Paul Didn’t Actually Write Romans?! | Episode 31

This week on the YTTB podcast: Many people mistakenly believe that the Apostle Paul wrote the Letter to the Romans in the New Testament. If you look more closely, however, you find that this is not true!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well then you go back to Romans 16, 13, and it says great Rufus. We don't know that this is the same Rufus. You can't make those, you can't prove those sorts of things. This is 2,000 years ago. It should be flashing off the page, right? So cool that perhaps the guy who carried the cross of Jesus, his sons came to faith later in in their part of the Roman church.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Yeah. And you could use uh like the work Bacham does on the frequency of names to like sort of track how likely it is that it's the same roof, right? Yeah. If it was in the top three, maybe it's more likely it's a different roof as it's aware of. It's probably him.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

All right, here we are at the Year Through the Bible podcast. I haven't been on this podcast from feels like months, because it kind of almost is. I'm Andrew Forrest. This is I'm Kevin Watson. Our colleague Rodney Adams is away this week, and we're talking about the Year Through the Bible in support of Asbury Church's Year Through the Bible ministry. So for those in the know, Kevin, the YTTB. But that's right. Yeah. Year through the Bible. Acronyms are always important. Acronyms are very important. The reason we're doing this podcast is to help us continue with our reading. The idea is that we're reading through the entire Bible in the year using the one-year Bible, and that'll make the biggest difference. So we just wrapped up Romans. We're going to spend some time in that today. We've been reading Chronicles in the Old Testament. This will finish tomorrow. Chronicles tomorrow. We've been doing uh Psalms and Proverbs. So we've kind of a lot to cover. Kevin, there's a thing I'd like to ask you as we begin about Chronicles and about um the Kings, which is have you noticed any differences between reading through Kings first and then now reading through Chronicles, which are both historical ref you know accounts of the kings. What have you noticed?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Yeah, I mean I I I think I really enjoyed the stories of Elijah and Elisha in Kings. Which are not in Chronicles. Um and I think probably for me the the first pass like stuff stuck more. I had a harder time in Chronicles, like not speeding up my reading. Oh, yeah, I've already read about this and that kind of thing. Um I think the story of Hezekiah is told differently in Second Chronicles. Yes. He comes across way worse. I I think one of the saddest stories in the history of the Old Testament is Hezekiah's ending, when he's basically like, well, like it's gonna end badly for your sons, and he's like, Okay, just as long as I don't have to see it. Like just every time I think about it, it makes me sad.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

And he comes across better in Chronicles. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Yeah, they just don't tell that story at all. Yeah. I noticed some differences there. So in the Hebrew Bible, the kings are part of the the f the f historical books, the earlier books, and Chronicles is what's called the writings. Uh-huh. And it's actually the very end. Chronicles is the end in the way the Jews organize their Old Testament. So it actually makes way more sense in a way. It's like a theological, re historical recap of everything that's happened to Israel. So if you did imagine if you didn't get to Chronicles until you've read every other thing in the Old Testament, how it would affect it differently.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, when I taught the overview of the rest of the Old Testament, that was one of the hardest things to explain to people, like because it was like a 30-minute thing, is like this is actually kind of the end of the story, but you still have a ton of the Old Testament's reasons. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

The New Testament has different reasons for why it's arranged the way it's arranged. I don't totally know why, other than the fact Chronicles seems historical, that's why you put it with the historical books, why they got away from the Jewish way of doing it. Yeah. Which kind of makes more sense in a way. Although there's always some books that just sort of grab bag that don't fit anywhere. Yeah, that's true. You know? So anyway. All right. So let's talk about Romans. Uh Romans 16. Romans is a difficult book, but we're here at the end. Uh what stuck out to you in Romans 16?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Well, there are a ton of names. I think that's probably one of the things that uh would jump out to most people the first time through. Um, and I found myself, well, I'll actually say I didn't do this this time, and it's actually because of your influence. Um, I used to want to just skip it, and I definitely would read faster. I don't know these names are not familiar.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

So starting in verse one, Kevin, you have names all the way through verse 15.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yep. And then you have more names uh and verses uh 21 and following. Yep. Yep. So I mean the the prominent feature really is like he's what kids today would say he's giving shout-outs to people. You know, he's calling people out, naming them. You really like impacted me when I heard you once talk about the importance of names in general. So, like, why should we read the names?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

One thing about names can do is that it gives credibility to this, to the um the reality of the scripture. So Richard Balcom, this great New Testament scholar, has done work in the historical referen records, a lot of the ossuaries in Palestine in Jerusalem, so the bone collections, uh the names and the frequency of names in Jewish Palestine from like 100 BC to like 280, so in like 300-year period. You've read this book. And the frequency of the names that occur compared to the frequency of those same names in the New Testament, and they basically line up. Yeah. It's so awesome. Yeah, it's so cool. So, like the number one remember, do you remember what the number one popular male name in the New Testament period for Jews was? Simon. And I almost said Peter. Exactly. And you read to the New Testament and you have all these examples where they have to disamb disambiguate. You know it. Yeah, they have to make the names different. So it's Simon Peter, Simon the Magis in the book of Acts, etc. Simon of Cyrene in Mark 15. Uh so that's kind of cool. You can like the names, like how frequently a name is can tell you this stuff wasn't made up. This is the names are there. Yeah, it's like evidence for the actual historicity of the names. Because somebody could make it up, but that person who made it up would have to have actual historical knowledge of the period. Yeah. You follow me there? Yep. Um, I'll talk about him, and this will be a future coming podcast. So that's cool. And in Romans, what's cool about the names, so not only are they all real people, which is so hard for us to forget, this is real people, this really happened. I commend you our sister Phoebe, servant of the church. Verse three. Greet Prisca, short for Priscilla and Aquila, my fellow workers. Uh greet Epinatus, uh, the first convert. You know, greet Mary, verse six, etc. Not only are these real people with stories about them, they are also ethnically coded names. So I heard somebody say one time, one of the great ways to read Romans is to read it backwards. Start with the picture of the ethnic complexity of the Roman church, and then work back through the ethical teachings in chapters 14 and 15, and then back to the issues on Jew and Gentiles in verses uh chapters 9, 10, and 11, and then about justification and faith. And you see that this ethnic picture of unity is resting on this deep theological foundation. It's pretty cool. Yeah, that is cool. Mary, for example, is a Jewish name.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

And that isn't she doesn't she fit the Bakham argument? Yeah. You reference that.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

That's the most popular female name in the in the in the period in the New Testament. That's why all the Marys are identified. Mary, the mother of the Lord, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, Mary of Bethany. Uh-huh. Yeah. So many Marys. Mary Magdalene, right? Okay. Mary's a Jewish name. Uh Urbanus, verse nine, that's a Latin name. And then look, verse 11. Uh Narcissus is a Greek name. So you have all these, and and all the different names are ethnically coded. So you have a church made up of people of Jewish ethnicity, Latin ethnicity, and Greek ethnicity, which is just remarkable. Yeah. This wasn't happening anywhere else in the in the Roman world.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

So in Acts 2, you have the the Holy Spirit comes and everybody's hearing the gospel in their own languages. But you had pointed out that that's actually all Jewish people. Right. Like you think it's like the beginning of the whole world, but it's all Jewish people. Is here in Romans 16, you're actually seeing that the gospel has gone to the Gentiles. And this is actually more what we think of when we think of Acts 2, is that it's like all these different people.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Correct. And it seems reading between the lines that the Jews are a minority in the church in Rome, which is very which sounds on one hand, well, of course they are. Rome is not a Jewish place. But the original Christians were all Jews. So Paul and Barnabas and those guys, Peter, they're going to Jewish synagogues and talking about Jesus and the converts out of them. But now in Rome, the church is majority Gentile, which is why Paul has all those chapters about how to get along with the people who care about the Jewish feasts. Yeah. And the Gentiles don't feel about it. They call themselves strong. The Gentiles call themselves the strong believers because they don't need to worry about the feasts. They know. And Paul uses that language. So yeah, it's this amazing picture of this multicultural church to use a modern term. It's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

So you can you can tell, like we know the names point to ethnicity and kind of like the diversity, the growth of the church. Are there other things about any of these names where we can know anything else about them, or are these just all anonymous and lost in the world?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

There's a couple of yeah, there's a couple of weird things here. So look at uh Rufus. Verse 13. Okay, great Rufus, chosen in the Lord, also his mother, who had been a mother of me as well. So keep your thumb there and turn to Mark 15. So Mark 15 is Jesus heading toward the cross. This is Mark 15, 21. Remember? He's carrying the cross piece of the cross. It's too heavy, so he's and he's been beaten and he's losing blood. So he's stumbling, I guess he's falling. Verse 21. They, the Romans, compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene. So first of all, Cyrene is Libya, so that's North Africa coming in from the country. So presumably he is a man of the Jewish diaspora living in North Africa in town for the Passover feast. He was coming in. Oh, he's the follower of Alexander and Rufus. So you have to go ahead and assume that Mark's readers would have known who Alexander and Rufus were. Otherwise, it's a totally useless point. It makes no sense, right? He liked green shirts. Who cares if he liked green shirts? Right? Now, uh Richard Balcombe, this guy we've already referenced, this great New Testament scholar, has done a lot of work on the um the gospel authors and and the tr traditional understandings of them. The traditional understanding of the Gospel of Mark is that it's written by John Mark, referenced in the New Testament, who was a disciple of Peter, and the Gospel of Mark is Peter's preaching, and traditionally somewhere in the Roman community. Well, then you go back to Romans 16, 13, and it says, Greet Rufus. We don't know that this is the same Rufus. You can't make those, you can't prove those sorts of things. This is 2,000 years ago, but there are but it's like it should be flashing off the page, right? So cool that perhaps the guy who carried the cross of Jesus, his sons came to faith later in and they're part of the Roman church.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Yeah. And you could use uh like the work Bacham does on the frequency of names to like sort of track how likely it is that it's the same roof, right or not. Like if it was in the top three, maybe it's more likely it's a different roof. Right. If it's a where at the bottom of the list, it's like it's probably him.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

By the way, one of the places where um he there that's real fun is in the list of the disciples. So in the list of the disciples in the Gospels, the names that are frequent names, so Judas is another Ju Judah, Jude Jude, Judah, Judas is a frequent name, and they are given extra, right? There's Judas Iscariot. You have to identify him. Simon, there's Simon the zealot, as well as Simon Peter. Whereas the names that are weird, like um, I don't know, Thaddeus or something, you don't have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Uh-huh. You know?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Anyway, okay, uh Narcissus, verse 11. Well, Narcissus is that Greek figure from myths, Greek myth. No self-respecting Jew is going to have the name Narcissus. So verse 11, that's a Gentile believer in Jesus. So it's just, when you see that, it's just amazing. You know. Yeah. And then, like, then you you when you know the people's history from elsewhere, like in the book of Acts, Priscilla and Aquila, this is 16 3. They were expelled, they're Jewish believers expelled from Rome when Claudius expelled the Jews. They meet Paul in Corinth, I think it is, and Paul takes up with them there. And then uh now they're back in Rome and they have a church in their house. Look, verse 5, greet also the church in their house. So they have a house church. One idea is that Phoebe um Phoebe is uh the one I commend you our sister Phoebe. That one is that she is the one carrying the letter and probably was expounding the letter. So she she's bringing it with her and she knows how to explain it to them because it's a complicated letter. I mean, that's cool.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

I mean the like One the ESV translates Phoebe a servant of the church, but other translations translate it a deaconess or deacon of the church, right? So that can that also tells you something about her as providing some kind of leadership role within the church.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

And I think I'm pretty sure now this is off the top of my head, we'll have to add this. We'll edit this out if this is wrong, but I think Phoebe is related to one of the names of one of the Greek titans from the Greek myth. So again, that would she'd be a she's a Gentile, not a not a Jew. Anyway, I just think that of the names is so awesome. Yeah. All that's thrown in there like that.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Okay, beautiful. Okay, so this is a total softball though. Okay. Um so which name in this list is your favorite?

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Okay. So anybody who's heard me teaching this knows that I like verse 22. I Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord. Here, breaking news on this podcast. Paul was not the writer of Romans. And of course, the point is, is because Paul had a secretary, the Greek term is ammunusis, he Paul dictates it and the guy writes it down. So I, Tertius. So turn to the end of Galatians.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Uh Galatians 6, 11.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Galatians 6 11. Paul writes, see with what large letters I'm writing to you with my own hands. So the rest of it is not his handwriting, and he wrote that there. You can see his scroll.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

I think it was Origen, one of the early church fathers. He had like many amnesuses out of amnesis. Yeah, because he was speaking he Yeah, he was like dictating multiple books at the same time. So he's like, You, you know, that's great.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

So slavery is an evil and vile thing wherever it has occurred, contrary to the natural law of God, period. And New World race-based slavery is not the way slavery functioned most of the time in the ancient world. The idea of race, skin tone is not a concept in the ancient world, that's a modern concept. So Caesar goes to Gaul, which is modern-day France, and he murders millions of people and he enslaves millions of people. Forgive the crass term. These would have been white people. He he Caesar is from Italy and he's enslaving people. You're often enslaved in war. You can be a nobleman and you're enslaved, and it's a way of showing dominance and e it's evil. Okay. Slaves were often educated in the Roman world uh because they did things they were like help them do their job. Yeah, help you do your job. And they worked in the field, and the I mean, being a slave is terrible. My point is that it's not like American chattel race-based slavery where the people were in the fields, not quite the same. Okay, so here we go. I Tertius. Well, Kevin, you're you're our Latin scholar. Did you ever have Latin? No. Me either. Are your kids taking Latin? Yeah. Yeah, mine are too, but I never knew it. Well, Tertius means the third. So often, slave slave girls were often abandoned to die. And the early church was against that, by the way. This is a side note. The early church thought every human life mattered. So the church has a record of being um what we would today call pro-life from the beginning. Girls might have been left to die or become sexual slaves or whatever. Uh, and boys could be all kinds of things. Often they weren't given names because they don't matter. So Tertius means the third. So he could have been the third boy born from this particular slave woman. It's Latin. Now imagine the moment. Can you feel the drama? Paul has been dictating. I mean, what anybody would have to argue is the greatest letter ever written. Yeah. Yeah. It it's so deep and so wise. By the way, if I'm a secular scholar who's familiar with ancient literature, I'm going to be moved by Romans. And if you're a Christian, I mean, the chapter after chapter, right? The sentences that just snap and sparkle on the page. And then he turns to Tertius. Hey, why don't you why don't you add something? Yeah. Can you imagine the moment? So awesome. We don't know Tertius' category. We don't know if he is a freed slave, a runaway slave. We don't know. We have no idea. But he's a trained, he's literate, he's trained. He doesn't have his own name. His name is the third one. I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord. I mean, it's just the most amazing thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

And that he greets them in the Lord. Yeah. He's a follow believer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yeah. Yeah. And so going back to the church that meets in Priscilla and Aquila's house, so what's happening is these are early morning meetings, early on Sunday morning. The Romans don't have a weekend. They don't that that's not a thing. That's a modern thing. So Sunday is a regular day before the Lord's day of the week, the first day of the week. They greet, they get together at dawn and they meet in the rich person's house with enough room for them all to meet. And you have slaves there, and you have uh Jewish people and you have Gentile people. Priscilla and Aquila and the other house church leaders have it. It's just amazing. Yeah. It's awesome. And I love that too because it it humanizes the letter. It makes it feel real to you, you know? I Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord. Yeah. Just beautiful. Sometimes the boring parts are the best parts when you take your time and work your way through them. And I think Romans 16 is is uh one of those places. Kind of put a spade to it and start working.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

It it just always like yields something. There's always something there.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Not every time you read the Bible is it like this spiritual moment. Let's just be honest. Not every time you go to church is like this amazing thing. If I'm reading the Bible and I'm not getting anything out of it, it's the problem is on me, not the Bible. So it's okay to go, I just did not get anything out of today and move on. Yeah. But I don't blame the Bible. I just go, I'm just not in the place to read Romans carefully today. I mean that people should remember that. The other thing is, I preached yesterday on one of these moments that I had this summer where I read a verse that I'd read a billion times and a thing I'd never seen jumped out at me. So I thought we might turn there.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Great. Yeah, the Great Commission, one of the most like it's got to be a top 10 passage in the whole Bible to be, right? Matthew 28. So 16 years of full-time ministry preaching like most weekends, and you just notice something new about the Great Commission.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Yeah, and it's from a text with a friend of mine, but when Jesus says make disciples, he's it's equivalent of him saying, plant trees. Well, the very act of planting a tree is a hopeful act because you wouldn't plant it if you weren't gonna see it, believe that a tree could come to full flower. Yeah. And the disciples the same way, and I just never seen that. I'd always thought of it as like a like a missionary passage. I never saw it as like a hopeful passage. Like Jesus is bullish about the future. He believes that things are not gonna done, they're not done.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

It's right there in verse 19. And like I I love that about Jesus when you like you realize an implication to what he said that you'd missed before. We start reading Corinthians, which is another hard letter, really hard letter. For larger reasons we don't need to get into today. We're gonna read in Corinthians, we move forward in the Old Testament, and the same lessons are are gonna apply. You just gotta keep going. Yeah. Try to find something out of it, but don't get, don't, don't allow yourself to get too bogged down in things.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

And well, and like go ahead. Like you've said from the very beginning, the point of our year through the Bible is the habit of daily Bible reading. Yeah. And I think we actually think it's okay to check the box. Like it's not wrong to say, I'm gonna commit to read the Bible every day, no matter how I feel when I'm reading it, no matter whether there's some kind of cathartic moment. And for the people like you who have done this over a lifetime, the those moments don't happen every day, but they do happen because you decide to show up every day.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Right. Right. They're not gonna happen if you don't do it.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Anybody who does anything about physical training knows you don't always feel like doing it, but you do it when you don't feel like doing it because not doing it definitely doesn't work for you.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

And the the daily discipline of doing these things is build you up. Yeah. Just the way it works. So if you're behind or or you're not reading, just jump on in. Just kind of start on in. Don't you you you you can't you can't overthink the daily habit.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Yep. Read today's reading, get back in it. These are the dog days of summer. Like so somebody's about to quit, like, don't quit. Keep going. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Keep going. If you did quit, let's go. Yeah. Start back in. Start today. It's not the end of the year yet. Kevin, thank you for the time today. Thanks for being here. And uh, we pray, everybody who's watching, that this has been a helpful episode for you and that God uses to help you read through the Bible. That's the whole reason we're doing this, is to get people to read through the Bible. We believe in it that much. And remember, there is no substitute for being with the body in worship. That's what Paul would say.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

He'd say, Don't just read my letter, be with the other believers around you, and they're not all like you. Yeah. And they're going to stretch you, and that's the point.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

All right. Well, I'm Andrew. I'm Kevin. And this is the YTTB Year through the Bible podcast. We'll see you guys soon.