worth being careful here, because the point is often overstated: Tertullian, who devoted a whole book of his Against Marcion to the Marcionite Paul, is silent about chapters 15 and 16 and provides no direct testimony to the fourteen-chapter ending. The evidence that Marcion stopped at 14:23 rests on Origen alone — but it is good evidence, and it locates the shortening of Romans in the second century.⁠³²

Then there is the oldest copy. Papyrus 46 — the Chester Beatty codex of Paul, written around the year 200 and the earliest substantial manuscript of the Pauline letters — places the doxology not at the end but after 15:33, with the greetings of chapter 16 following it.⁠³³ This is the manuscript datum behind the boldest of the integrity theories. In a celebrated 1948 essay, T. W. Manson proposed that Paul’s letter to Rome originally ended at chapter 15, and that a copy of it, with the greetings of chapter 16 attached, was sent to Ephesus — where Paul knew a great many people.⁠³⁴ The argument has a certain force. Prisca and Aquila, greeted first in Romans 16:3, were in Ephesus not long before; Epaenetus is called “the firstfruits of Asia,” Ephesus’s province; and a list of more than two dozen named acquaintances seems easier to explain if Paul were writing to a church he knew.

Yet the modern consensus has come down, on balance, for the integrity of the letter. Peter Lampe’s prosopographic study of the names in Romans 16 found that they fit the population of the city of Rome — a high proportion of slave and freedman names characteristic of the capital — and Romans 16 is now read as our earliest evidence for the makeup of Roman Christianity itself.⁠³⁵ That Paul knew people in a church he had not visited is no mystery once one remembers how mobile the early Christian network was: Prisca and Aquila had been expelled from Rome under Claudius and could easily have returned once the edict lapsed. And another early witness, the papyrus P118, preserves the transition from 15:33 directly into chapter 16, showing that at least one early line of the text knew the two chapters as continuous.⁠³⁶ The Ephesus hypothesis is now a minority report; the greetings most likely belong to Rome.

I dwell on all of this because it is the part of the story most readers never hear. The popular impression of Romans is of a pristine, seamless treatise handed down intact. The reality is a letter with a restless ending, an abridged edition, a heretical mutilation, a floating doxology, and a live scholarly debate about its final chapter — and none of it touches the authenticity of the letter or the substance of its gospel. The text is complicated; the letter is secure. Both things are true, and holding them together is the beginning of understanding how the New Testament actually reached us.

Romans in the early Church

If the manuscripts are restless, the reception is not. Romans is present in Christian literature from the earliest moment after the apostolic age, and it is never once questioned.

The first witness writes from Rome itself. Around A.D. 96, Clement, writing on behalf of the Roman church to the Corinthians, reaches for language that unmistakably echoes Paul’s letter. His catalogue of vices in chapter 35 tracks the great indictment of Romans 1, down to the closing note that those who practice such things and those who applaud them share the same guilt.⁠³⁷ More striking still is his account of justification: “we, having been called through His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified through ourselves … but through faith.”⁠³⁸ That is Paul’s vocabulary. But Clement is no proto-Protestant, and the very next lines are worth weighing: “What then must we do, brethren? Must we idly abstain from doing good, and forsake love? May the Master never allow this … let us hasten with instancy and zeal to accomplish every good work.”⁠³⁹ Clement holds faith and works together in a single breath — the reading the Catholic tradition would defend against a later “faith alone.” A caution is in order: these are echoes and allusions, not formal quotations. Clement never names Romans, and some of the shared language belongs to a common stock. What the evidence shows is that within a generation of Paul’s death, the Roman church knew his letter to Rome and reworked its language as its own.⁠⁴⁰

The echoes continue. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107, professes Christ “truly of the race of David according to the flesh” — the credal formula that opens Romans.⁠⁴¹ Polycarp of Smyrna, a little later, warns that “we must all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, and each one must give an account of himself,” pairing two verses of Romans 14 in a single sentence.⁠⁴² None of these writers cites Romans by title, as was the custom of the age; all of them breathe its air.

The first collection to name it explicitly was, once again, a heretic’s. Marcion’s Apostolikon, around 144, gathered ten letters of Paul — and Romans stood fourth among them, after Galatians and the two Corinthians.⁠⁴³ The point is easy to miss and important to grasp: Marcion did not invent the Pauline collection. He pruned and edited one that already existed. Romans was in the corpus before the first heretic got to it.

By the end of the second century the orthodox lists arrive. The Muratorian Fragment — the oldest surviving catalogue of New Testament books, usually dated around 170 to 200 — describes how “to the Romans he wrote at length, explaining the order of the Scriptures, and also that Christ is their principle,” and then places Romans in a list of seven churches Paul addressed: “to the Corinthians first … to the Romans seventh.”⁠⁴⁴ A century and a half later, Eusebius of Caesarea, sorting the books into the acknowledged and the disputed, files “the epistles of Paul” without hesitation among the acknowledged — and elsewhere states flatly that “Paul’s fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed,” the doubts of his day touching only whether Hebrews belonged among them.⁠⁴⁵ Romans is never the letter in question. It is the measure by which the questionable ones are judged.

And wherever a list stops merely counting Paul’s letters and begins to enumerate them, Romans comes first. It heads the fourteen in the canon transmitted with the Council of Laodicea; it heads them in the great festal letter of Athanasius; it will head them at Florence and at Trent.⁠⁴⁶ When Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of A.D. 367 — the first document to list exactly our twenty-seven-book New Testament — comes to Paul, he writes: “there are fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, written in this order: the first, to the Romans.”⁠⁴⁷ The place of honor was Romans’ from the beginning.

The Catholic canon: Florence and Trent

The canon the early Church received, the Catholic Church has defined. Two conciliar acts matter most for the Book of Romans, and in both the letter stands first among Paul’s.

The earlier is the Council of Florence. In its Bull of Union with the Copts, Cantate Domino, promulgated on 4 February 1442, the council professed that “one and the same God is the author of the old and the new Testament” and listed the sacred books it received — among them “fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans,” heading the enumeration.⁠⁴⁸ This was the first time an ecumenical council reckoned by the Latin Church had enumerated the full canon. A century later, against the challenges of the Reformation, the Council of Trent made the definition solemn and binding. In its Fourth Session, on 8 April 1546, the council decreed the list of sacred books “lest a doubt may arise in any one’s mind, which are the books that are received by this Synod,” and named for the New Testament “fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, (one) to the Romans” — quatuordecim epistolae Pauli Apostoli: ad Romanos — again at the head of the list.⁠⁴⁹ To this the council attached its anathema: “if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts … let him be anathema.”⁠⁵⁰ The phrase “entire with all their parts” has a particular weight for a letter whose parts had wandered for centuries: the canonical Romans is the sixteen-chapter letter, doxology and greetings and all.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church confirms in practice what the councils defined in principle. Romans is among the most heavily cited books in the entire Catechism. It grounds the treatment of justification, where Romans 3 is quoted directly; it undergirds the teaching that “faith comes from what is heard,” drawn from Romans 10; it appears in the exposition of Abraham’s faith from Romans 4.⁠⁵¹ A letter that a Roman bishop echoed in the first century and an ecumenical council enshrined in the sixteenth remains, in the Church’s official teaching, one of the load-bearing texts of the faith.

Why Romans stands first

Romans opens the Pauline corpus in every Bible you are likely to own. It is worth asking why — because the answer is not the one most readers assume. Romans is not first because it was written first. It was not. The earliest of Paul’s surviving letters is almost certainly First Thessalonians, from around A.D. 50 or 51; Romans comes half a decade later.⁠⁵²

The principle of arrangement is length. The letters to churches are set in roughly descending order of size, followed by the letters to individuals in the same descending order, with Hebrews — whose Pauline authorship the West long doubted — attached at the end of the collection.⁠⁵³ Romans is simply the longest of Paul’s letters to a church, and so it comes first. There is a fittingness in the accident. The most comprehensive statement of Paul’s gospel opens the corpus and sets the key for everything that follows, even though the chronology runs otherwise. The oldest manuscript, P46, arranges the letters by the same descending-length principle but counts Hebrews among them, placing it startlingly early — second, right after Romans — a reminder that the order we take for granted was itself the product of a long settling.⁠⁵⁴

The letter that keeps re-making the Church

There remains the matter of what Romans has done. No other book outside the Gospels has so repeatedly seized the Church by the collar and turned it in a new direction — and it has done so, remarkably, again and again at the great hinges of Christian history.

It began with Augustine. In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, weeping and undone, he heard a child’s voice chanting “take up and read.” He opened the codex of Paul that lay beside him and read the first passage his eye fell upon: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” — Romans 13:13–14. “No further would I read,” he recalled, “nor did I need; for instantly … all the gloom of doubt vanished away.”⁠⁵⁵ The conversion that would shape Western theology for a millennium turned on two verses of Romans.

It happened again with Luther. He called Romans, in his 1522 preface, “truly the most important piece in the New Testament … purest Gospel,” a letter worth a Christian’s occupying himself with daily “as though it were the daily bread of the soul.”⁠⁵⁶ His whole theological revolution grew from wrestling with a single phrase in Romans 1:17, “the righteousness of God,” which he had hated until he came to read it as a righteousness God gives rather than one God demands — after which, he wrote, “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”⁠⁵⁷ Whatever a Catholic makes of where Luther took that reading — and I have written about the Reformation elsewhere — the engine of it was Romans.

It happened a third time, more quietly, on the evening of 24 May 1738, when a reluctant John Wesley went to a meeting in Aldersgate Street “where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans.” “About a quarter before nine,” he wrote, “while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.”⁠⁵⁸ The evangelical revival that swept the English-speaking world was lit from Luther’s preface to Romans. And it happened a fourth time in the twentieth century, when Karl Barth’s explosive commentary Der Römerbrief — first published in 1919 and wholly rewritten in 1922 — fell, in a phrase of the era, “like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground,” and launched the dialectical theology that dominated a generation.⁠⁵⁹

Four turning points of the Church — the fourth century, the sixteenth, the eighteenth, the twentieth — through one letter. The observation is not merely devotional. Coleridge, no sentimentalist, called Romans “the most profound work in existence.”⁠⁶⁰ And Joseph Fitzmyer, whose Anchor Bible commentary is the natural starting point for a Catholic reader, put the historical judgment as soberly as it can be put: Romans is “the most important of the Pauline writings, if not of the entire” New Testament, and “one can almost write the history of Christian theology by surveying the ways in which Romans has been interpreted.”⁠⁶¹

That is the final paradox of the Book of Romans. The letter with the most tangled text in the New Testament is also the one no critic could deny, the one the councils named first, and the one that has re-made the Church again and again. The text wanders; the letter endures. Perhaps that is fitting for a book whose subject is a righteousness that comes not from our keeping but as a gift — a letter secure not because its transmission was tidy, but because the Church has never for a moment been able to do without it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the Book of Romans, and when?

The Apostle Paul wrote Romans, dictating it to a scribe named Tertius, who adds his own greeting in 16:22. Paul composed it near the end of his third missionary journey, most likely from Corinth, around A.D. 57 (the American bishops’ introduction gives a range of 56 to 58). He was about to carry a relief collection to Jerusalem and was writing ahead of a planned visit to Rome, on his way to a new mission in Spain. Romans is one of the seven “undisputed” letters accepted as authentically Pauline by scholars across the whole spectrum — indeed even the radical nineteenth-century Tübingen School granted it.

Why does the Book of Romans come first among Paul’s letters if it was not written first?

Paul’s letters are arranged by length, not chronology. The letters to churches are placed in roughly descending order of size, followed by the letters to individuals, with Hebrews attached at the end. Romans is the longest of Paul’s letters to a church, so it comes first — even though First Thessalonians, written around A.D. 50–51, is several years older. The arrangement has a certain fittingness: the fullest statement of Paul’s gospel opens the collection and sets the key for the rest.

Is the text of Romans reliable, given that the ending seems to move around?

Yes. The uncertainty concerns the placement of the closing doxology (16:25–27) and, in antiquity, whether a shorter fourteen-chapter form circulated — not the wording or the substance of the letter. The doxology appears in at least six positions in the manuscripts, the oldest copy (Papyrus 46, c. 200) placing it after 15:33. Scholars debate these arrangements precisely because the manuscript tradition is so rich and so early. None of it affects the authenticity of Romans or the content of its gospel; the Church receives the sixteen-chapter letter, and the Council of Trent defined the canonical books “entire with all their parts.”

Did the heretic Marcion really cut Romans in half?

He shortened it. Around 144, Marcion of Sinope produced the first known collection of Paul’s letters and edited the text to fit his theology. According to Origen — whose commentary survives in Rufinus’s Latin — Marcion removed the closing doxology and cut everything from 14:23 to the end, so that his Romans stopped at chapter 14. Origen is the direct witness for this; Tertullian, who also attacked Marcion’s Paul, is silent about the last two chapters. The episode is one reason a fourteen-chapter form of Romans is thought to have circulated in the second century.

Why is the Book of Romans so important in Christian history?

More than any book outside the Gospels, Romans has repeatedly turned the Church at its great hinges. Augustine’s conversion in 386 came through Romans 13:13–14; Luther’s Reformation breakthrough grew from Romans 1:17; John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience in 1738 came while Luther’s preface to Romans was being read; and Karl Barth’s 1919 commentary on Romans launched twentieth-century dialectical theology. The Jesuit scholar Joseph Fitzmyer observed that one can almost write the history of Christian theology by surveying how Romans has been interpreted.

What does the Catholic Church teach about Romans?

The Catholic Church receives Romans as inspired, canonical Scripture, defined among the “fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle” by the Council of Florence (1442) and solemnly by the Council of Trent (1546), which named Romans first in the list and attached an anathema to any denial of the canon. Romans is one of the most frequently cited books in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, grounding its teaching on justification, on faith, and on the moral order. Catholics read Paul’s teaching on faith in concert with the rest of the New Testament — including the Epistle of James — rather than in isolation.

Footnotes

1. 1. Romans 1:1 (New American Bible, Revised Edition). All Scripture quotations follow the NABRE unless otherwise noted; bible.usccb.org/bible/romans/1.

2. 2. Note on Romans 1:1–7, New American Bible, Revised Edition (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011): "this element is more developed in Romans than in any other letter."

3. 3. Romans 16:22 (NABRE). On the ordinary use of an amanuensis in antiquity, compare Galatians 6:11 and 1 Corinthians 16:21, where Paul takes the pen himself for the closing greeting.

4. 4. Acts 20:2–3 records Paul spending three months in Greece before setting out for Jerusalem — the window during which Romans was written. See the Introduction to Romans, NABRE: "the apostle wrote from Greece, likely Corinth."

5. 5. Romans 16:1–2 (NABRE). Cenchreae was the eastern port of Corinth. The placement of Phoebe's commendation at the head of chapter 16, in the form of an ancient letter of recommendation, is the basis for the widely held view that she carried the letter to Rome.

6. 6. Romans 16:23 (NABRE); compare 1 Corinthians 1:14, where Paul names a Gaius among the few he baptized at Corinth. The NABRE cautions that this Erastus is "not necessarily to be identified" with others of the name; the Corinthian identifications are probable, not certain.

7. 7. Romans 15:25–26 (NABRE). On the collection see also 2 Corinthians 8–9, Paul's extended treatment of the same relief fund.

8. 8. Introduction to Romans, NABRE: the letter arose "when the apostle wrote from Greece, likely Corinth, between A.D. 56 and 58 (cf. Acts 20:2–3)." Most scholars narrow the date to c. A.D. 57. See Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 85–88.

9. 9. Romans 15:22–24 (NABRE); compare 15:28, "I shall set out by way of you to Spain." The NABRE note on 15:20 remarks that Spain "was considered the limit of the western world."

10. 10. The Introduction to Romans in the NABRE lays out these overlapping purposes: self-introduction and support for the Spanish mission; the relationship of Judaism and Christianity (as in Galatians); and the theme of Israel and the Church in chapters 9–11. For the socio-historical reading, see Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

11. 11. Suetonius, Life of Claudius 25.4: "Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit" — "he expelled from Rome the Jews, who were continually making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus." Compare Acts 18:2, which records that Aquila and Priscilla had left Italy "because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome." The expulsion is usually dated to A.D. 49.

12. 12. Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes (1521); the characterization of Romans as a doctrinae christianae compendium ("compendium of Christian doctrine") stands in the work's introduction. English from Charles Leander Hill, trans., The Loci Communes of Philip Melanchthon (Boston: Meador, 1944), 69. The Latin and its history are discussed in Robert L. Plummer, "Melanchthon as Interpreter of the New Testament," Westminster Theological Journal 62 (2000): 257–65. Melanchthon dropped the phrase from later editions, and W. G. Kümmel objected that reading Romans as a compendium slights its near-silence on eschatology, the Lord's Supper, and church order (Introduction to the New Testament, rev. ed. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1975], 312).

13. 13. Karl P. Donfried, ed., The Romans Debate, rev. and expanded ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991; orig. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1977). The quoted rule is from Donfried's essay "False Presuppositions in the Study of Romans," 102–25 (the rule at 102–3), grounded on "the fact that every other authentic Pauline writing, without exception, is addressed to the specific situations of the churches or persons involved."

14. 14. A. J. M. Wedderburn, The Reasons for Romans (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988). Wedderburn argues that a single-reason account of the letter can no longer be sustained.

15. 15. Paul's own extended treatment of the Lord's Supper is at 1 Corinthians 11:17–34; the qualifications for church office at 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1; the detailed sequence of the parousia at 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; the cosmic-Christ hymns at Colossians 1:15–20 and Philippians 2:6–11. Romans 12:6–8 lists charisms rather than offices. On Romans' deliberate lack of comprehensiveness — "Paul doesn't mention the Lord's Supper in the epistle... nor does he operate out of a concern for comprehensiveness" — see the "Introduction to the Epistle to the Romans," Lectio (Seattle Pacific University).

16. 16. Krister Stendahl, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 199–215; repr. in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 78–96. The quoted sentence is at p. 205.

17. 17. Stendahl, "Introspective Conscience," 200–201 (Paul's "robust" conscience, with Philippians 3:6) and 204–5 (Paul's doctrine of the Law arising from "his grappling with the question about the place of the Gentiles in the Church and in the plan of God"). Stendahl's essay is a headwater of what became the New Perspective on Paul.

18. 18. Romans 14:1, 2, 5 and 15:7 (NABRE). The study note on Romans 14:1–15:6 (NABRE) observes that "since Christ spells termination of the law... the jettisoning of long-practiced customs was traumatic for many Christians brought up under the Mosaic code." The Greek verb rendered "welcome" (proslambanesthe) brackets the whole section, at 14:1 and again at 15:7. Compare Paul's parallel counsel on food and conscience in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10.

19. 19. N. T. Wright, "The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections," in The New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 10, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 395, 404: Romans is "neither a systematic theology nor a summary of Paul's lifework, but... by common consent his masterpiece," and yet "this is not, after all, a systematic theology but a letter addressed to a particular situation."

20. 20. J. C. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), whose central framework is the interaction between the "coherence" of Paul's gospel and its "contingent" application to each community (see Parts Two and Three).

21. 21. Günther Bornkamm, "The Letter to the Romans as Paul's Last Will and Testament," in The Romans Debate, ed. Donfried, 16–28.

22. 22. Catechism of the Catholic Church §112, itself quoting the principle of reading Scripture attentive to "the content and unity of the whole Scripture"; compare Dei Verbum 12. On the Reformation "canon within the canon" and Trent's response — which cited James by name on justification — see my The Epistle of James and The Council of Trent and the Doctrine of Justification.

23. 23. The standard taxonomy counts seven undisputed letters (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) and six disputed or deutero-Pauline (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastorals: 1–2 Timothy, Titus). Romans belongs to the undisputed core.

24. 24. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (Stuttgart, 1845); English translation, Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, trans. Eduard Zeller (London: Williams and Norgate, 1873–75). Baur (1792–1860) accepted only Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians — the four Hauptbriefe — as genuinely Pauline.

25. 25. Later nineteenth-century critics (Hilgenfeld, Holtzmann) restored Philemon, 1 Thessalonians, and Philippians to the authentic column, bringing the accepted core to seven. The direction of criticism after Baur was to grant Paul more letters, never to remove Romans.

26. 26. Willem Christiaan van Manen (1842–1905), professor at Leiden, argued in his Paulus (1890–96) that no Pauline letter, Romans included, was authentic — following A. D. Loman and the Swiss critic Rudolf Steck, in the current of the so-called Dutch Radical criticism. Van Manen's own 1865 dissertation had accepted 1 Thessalonians as genuine; he reversed himself by 1889. The position won no lasting following.

27. 27. Romans 16:25 (NABRE). The full doxology runs 16:25–27.

28. 28. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 470–73, 476–77, catalogues six differing sequences: the doxology after 16:23 (𝔓61, א, B, C, D, 81, 1739); after 14:23 (the Byzantine tradition, L, Ψ); in both places (A, P); omitted (F, G, 629); after 15:33 (𝔓46); and, in some Vulgate manuscripts, after 14:23 followed by 16:24.

29. 29. Harry Y. Gamble Jr., The Textual History of the Letter to the Romans: A Study in Textual and Literary Criticism, Studies and Documents 42 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977). Gamble argues that the fourteen-chapter form was a secondary "catholicizing" abridgement and defends the integrity of the sixteen-chapter letter.

30. 30. Codex Boernerianus (G, Gregory–Aland 012), a ninth-century Greek–Latin manuscript, omits the closing doxology (16:25–27) and leaves a blank space for it at 14:23 — a physical trace of a text-tradition that placed the doxology after chapter 14. It also lacks the destination "in Rome," substituting "in love" (ἐν ἀγάπῃ) at 1:7 and omitting the phrase (ἐν Ῥώμῃ) at 1:15. On the omission of "in Rome" by a handful of witnesses (1739 margin, 1908, and Origen's knowledge of such copies), see Gamble, Textual History, 29–33.

31. 31. Origen, Commentary on Romans 10.43, preserved in Rufinus's Latin: "Caput hoc Marcion . . . de hac epistula penitus abstulit; et non solum hoc, sed et ab eo loco, ubi scriptum est: 'omne autem quod non est ex fide peccatum est' [14:23], usque ad finem cuncta dissecuit." Translation from Thomas P. Scheck, Origen: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 6–10, Fathers of the Church 104 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002).

32. 32. Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.13–14 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3), treats Marcion's Romans but cites nothing from chapters 15–16, an argument from silence consistent with — but not direct proof of — the fourteen-chapter ending. The nineteenth-century ANF editors already noted that the positive testimony is Origen's, not Tertullian's.

33. 33. Papyrus 46 (Chester Beatty Papyrus II / P. Mich. inv. 6238), dated c. A.D. 175–225, is the earliest substantial codex of the Pauline letters. It places the doxology after 15:33 and follows it with chapter 16; its order of letters is Romans, Hebrews, 1–2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians.

34. 34. T. W. Manson, "St. Paul's Letter to the Romans — and Others," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 31 (1948): 224–40; reprinted in The Romans Debate, ed. Karl P. Donfried, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), 3–15. Manson held that the Roman letter ended at chapter 15 and that a copy with chapter 16 appended was sent to Ephesus.

35. 35. Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 153–83, analyzes the names of Romans 16 against the epigraphic record of the city of Rome. See also Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 324–28, defending the integrity of chapter 16.

36. 36. Papyrus 118 (P. Köln 10311), assigned to the third century, preserves the transition from Romans 15:33 into 16:1 as continuous text, evidence that at least one early line of transmission knew chapters 15 and 16 together.

37. 37. 1 Clement 35, echoing the vice-catalogue of Romans 1:29–32, including the closing note that those who applaud such deeds share the guilt of those who do them (cf. Rom 1:32).

38. 38. 1 Clement 32:4, trans. J. B. Lightfoot, in The Apostolic Fathers; earlychristianwritings.com. The passage echoes Romans 3:28 and 4:2–5.

39. 39. 1 Clement 33:1 (Lightfoot). Clement holds justification by faith and the necessity of good works together, an early witness against reading Paul's "faith" in isolation from works of love.

40. 40. On the scholarly caution required — Clement alludes to and reworks Romans rather than formally citing it — see Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher M. Tuckett, eds., The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Clement names 1 Corinthians explicitly (1 Clement 47) but never cites Romans by title.

41. 41. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 1.1 (trans. J. B. Lightfoot), "truly of the race of David according to the flesh," echoing the formula of Romans 1:3; compare To the Ephesians 20.2 and To the Trallians 9.

42. 42. Polycarp, To the Philippians 6.2 (Lightfoot), pairing "the judgment-seat of Christ" (Rom 14:10) with "each one must give an account of himself" (Rom 14:12) in a single sentence.

43. 43. Marcion's Apostolikon comprised ten letters, reconstructed from Tertullian (Against Marcion 5) and Epiphanius (Panarion 42): Galatians, 1–2 Corinthians, Romans, 1–2 Thessalonians, "Laodiceans" (canonical Ephesians), Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon. Romans stood fourth. Marcion excluded the Pastorals and Hebrews and used an edited, shortened text.

44. 44. The Muratorian Fragment, lines 42–55, trans. Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Appendix IV, 305–7. The fragment is generally dated c. 170–200; a minority (Sundberg, Hahneman) argue for a fourth-century Eastern date, but the earlier dating remains the consensus.

45. 45. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1–2 (the acknowledged books include "the epistles of Paul" as a group) and 3.3.5 ("Paul's fourteen epistles are well known and undisputed"), trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1. Eusebius names no individual Pauline letter in 3.25; the only doubt he records concerns Hebrews.

46. 46. The book-list transmitted with Canon 60 of the Council of Laodicea (c. 363) enumerates "fourteen epistles of Paul," beginning "1, to the Romans"; the authenticity of this appended list is disputed, but it is an early Eastern witness placing Romans first. The African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) received "thirteen epistles of the Apostle Paul, and one of the same to the Hebrews" as a block, without enumerating the individual letters; text in B. F. Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1881), 541–42.

47. 47. Athanasius, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (A.D. 367), trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 4, 551–52: "there are fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle, written in this order: the first, to the Romans" (Greek: πρώτη πρὸς Ῥωμαίους). This is the earliest list to match exactly the twenty-seven-book New Testament.

48. 48. Council of Florence, Bull of Union with the Copts (Cantate Domino), Session 11, 4 February 1442, trans. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990); "fourteen letters of Paul, to the Romans," heads the enumeration. Denzinger–Hünermann 1334–35.

49. 49. Council of Trent, Fourth Session, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, 8 April 1546, trans. James Waterworth, The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (London, 1848); Latin and English at bible-researcher.com. Denzinger–Hünermann 1501–5; the canon list is DH 1502–3.

50. 50. Trent, Fourth Session, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (Waterworth); Denzinger–Hünermann 1504.

51. 51. See Catechism of the Catholic Church §1992 (quoting Romans 3:21–26 on justification), §875 (quoting Romans 10:14–15, 17, "faith comes from what is heard"), and §146 (quoting Romans 4:3 on Abraham's faith). Romans is among the most frequently cited books in the Catechism.

52. 52. First Thessalonians, usually dated c. A.D. 50–51 and anchored by the Gallio inscription at Corinth, is generally regarded as the earliest surviving Pauline letter (a minority dates Galatians earlier, c. 48). Either way, Romans (c. 57) is not the first written.

53. 53. On the length principle of arrangement, see David Trobisch, Paul's Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). The Introduction to the New Testament Letters in the NABRE states that "the letters of the Pauline corpus are arranged in roughly descending order of length from Romans to Philemon, with Hebrews added at the end." The one anomaly is that Galatians precedes the slightly longer Ephesians.

54. 54. In P46 the letters run by descending length while counting Hebrews as Pauline, so that Hebrews — longer than 1 Corinthians — stands second, immediately after Romans. In most later traditions Hebrews was placed at the end of the Pauline corpus, reflecting doubts about its authorship.

55. 55. Augustine, Confessions 8.12.29, trans. J. G. Pilkington (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st ser., vol. 1); newadvent.org/fathers/110108.htm. The passage Augustine read was Romans 13:13–14.

56. 56. Martin Luther, "Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans" (1522), trans. Andrew Thornton, OSB; ccel.org: "This letter is truly the most important piece in the New Testament. It is purest Gospel."

57. 57. Martin Luther, Preface to the Complete Edition of his Latin Writings (1545), in Luther's Works, vol. 34, ed. Lewis W. Spitz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), 336–37, recounting his breakthrough on the meaning of "the righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17. For a Catholic assessment of Luther, see my Martin Luther — A Catholic Perspective.

58. 58. John Wesley, Journal, entry for 24 May 1738; ccel.org. The reading was "Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans" — not, as sometimes reported, to Galatians (that association belongs to Charles Wesley's parallel experience three days earlier).

59. 59. Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (1st ed., Bern: Bäschlin, 1919; 2nd, wholly rewritten ed., Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1922); English translation by Edwyn C. Hoskyns, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). The "bombshell on the theologians' playground" is the much-quoted phrase of the Catholic theologian Karl Adam, Hochland (June 1926).

60. 60. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, entry for 15 June 1833: "I think St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in existence."

61. 61. Fitzmyer, Romans, xiii: Romans is "the most important of the Pauline writings, if not of the entire NT," and "one can almost write the history of Christian theology by surveying the ways in which Romans has been interpreted." For further study, the standard commentaries include Fitzmyer (Anchor Bible, 1993); C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans, 2 vols. (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975–79); James D. G. Dunn, Romans, 2 vols. (Word Biblical Commentary 38A–B; Dallas: Word, 1988); Douglas J. Moo, The Letter to the Romans, 2nd ed. (New International Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018); and Robert Jewett, Romans (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).