Fr. Stephen De Young: We’ll go ahead and get started in Romans 1:1. We’ll see how far we get here at the beginning. So it begins, as I mentioned, with St. Paul’s greeting, identifying himself as the author. And that starts with just “Paul,” but then he goes into a little more detail about who he is.

So Romans 1:1: “Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the Gospel of God, which he promised before through his prophets in the holy Scriptures.” So we’ll pause there for a second. So first, his name’s Paul, Pavlos. [Laughter] But “bondservant” is our nice New King James Version translation; it really means “slave.” It means “slave.” And “slave” here doesn’t mean involuntary servitude, but it means that he’s Christ’s servant and, importantly, as we’re going to see as we go on in the epistle to the Romans—because he telegraphs some of his themes here in how he identifies himself—a slave is a servant who’s been purchased, who belongs to his master, not a hired hand or another kind of servant. So he’s already telegraphing a little bit of what he’s going to talk about. He’s been purchased by Jesus Christ—

Q1: It’s not just a job.

Fr. Stephen: —who is his Master, yes. And then “called to be an apostle.” And both of those words are important. “Apostle” of course means “one sent” in Greek, someone who’s sent, very literally, but it is the translation in the Greek Old Testament of the Hebrew word shaliach, which also means, literally, “one sent”—shalach means “to send”—but it has the particular connotation of a legal representative, someone who’s going to represent you in some matter. I’m not going there in person, so I send someone to represent me and who has my authority to act on my behalf. So that sense is contained within the word “apostle.” We’re going to see, not so much in Romans but in some of St. Paul’s other epistles, there are going to be people who don’t acknowledge him as an apostle, because they’re going to say, “Well, we know about the eleven back in Jerusalem. They knew Jesus; they were with him. He made them apostles. They represent him legitimately and have his authority. You I don’t know so much, Paul.” [Laughter] So that’s not going to be so much here, but it is important that that’s what he’s claiming.

So he’s saying, identifying right off the bat that when he writes to them, he’s writing to them not just as the servant of Jesus Christ, but as his representative, meaning with his authority. This is why it’s not just the red letters that are in the Bible that are important. Everything is red letters if it’s in Scripture! But also that “called.” Remember we talked about, when we talked about, again with the scare quotes, “conversion” of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, that the language he uses there is language picked up from the Old Testament about the calling of the prophets. We talked about how Isaiah when he begins has this vision, this vision of God enthroned. He sees it, and that commissions him to be a prophet, to go out on God’s behalf. That’s how St. Paul sees what happened to him on the road to Damascus, and we’ll get into that. He narrates that in his epistle to the Galatians, so when we get there, we’ll read his account of that and go further into this, but that’s how he sees it.

So he sees himself in that event as Christ having set him apart in particular to be an apostle and with this mission to represent him, and we see that in verse two when he continues: “which he promised…”

Q1: Wait. The phrase that was causing me trouble is “separated to the Gospel of God.” Grammatically, that doesn’t work.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, right, I won’t skip that. [Laughter] Well, the “to” is an issue with Greek prepositions, which are very fluid in how you…

Q1: It implies separated from something. So what is the separation?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and what this is referring to, this “set apart” is referring to the same idea as holiness. It’s referring to the idea that, for example, the difference between the chalice we have in the church and my Wrath of Khan collector’s cup at home is not that the chalice here at the church is made of some mystic metal, mined from a holy mountain. It’s not the material of it; it’s that we’ve taken the chalice and we’ve set it apart for this particular use, and it’s only used for that. We don’t do anything else with it, whereas the Wrath of Khan collector’s cup gathers dust on a shelf, but the chalice is set apart for this…

So that’s the same idea here. St. Paul isn’t a super-human or some angelic being, but he is a human being who has been set apart for this particular purpose, and that purpose is the proclaiming of the Gospel of God. And I’ll go back a little bit on this, too, because it’s going to be important, because St. Paul is going to continue to use obviously the word “Gospel,” and we hear sort of the folk etymology of that as “good news.”

Q1: Oh yeah, that’s the way I learned it.

Fr. Stephen: Lots of things are good news. Saving a lot of your money on your car insurance with Geico is good news, right? But that’s not what we’re talking about. [Laughter] That’s not what we’re talking about! The Greek word, evangelion, that we translate as “gospel” is found in the singular all through the New Testament, but is almost always found in the plural outside the New Testament. And the reason it was in the plural is that the way it was used was when Caesar or a senator or one of his generals or some other important person was coming for an official visit to a city, before he came there, he would send someone ahead of him who would do the public reading of the evangelia of the emperor, which was the list of all of his honors and victories. It was all: he won this battle, he defeated this… on down the list. They’d run through all those things, all those official titles, all these sorts of things.

So in the New Testament, it’s singular. But when we read “the Gospel according to St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke”—and we mentioned before the “according to,” because there’s only one Gospel, but there’s four accounts of it—is talking about a victory. When it’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s the victory of Jesus Christ. When it’s the Gospel of God here, it’s the victory of God. And the reason those were read in the town was so that the people there could prepare for who was coming. So contained within this idea of the proclamation of Jesus Christ being the Gospel is the idea that St. Paul is coming and proclaiming this so that the people could prepare for what? For the fact that Christ is coming, again, to judge the living and the dead.

And so the apostles, including St. Paul, come and announce this: This is what Christ has done. This is the victory he’s won through the cross and his resurrection. He’s coming back; you need to prepare. And that’s why the response to that, when they preach the Gospel, is: “What must I do to be saved?” Saved from what? Saved from the judgment that’s now coming, not some abstract “I got saved,” but saved from something, and that’s the fact that, once you’ve heard this, you say, “Oh, I’m on the wrong side of this. What do I need to do now before he returns so that I’ll be on the right side of this?” So this is adding a particularity to his apostleship. He’s not representing Jesus Christ in sort of all legal matters or in his off-hand comments or his opinions, but he is a representative of Christ in that he has come to make this proclamation of the Gospel of God.

Q2: The word, the way it is translated in my Bible, it is more specific than “separate.” It’s not “separate,” which is just exactly what Father says.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So yes.

Q1: So the word “Gospel” means in the…?

Fr. Stephen: The proclamation of a victory.

Q1: The proclamation of a victory, okay.

Fr. Stephen: And this Gospel was “promised before, through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,” meaning St. Paul sees a complete continuity, again, between what the Scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, taught, what was prophesied, what was promised, and now what has actually happened. So he’s not seeing this big disjunction. He’s not here to start a new religion. He’s here to proclaim the fact that the religion they already have, which came from God in the first place, is now being fulfilled in the Person of Jesus Christ. That’s what he’s coming to do.

It’s also important that you notice when he’s introducing himself, he doesn’t proclaim his own gospel. This is where you’d normally list your credentials, and all of his credentials relate to him being Christ’s slave, and the one who proclaims what Christ has done, not his own learning, rabbinical credentials, signed letters from the high priest that he had before. [Laughter]

Okay, then continues in verse three: “Concerning”—and this is the Gospel still, the Gospel of God: “concerning his Son,” God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, “who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh.” So he’s already proclaimed, just in that phrase, that Jesus is the Son of God. Remember, “Christ” is not his last name; it’s the title, “Messiah”: he’s the Messiah; he’s the King—that he’s our Lord, which is Kyrios, which is not uncoincidentally—it is not a coincidence that kyrios, the word “lord,” is the word that’s used to replace the name of the Lord in the Old Testament in the Greek Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: That’s all the times we read “Lord.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. It doesn’t say there in the Hebrew, “Adonai”; it doesn’t say, “Lord.” It says, “Yahweh.” And they transliterate that. In English, it’s usually all caps: “LORD,” when that occurs. But giving that title to Christ, that is a title in the Old Testament… And we’ll see he’s going to go more into that.

And then mentions, of course, that he’s descended from David, which the Messiah would be. That’s part of what makes him the Messiah. But another thing we have to take into account here is the fact that “son of god” and “lord” here are both titles of Caesar. “Son of God” started with Augustus, because he proclaimed that Julius Caesar when he died had become a god, had ascended and become a god, which made Octavian, a.k.a. Augustus, the son of a god. And subsequent emperors proclaimed that their fathers and predecessors had also ascended to godhood, making all of them sons of god. And there are coins from this time that have been found, even in Judea, that say, “divii [filius],” which is Latin for “son of god,” on them for the inscription, and “lord” is also a title for Caesar.

Calling someone else that was treason. This is the charge that they finally use to get Pilate to execute Christ, because he claims to be a king. Remember, they say, “We have no king but Caesar.” So St. Paul is committing an act of treason… in a letter headed for Rome, by saying that it’s actually Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, who is truly, actually the Lord and is actually the Son of God.

And so we have this first part that he’s descended from David according to the flesh, and then in verse four: “And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead.” So there’s two pieces. One, according to the flesh, he’s descended from David, which makes him the Messiah. Then by rising from the dead he is proclaimed as being the Son of God.

Q1: And this is something Caesar can’t do: rise from the dead.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so when anyone tells you that it was just in the fifth century when they came up with the idea that Christ was both God and man, you can direct them to this, to these two verses, because St. Paul lays that out right here in his intro. His intro to himself, that this is who Christ is: descended from David according to the flesh, declared to be the Son of God. Notice he doesn’t say that Jesus became the Son of God when he rose from the dead, so this isn’t like the idea of Julius Caesar going up into the sky and becoming a god because he was a great man. It says declared: it was revealed; it was proven that he was the Son of God because he rose from the dead.

Q1: “According to the Spirit of holiness,” so that’s a reference, I would take it, to the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: The Holy Spirit, right. And so we’ve also got a trinitarian reference here in the opening. You’ve got God, his Son Jesus Christ, the Spirit of holiness. All in there. So there’s a trinitarian invocation embedded here in St. Paul’s opening.

So when someone tells you that the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t show up until the fourth century, you can direct them to the beginning of the epistle to the Romans. And this isn’t just me being a fundamentalist or something. We’ve talked a little bit before, and I don’t want to go too much into it now, because it’ll be a long—it would be a whole lecture in and of itself, but we’ve talked before, especially when we were going through the gospel of John, about the idea that Judaism at this time in history was not unitarian monotheist, meaning they weren’t like Muslims or like modern Jews, where they think that God is only one Person. That they were minimally binitarian and potentially trinitarian; they believed that there was a second Figure, that there was the God whom you can’t see and the God whom you could see. There was Yahweh whom you can’t see and Yahweh whom you could see. And sometimes the Yahweh you could see was referred to as the Word of God, the Angel of the Lord, these other titles, and that part of the teaching—a big part of the teaching of the New Testament is that Jesus is that Person, that second Person. So it would not be odd for St. Paul to be thinking in what we now call trinitarian terms. That’s mainstream early Christianity, early Jewish Christianity that St. Paul comes out of.

So “through him we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ.” So this is the end of his opening proper. He says, “through him,” through Christ, “we have received grace and apostleship”—so he’s coming back to his own apostleship: the “we” is him now. This is the regal “we”; so he returns to that. And the purpose of his apostleship, the purpose of him proclaiming this Gospel is what he lays out here: “obedience to the faith among all nations for his name, among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ.” So that’s the purpose of him proclaiming the Gospel, is to bring all of the nations to obedience to God. And this is an idea that he’s again drawing out of the Old Testament prophets, out of Isaiah and out of Hosea, particularly. He’s going to quote both of them later. But the idea that in those last days all of the nations would come to obedience in Yahweh. And we’re going to see how, later in the epistle, he draws together the idea that, if you read the Old Testament at all—you don’t even have to read it carefully—you’ll see that Israel wasn’t really obedient to God either, but that Israel and all the nations, together now in Christ, come to obedience to God.

And that word, “obedience,” is important, and we’ll get into that more as we go through and we talk about how, especially again our Protestant friends interpret a lot of the epistle to the Romans, obedience is not something they have in view; quite the opposite. But St. Paul sets out his purpose in proclaiming the Gospel: bringing people to obedience, which implies things we do, not just things we believe. It’s obedience to the faith, so he draws those ideas together.

And he says, “You folks in Rome,” even though he wasn’t the one to do it, “have now come to faith in Christ and are now called also.” Now that’s why he’s writing. He says, “To all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints.” So he says two things about them. Number one, God loves you, and, number two, you are called to be saints. And the translation, “saints,” while it’s good for us as Orthodox Christians, because we understand saints, and “called to be saints” sort of makes sense to us, the original said—of course, the original word was agiois; it’s a word that means “holy ones.” The “holy ones” in the Old Testament refers to angels. It refers to the angelic beings who sort of form God’s council. When they prophesy about the day of the Lord, it’s God coming, surrounded by his holy ones. When he’s called the Lord of hosts, the hosts, the armies, are his holy ones who form this council around him.

And so what St. Paul is talking about here is the fact that, in Christ now—because of Christ’s incarnation, because Christ has become human—humans are now called to become a part of God’s family, to become a part of this council with which he shares his governing of the universe. And this is where our concept of sainthood comes from. Our concept of sainthood is that the departed holy ones in Christ join this council and take part in, because Christ shares it with them, his governing of the cosmos and of the universe. So just as we see in the Old Testament there are guardian angels of individual people—in the book of Daniel we see there are angels who are assigned to nations, like St. Michael is assigned to the nation of Israel to guard and protect them—in the same way, we now in the new covenant have patron saints of countries, of churches, of people. It’s in the same sense, because people are now called to become holy ones, to become saints, to become a part… So all this is entailed in the terminology he uses. This is at the core of what we’re talking about when you hear the term “theosis” in the Orthodox Church: is becoming like God and becoming a part of this family.

So he sets that out: God loves them and he’s called them to this destiny. He’s called them to this destiny, and so what he’s going to be talking about throughout the epistle is going to be what they need to do and how they need to get there. And then he has his greeting, which is: “Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” This phrase is going to be very important in all of St. Paul’s epistles, but also in Romans. “Grace to you and peace” is just a greeting. That’s a way of saying, “Hello.” But the “God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” It’s to here: “God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” And the two, that the Father is God and Jesus Christ is Lord, the way he phrases that all of the time is important because the most important—I will go out on a limb and say this—it’s not much of a limb—the most important verse in the Torah for Jews at this time was the Shema in Deuteronomy. The Shema, that’s named after the first word, and in Hebrew it’s: Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh ehad, which means roughly—we’d say “Lord” instead of “Yahweh”—“The Lord your God, the Lord is one.”

Now if you look at that in Greek, they use Kyrios. They use Kyrios, so it says, “The Lord your God, there is one Kyrios, is one Lord.” So this verse was prayed as a prayer over and over again. It was used for meditation.

Q1: Like the Jesus Prayer.

Fr. Stephen: Exactly like the Jesus Prayer. So much like the Jesus Prayer that, as we’re going to see, St. Paul’s going to talk about this in 1 Corinthians, about one of the mystical experiences he had. But Jewish mysticism at this time, you would pray this prayer over and over again, and the end goal was the vision of God enthroned. It’s called Merkabah mysticism, because merkabah means “throne” in Hebrew. That’s what they were looking to see. And now we talk about the saints who have, through the practice of the Jesus Prayer, the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory. That’s the same vision St. Paul had on the road to Damascus. So it is very likely that while St. Paul was on the way to Damascus, he was praying this prayer over and over again, meditatively. He had his vision of the throne of God, and then it turned out it was Jesus sitting on it! And that’s what then transforms his thinking.

So that’s how important this prayer was, and what St. Paul does every time he uses this phrase is he inserts the Father and Jesus into the middle of “Lord your God is one Lord.” So he’s turned what is the great Jewish statement of “monotheism” into a binitarian statement every time he does that. Every time he says that, refers to Jesus Christ as “Lord” and the Father as “God,” he’s making the point that Yahweh the God of Israel is these two Persons. We’ll also see he loops in, as he did in the introduction, the Holy Spirit as well, to be fully trinitarian. But that’s what he’s saying, and that would not have been lost, not just to the Jewish audience: to anyone who’s familiar with that verse in the Greek, which would have been everyone who was going to a synagogue, whether they were a Gentile, God-fearer, they would have seen what he did there. “Wait a second. You just—” Put the two together.

So we’ll go ahead and leave off here, and we’ll get into the meat of the epistle next week.