Fr. Stephen De Young: Okay, so we’ll go ahead and get started. We’re actually at the beginning of a new book, so I don’t have a lot of catch-up to the point where we’re at to do. So tonight is primarily—we’ll see how long it takes us, but primarily going to be an introduction not just to the book of Romans that we’re about to start, but because this is the first of St. Paul’s epistles that we’re going to be reading, it’s also going to be an introduction to St. Paul’s epistles. So a lot of introducing, and then in future Bible studies I’ll be referring back to this one even though it’ll take a while to be posted online. So you’ll just have to listen to that every week.

So the epistles of St. Paul: the word “epistle” basically just means “letter,” but it’s a particular type of letter that had a particular form and a particular purpose and particular traditions surrounding it in the first century. So epistles proper were written to groups of people. Now, there are epistles, like 1 and 2 Timothy and Philemon, of St. Paul’s that we have in the Scriptures that were written to individuals, and they’re still called epistles; they’re still reckoned among St. Paul’s epistles, but properly speaking it was to a group.

Q1: Now this would be true for any Roman person writing letters?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So a Roman person writing a letter to Caesar wouldn’t be writing a personal letter to the person Caesar; he’d be writing to Caesar’s court, to his government, and vice-versa. If he sent one to a governor, it would be to the governor and the other folk. And so, associated with the writing of epistles, we often have in our head—and this is going to be important, and we’ll talk more about this in a minute—when people talk about St. Paul having written these epistles, and of course some people are going to argue that he wrote some of them and not others and what exactly that means—we have in our head St. Paul wrote these letters as if he sat down with a stylus and some parchment and wrote them out, which is not what happened. All of them were written—we know this for a fact with all of St. Paul’s epistles, because at two different points in his epistles, he says, “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand,” which implies that other than those two times, he wasn’t writing with his own hand.

But what was common practice was there was a group of what we would call scribes that were called in Greek an amanuensis. And we have to remember that the literacy rate is obviously much, much lower at this point in history and that reading and writing are different skills. It’s possible to be literate and to be able to read a language without being able to write or write well in that language. You’ve been to graduate school also, so you’re aware of that! [Laughter] Those are two different skills. So an amanuensis, his particular skill was to be able to write well in a particular language.

So the person who was the author of the letter would generally dictate the letter to the amanuensis, although “dictate” is a strong term in some cases. In some cases it would be virtually word for word—“take this down”—and then the amanuensis would still make corrections for style and grammar and that kind of thing, polish it up. Sometimes the author would just give sort of a general gist: “Mention the gift they sent me. Remind them about this. Tell them about this,” and the amanuensis would be writing a great deal more of it, would be responsible for more of the composition. After he was done writing, then he would give it to the author to read, who would make any further corrections or changes necessary, like: “No, that’s not what I meant,” or “Clarify this,” or “I meant what I said. You shouldn’t have corrected it,” or whatever it was. And then that would be the final copy of that letter.

In the case of Romans, if you go to the very end, which is Romans 16:22, you’ll notice it says, “I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, greet you in the Lord.” [Laughter] So this is a good trick Bible trivia question. You ask someone who wrote the epistle to the Romans and then when they say, “St. Paul,” you say, “No. Wrong. Tertius,” and you take them to this verse. [Laughter] So Tertius is the name of the amanuensis who was involved in the book of Romans in particular. “Tertius” means “third.” I know we mentioned this once before, but Romans had four names, and your given name, your personal name, was the least important of those names. You would have your given name, your father’s name, a family name, and then the name of an ancestor, usually your grandfather, but sometimes if there was some other illustrious ancestor, that would get put in there, too. So since the given name was considered unimportant, often Roman men would give the names to their children: Primus, Secundus, Tertius, Quadratus; which means First, Second, Third, Fourth. It’s just the number of birth order!

Q1: Octavius.

Fr. Stephen: So their name would effectively be “The first son of…” [Laughter] … the rest of the name, which would then be most of your father’s name. So “Tertius” is likely the same thing. He was the third son of his father, and this was his job.

There was then a second person involved, because there was, of course, no Roman postal service. You couldn’t just write a letter and drop it in the mail; someone had to be assigned to take the epistle to its recipient. And when that recipient was a group, that person who was sent would not only read the epistle aloud, but he would read it formally and then he would be expected to answer questions about it if people didn’t understand something. We don’t have recorded who it was who brought the epistle to the Romans to Rome. In some cases we do, for example, at the end of 1 Peter, Silvanus—St. Silvanus, from which the name Silouan comes; it’s the same name in Greek—St. Silvanus is the one who brings 1 Peter to its audience and reads it. So sometimes one or the other of those is identified; sometimes neither is identified in the actual text.

Q1: That person would have to be fairly responsible.

Fr. Stephen: That person would have to be responsible. They would have to be—they would usually be an associate. And at the end of St. Paul’s epistles, he would also talk about some of the people who were “in the room,” so the people who were there with them. So in some cases, even though they’re not identified, the person who brought them was probably one of those people. He frequently mentions St. Luke, St. Timothy, some of his other close associates. And so it generally would have been one of them who would have brought it and would have been able to, because they knew St. Paul, answer questions that they had.

So there are these two other people involved in the process. Not only this, but St. Paul’s epistles quickly begin to circulate. He intended some of them to circulate. So, for example, he tells the Corinthians that they should send their letter to the Laodiceans and get the letter to the Laodiceans and read it themselves. So St. Paul was envisioning this. It wasn’t just that they ended up getting passed around because people read them and saw how important they were, but that he envisioned, even though he was writing to a particular church, that these would circulate at least in the nearby churches.

So they begin to circulate, and as they begin to circulate, they also begin to be collected. Churches, individual churches, start to have more than one of them. Probably the most famous case of at least two being put together is 2 Corinthians, which—it’s pretty clear that 2 Corinthians is actually made up of two of St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, sort of stitched together in the middle. You’ll find some people, because dissertations have to be written, argue that there are as many as six different letters to the Corinthians that are stitched together into 2 Corinthians. That’s really stretching it, but it’s pretty clear there’s a pretty major shift where it seems to sort of conclude and then begin again in the approximate middle of 2 Corinthians, and when we get to 2 Corinthians we’ll talk more about that.

Q1: So there’s at least three letters to the Corinthians.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we know that there are at least four, from what St. Paul says in 1 and 2 Corinthians, that he wrote them at least four letters. So at least one we no longer have. We also no longer have the epistle to the Laodiceans, so that’s because… I know we talked about this once before: that’s because God doesn’t want us to have them. [Laughter] And that’s why! But that shows the collection, though, that some church had the second and third letters, so they put them together. And they would have been put together for purposes of copying. We’ve talked before about how expensive it was to hire—because, of course, again, writing is a prized skill—to have a copy made of a letter. To have a copy made of Romans—Romans is the epistle I use as an example, because of its size—would have cost the equivalent in the first century of $5,000 in today’s money, to get a copy made. So you can imagine if you have two different epistles from St. Paul to the Corinthians that are of smaller size, you could see why you would want to pay just one fee and get one copy with both.

By the year 100 AD, all of St. Paul’s epistles had been collected together and were circulating as a unit, in a book called the Apostolikon. We have a copy—it’s referred to as P46: the P is for papyrus, and the 46 is because it’s the 46th one they found. It wouldn’t have been called that in ancient times, but that’s what it’s called now by modern scholars. That’s from probably around 130 AD, that’s a copy of that collection.

Q1: Does it have anything that’s not now in the Bible?

Fr. Stephen: No. No, in fact, it has exactly what we have. And interestingly, it includes the epistle to the Hebrews, and we’ll talk more about that in a minute, but many, many people, not just today—many of the Church Fathers had doubted that St. Paul had written the epistle to the Hebrews. And the epistle to the Hebrews doesn’t actually identify itself as being written by St. Paul. So the primary reason why it was broadly considered to be an epistle to St. Paul is that it was circulating in this collection with all the other letters of St. Paul. Interestingly also in P46, the epistle to the Hebrews is not tacked onto the end; it’s actually the second one after Romans in our earliest copy. And that’s because they were put in order by length, from longest to shortest. That’s where our order now comes from, too, although Hebrews has gotten moved toward the end because of those doubts of St. Paul having written it.

So they are very quickly collected and were operating in the Church as a unit, and the basis of our epistle book is the Apostolikon, because the readings at the earliest level, we know from St. Irenaeus of Lyons that by 150 the four gospels had been collected together as a unit and were being read in the churches as a unit, and there would be a reading in worship from the gospels and then from St. Paul, from the Apostolikon.

The other epistles, which are referred to as the general epistles or the catholic epistles, also were collected together into a unit by around 175 we know for sure, because St. Clement of Alexandria wrote a commentary on them at that time, and it was his commentary on them as a unit, not as individual texts. And then they sort of all end up conglomerating into what we call the New Testament.

So, that said, as I mentioned, there are disagreements about which of these St. Paul actually wrote. Some of those are ancient disagreements, as I mentioned. There were among the Church Fathers all kinds of suggestions as to who wrote the epistle to the Hebrews, mainly because the style of the writing is very different [from] the rest of St. Paul’s epistles, even though a lot of the ideas seem closely linked to St. Paul’s ideas. And so most of their suggestions were people who were affiliated with St. Paul, so St. Barnabas was a common suggestion, St. Apollos, who as we saw in the book of Acts was associated with St. Paul. The oddest suggestion is that there was actually a fairly obscure Church Father, a Fulgentius, who suggested that the Theotokos wrote it! [Laughter] I think we can safely set that aside, but it’s interesting. So there were all of these suggestions.

We still read it; when we read it in Liturgy, we refer to it as St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews: the epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews. And here’s why I’m going to argue that that’s legitimate, that we’re not sort of fibbing or fudging. Based on what I just described in terms of how an epistle was written and how they were collected, when we talk about Pauline authorship, when we talk about St. Paul’s authorship of these epistles, there’s a sort of continuum; there’s a sort of range of what we mean. We never mean he sat down and wrote it by hand, but there are certain epistles, particularly the epistle to the Galatians, the epistle to the Romans which we’re beginning now, which everyone, from the most crazed fundamentalist to the most crazed liberal, agrees St. Paul wrote, that these are a direct reflection of St. Paul’s mind. So while there was a scribe involved, this is pretty straight, mainline, direct from St. Paul. The other end would be, as we were just mentioning, Hebrews, which lots and lots of people, all through the history of the Church, have kind of been dubious of, at the other end of the continuum.

In between, there are books… More toward the Hebrews end would be what are called the pastoral epistles, which is 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus…

Q1: The ones to individuals?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, other than Philemon. Everybody pretty much agrees that Philemon St. Paul wrote. But, yeah, they’re dubious of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Somewhere in the middle would be the epistle to the Ephesians and the epistle to the Colossians, where you get people going both ways; and there are people who are clear.

But what you find when you read these texts closely is when you get to—I’ll start with Ephesians and Colossians, which are kind of in the middle—when you read the introduction, all of the epistles have a formal introduction, and there was a way to introduce an epistle. So you’ll notice, if you go to the first page of Romans, Romans 1:1 starts with: you identify yourself as the author: “Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ…” And then he said, “To…” whom he’s writing to. Then it goes on. If you look at the epistle to the Ephesians, the epistle to the Colossians, it doesn’t just say, “Paul”; it says, “Paul and Timothy, to the church at…” So St. Paul listed a co-author. He listed, at the beginning of the text, that it was coming from him and St. Timothy. So the reason why in Ephesians and Colossians… The Greek style in these things [doesn’t] match up well to Galatians and Romans is that St. Paul had a co-author. And that’s just taking the text as it’s introduced.

What you find when you get to the pastoral epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, is that, while the Greek is again different and there’s not a co-author listed, if you go through and—we could do this now very easily with a computer!—if you go through and look at the phrasing that’s different from St. Paul’s usual phrasing—there’s a lot of it that’s the same—but if you look at the things that are different that cause some people to doubt that St. Paul wrote them, and you compare them to the rest of the Greek in the New Testament, what you find is that they match up almost perfectly with St. Luke. And St. Luke is mentioned in those epistles as being there with St. Paul at the time they were written. And from what St. Paul says in those epistles, he was writing them from prison in Rome near the end of his life.

So what we really see here is that it was likely St. Luke, possibly serving as the amanuensis, or at least assisting in the production of these epistles, and so that’s why some of the phrasing is a little different, but this is still coming from St. Paul.

When we get to Hebrews, there’s a question as to whether what we call the epistle to the Hebrews is actually an epistle, because it does not start with that formula. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons people doubted it is it doesn’t say, “Paul, to the church at Jerusalem” or whoever the Hebrews in question would be. It immediately begins just with the text. And if you look at the style of the text which is different [from] St. Paul’s usual style in his epistles, then what you see is that the style conforms very much to what was then current homiletical or rhetorical style. It looks more like a sermon than like a letter. And if you take that and you compare it to St. Paul’s sermons in the book of Acts, you suddenly find a lot of crossover in phrasing and in syntax.

Now, if that’s because this was just St. Paul’s preaching style, if that’s because St. Luke was also involved with transcribing in Hebrews, if it was a sermon preached by St. Paul—but that explains the difference in style and why there are all these ideas that resonate with St. Paul in the book of Hebrews.

Now, Hebrews does conclude sort of like an epistle, even though it doesn’t start like one, so the best explanation I’m going to argue, and I’ll argue this more when we actually get into Hebrews—but the best explanation for Hebrews is that this is a sermon or homily of St. Paul’s that has been transcribed and is now being sent and is circulating in printed form among the churches, and that explains the differences.

So I’m arguing that all of these come from St. Paul. All of St. Paul’s epistles are St. Paul’s epistles in that they come from St. Paul, but that there are different processes and different intermediaries, different scribes, different deliverers, different other people involved that account for the differences in style and format, these kind of things that we see among the different epistles.

So that talks about St. Paul’s epistles in general. In terms of the epistle to the Romans in particular, this is, as I mentioned, one that nobody doubts comes directly from St. Paul. St. Paul, the time he writes the epistle to the Romans, mentions that he has not been to Rome yet, and, based on the context of the things he’s going to talk about—he speaks a great deal about reconciliation between the Jewish Christian community and the Gentile Christian community—and so there’s an event that corresponds to roughly when this would have been written that most—I think I can still safely say most—scholars think forms the background of what’s going on here, and we actually read about it in the book of Acts. Remember in the book of Acts when we first met Priscilla and Aquila? The reason they were at Corinth when St. Paul met them there was that they had been expelled from Rome, along with the rest of the Jewish citizens, by the Emperor Claudius. So the Emperor Claudius had expelled all the Jews from Rome; he actually did that twice. [Laughter]

Q1: Because it was so effective the first time.

Fr. Stephen: Right! Well, no, later he let them back in. He would relent and let them back in. And so around 54—we’re not sure of the exact date, but it’s around that period—this expulsion happened, and shortly thereafter, within a year, Claudius allowed them to return. So this return likely forms the background of this epistle, because the Church in Rome had been started by Christian believers who had come following Pentecost, who had returned to Rome, who were in Jerusalem on Pentecost because they were Jewish, and they were there to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. They accepted Jesus as the Christ, returned to Rome, and that was the beginning of what amounted to at that point a Christian synagogue in Rome that later became the Church, and then later Gentiles came in.

Well, this initial group of Jews had all been sent out of the city by Claudius, and so the Gentile portion of the Church had been functioning independently then, for a period of roughly a year. And now these original Jewish Christians are coming back in and having to sort of reconnect with the community, and now the flavor of the community and things have changed. And what St. Paul does not want to happen is for this to end up breaking the community apart and having a Jewish Christian church here and a Gentile Christian church here that are two separate entities. He wants to see the unity of the Church preserved. So a lot of what we’re going to read in the epistle to the Romans is going to be aimed at that, at pointing out that these two groups have found themselves in the same predicament and now find their salvation in Christ in the same way, whether they were originally Jews or whether they were originally pagan Gentiles or they were Gentile God-fearers who, as we talked about, are sort of somewhere in between. [Laughter] They’re sort of associated with the synagogue but didn’t go all the way to becoming Jewish.

St. Paul has not been there yet at the time he writes this, which is different [from] many of his epistles that we’re going to read. We read in the book of Acts, of course, about him founding the church in Corinth, for example, and in Ephesus. So in many cases he’s writing an epistle to a community that he founded, so he’s going to give them further instruction and deal with problems there. Here he’s writing blind to a community about situations he knows about, but not to people whom he, for the most part, knows directly.

Q2: Why would he be so well-informed about the community in Rome, and why would the community in Rome expect a letter from him, or would they expect a letter from him?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we don’t know whether they would have been expecting it or not. We know he had close associates, like Ss. Priscilla and Aquila we mentioned earlier, who were part of that Roman Church and who had been expelled. So he had…

Q2: So they know him, so they know his reputation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they knew… He would have known about the situation through them. Additionally… Remember, St. Paul sort of went back to Antioch and to Jerusalem, as we saw in Acts, as sort of a home base in between his missionary journeys. And he tended to go back, whenever he went back for Pascha, he went back for another Pentecost. So these were all times when Jews, including Christian Jews, from all over the world, would go back to Jerusalem. So he would have heard from him then, they would have encountered him, they would have encountered the other apostles at that point, those who made that journey. So there was a fair amount of flux in and out. So that’s how he would have known.

But we will see, he knows about that general situation, but when he writes epistles to churches that he helped found and with which he’s intimate, you’ll see that he speaks about very specific situations. He’ll name people who are causing a problem or in a positive sense: this person is a good leader; you should follow his way of life. There’s almost none of that in the epistle to the Romans, because he doesn’t have that level of familiarity with their situation.

And that brings us to an important point about epistles, about reading St. Paul’s epistles. In the New Testament so far, we’ve read, gone through the gospels and Acts, and those are all narrative. The gospels, of course, are telling the story of Christ; Acts, as we saw, is St. Luke’s continuation of the story of Christ in the apostles. Epistles, obviously, aren’t narrative; they’re not telling a story: it’s a letter. So that’s different, but also, epistles are aimed at particular situations; they’re what are called occasional documents. There was not a particular incident that happened that caused St. Luke to sit down and say, “I really need to write a gospel and about the acts of the apostles.”

In general, people needed to know the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and they needed to know about the history of the early Church, which he saw as a continuation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—everyone in general, but it wasn’t aimed at a particular… St. Paul’s epistles are aimed at particular situations, a series of particular situations—as I mentioned, the epistle to the Romans a little less so than some of the others. I think it’s directed toward that larger situation of the Jew and Gentile churches, but not, again, like 1 Corinthians where we’ll see, like in 1 and 2 Corinthians, where St. Paul is basically telling them to excommunicate a certain person because of sins he’s been committing in the community. So it’s not quite that level of particularity, but it’s still in a particular situation.

And the reason I make this point is many people, especially among our Protestant friends, when they interpret the epistle to the Romans, do not interpret it as an occasional document that’s meant to address a particular situation. Some of them will even refer to it as St. Paul’s systematic theology. They treat it as if this is a discourse on theology that St. Paul was giving. There’s a way to write one of those. We have lots of treatises in the ancient world, including from the first century, from philosophers and that kind of thing. They’re titled “On…” whatever: “On the soul,” “On the resurrection,” “On the…” The Church Fathers write treatises like that, but St. Paul—if he wrote any treatises like that, they’re not part of the New Testament, or we don’t have them. They follow a very different format and a different structure. This is a letter to a church.

So he’s not talking about abstract theological ideas; he’s talking about things that pertain to the situation that they’re facing, right then at the time it was written.

Q1: I keep thinking of our interregnum, when we were between priests, the bishop might well have written us a letter, telling us what to do and—

Fr. Stephen: Right, how to deal with certain situations, yeah.

Q1: —how to do and how to deal with the situations that were arising, and it would be that sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it’s aimed at that. Now, that doesn’t mean that this is just a relic from the first century that tells us about some problems that went on in the first century at the Church in Rome either, because human nature is one. [Laughter] And the problems that they faced in the first century in churches are not so different from the problems that we—as Christians, the problems that people faced are not so different from the problems we face. And so we also can’t read it as an artifact; it is also St. Paul addressing us, but he is addressing us in this particular pastoral way, not in a sort of rationalistic kind of “let’s muse about theology.” This will become very important when we get to around chapters eight and nine, when St. Paul starts talking about things like election and, again, whether we understand those in an abstract way or whether we understand those as referring to particular situations. But we’ll get there, but that is something to always keep in mind. That’s something to always keep in mind. If our suggestion for what this means would have made no sense to a first-century Christian in Rome, then we’re wrong. [Laughter] Then we’ve gone off on some rabbit trail.

As a last note, and then I think we’ll get into the actual text a little—as I go through this, the way… If you’re familiar with other treatments of the book of Romans, mine’s going to be very different, because it’s mostly been treated again by our Protestant friends. It was reading the epistle to the Romans in Greek that really set off Martin Luther and started the Protestant Reformation, so that’s not a coincidence. And when we get to the passage in question, we’ll talk more about this, but he made a particular application of part of Romans to the situation he was facing in medieval Europe, with Rome, and we’ll talk a little more when we get there about whether that’s a legitimate application or not, but that application that he made of it shaped the way it’s read by our Protestant friends, by our Roman Catholic friends in response to him for the last about 500 years. And even when we go to read the Church Fathers on Romans, for example St. John Chrysostom, we have to remember that the translations we’re usually reading of St. John Chrysostom were translated by mostly our Protestant friends, like Philip Schaff. And so they’re translating St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on Romans in line with their understanding of the book of Romans, not in a nefarious way, where they’re trying to skew it, but it’s the way that seems natural to them to understand it, because that’s how they’ve imbibed it. So I’m going to be going at it differently [from] that. [Laughter]

And one of the biggest things that has shaped how I approach it, in addition to the Church Fathers and how they approach it, is the idea of watching how St. Paul uses the Old Testament, because as we’re going to see almost right off the bat, St. Paul is quoting the Old Testament constantly, and when he’s not quoting it, he’s alluding to it and referencing it, and not just the Old Testament proper, but also the Jewish traditions of his time in which he’s trained and through which he reads it, so we’ll see little bits and pieces of that coming in, too. That happens all over the place in St. Paul.

Some of the famous examples are when he talks about, in 1 Corinthians, that Israel had a rock that followed them through the wilderness, and that rock was Christ. We tend to focus on “the rock was Christ,” and we’re like, “Oh, yeah, the water comes from the rock.” And we skip over the word “followed,” like: “Wait, the rock followed them around?” Well, this is a rabbinical tradition; it’s from what’s called the Midrash, because the rabbis asked the question, “Well, wait a minute. At the beginning of their journey in the wilderness, Moses strikes the rock and they get water, and then they spend 40 years wandering around Sinai, and then at the end of that, Moses strikes the rock again and they get water but he gets judged for it. Where did they get water for 40 years?” So the solution was: Well, the rock must have followed them. And St. Paul just off-handedly mentions that the rock followed them in the wilderness.

The reason I bring this up is it’s important in the way St. Paul sees the Old Testament, because regardless of what our Protestant friends think about sola scriptura now, St. Paul had no such idea. He understood the Scripture and the text of Scripture within this body of Tradition that he’d received, and he didn’t see a firm line between the two. We’re like: “Well, yeah, there’s some people who say the rock followed them, but, you know, the text just says there was a rock at the beginning and the end.” There’s none of that with St. Paul; he understands it within this tradition. There’s bunches of other examples. In 1 Timothy, he talks about when Jannes and Jambres contested with Moses, and you can search all day through your Old Testament: you’re not going to find Jannes and Jambres, but according to the literature of the time, the religious literature of the time, those were the names of Pharaoh’s court magicians, whom Moses had sort of the stand-off with. Now, St. Paul isn’t endorsing all of those stories and saying, “All of these are Scripture, too,” but he’s also not saying, “Well, those names aren’t, you know, in the Torah, so… forget it!”

Q1: Well, if we were to refer to Photini, Protestants would be completely puzzled.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s what I’m getting at. It’s the same kind of thing. So if we’re going to talk about what St. Paul’s way of interpreting Scripture was, and we want to compare it to the Protestant way or the Roman Catholic way or the Orthodox way, it’s basically the Orthodox way of reading the Scriptures, where there’s not this separation and polarity. The Roman Catholic position is that Scripture and Tradition are these two separate things, and that there’s Church authority that sort of picks and chooses what of each of them is valid. And then in the Protestant sense, there’s just Scripture and everything else is just bogus automatically, suspicious at least. Whereas the Orthodox approach is that Tradition is one thing; Scripture is part of the Tradition, because the books themselves have been handed down to us, and it’s Tradition that says that these are the books that are Scripture: these are the ones you read in church. So there’s not that separation. So that’s how St. Paul approaches it.

But I also have the bias that St. Paul interprets Scripture correctly—and that may sound bizarre, that I have to say that, but you would be surprised, because there are whole books written on how the New Testament interprets the Old Testament, and they write about it as if it’s an oddity, because people today, modern scholars, modern readers, say, “Well, we can tell what the Old Testament means,” and then they read the New Testament and see how Paul and the other apostles quote the Old Testament and say, “They’re doing something weird, because our way of doing it clearly is the right way, and so they’re doing something weird or wrong.” [Laughter] More conservative Christian folk who approach that will say, “Well, they were apostles, so God sort of gave them the authority to do that, but we shouldn’t do that,” which sort of amounts to: God gave them the authority to do it wrong? [Laughter] Which doesn’t make sense to me either.

But what that means practically is that as I’m going through and as we’re reading it and interpreting it, when we come to a quote from the Old Testament, my approach to that is not to say, “How do I think St. Paul is using it?” and then go back and say, “Oh, well that must be what the Old Testament meant.” My approach is: You go to the Old Testament, you see what the passage means in the Old Testament, and that shows you what St. Paul is saying.

To give an example in the epistle to the Romans that will come up later, and I’ll talk more about it later, our Calvinist friends like to quote St. Paul’s quotation at the beginning of Romans 9, where he quotes from the Prophet, “Jacob I have loved; Esau I have hated,” and then they structure a whole theology of predestination! “Well, see, before they were even born, God loved one of them and hated the other one.” Now if you go back and actually look up that text from where St. Paul is quoting it, it has nothing to do with the people Jacob and Esau. It’s talking about the nations of Israel and Edom, who are descended from them, and how God had chosen Israel to be his people and not the Edomites; that’s what it’s about. That’s what it’s about; it’s got nothing to do with the individual people. Like I said, we’ll talk more about that when we get there, and even what the word “hated” there means, with some other examples from Scripture, but that’s just an example of… you don’t take what you think St. Paul is saying and read back into the Old Testament; we take: “St. Paul’s alluding to this,” and we take that to understand the point that St. Paul is making.

So that approach is going to be one of the biggest differences, again, if you’ve heard other…

Q2: So the people receiving the epistle, at least the Jewish ones, would probably have pretty much the same interpretation of the Old Testament as Paul has.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because they were operating—and the Gentiles who were God-fearers in the synagogue.

Fr. Stephen: Those who had familiarity.

Fr. Stephen: Because this is how they would have heard the Greek Old Testament. They weren’t… In Rome especially, they were not using Hebrew, and they were not allowed to use Aramaic in the synagogues. You had two options: you could do Hebrew or you could do Greek, and so they were doing Greek. So they would have heard the Greek Old Testament tradition, and that’s what they would have heard and heard preached, and so this is part of that aspect of… St. Paul is not quoting the Hebrew Scriptures in some kind of a vacuum. He’s citing this tradition, this religious tradition of worship that’s already going on, to which he has access and to which his audience has access. So when he refers to “when Jannes and Jambres contested with Moses,” they know exactly what he’s talking about. We have some trouble; we have to do a little more work and have a Bible study, but they had immediate access to these things. They had heard these texts, these Old Testament texts preached, because this was what was going on.

Again, we still have Christian synagogues at this point, basically, and so this is what they’re hearing every Saturday, because remember, at this point in history, on Saturday they’re going to the synagogue. They’re having readings from the Old Testament and preaching, and then on Sunday, just the Christians are gathering and celebrating the Eucharist on the first day of the week. And then later in the second century, when the Christians are expelled from the synagogue, they move that part of the service onto Sunday also, and you get our Divine Liturgy with the two parts. So these are still separated, but that’s what they’re hearing, and the preaching is Christian preaching. So they’re hearing the Christian interpretation of that.

Q3: Now we know and it sounds more familiar for us. Before reading the Acts and the way you explained it, it did not make more sense at the beginning, like they have Saturday and they have Sunday, where the Old Testament reading comes from. Now it all makes sense.

Fr. Stephen: Good. And so one last note on St. Paul. Then we’ll get started. And this is more a reminder, because we’ve been through the book of Acts, but we read the story of his—and for people on the recording, I’m doing scare-quotes—“conversion” way back at the beginning of Acts. [Laughter] And remember, we talked about at that time that we now look back on it and St. Augustine and Martin Luther looked back on it as a “conversion,” as if St. Paul leaves this one religion, this one religious tradition, and joins another religion. Well, St. Paul did that on the road to Damascus in 35 AD, so this is two years after Christ rose from the dead. So there was not “Judaism” and “Christianity” as two separate religions at the time this happened.

There was obviously a change. If you mean “conversion” in the sense of “repentance,” then, yes, that happened to St. Paul. He repented of what he was doing. But he did not see himself as having changed religions. He saw Christ as the Messiah whom he had been expecting. He as a Pharisee had been expecting the Messiah to come. What changed is: Oh, he has come, and he’s Jesus of Nazareth. And then everything else for St. Paul is a domino that tumbles from that. Well, if the Messiah has come and has died and has risen from the dead, that means we’re in the last days. What’s going to happen in the last days? The Gentiles are going to turn. Israel’s going to return to the land, to God. The Gentiles are going to come streaming into Jerusalem. All of these things are going to happen.

But those are things he believed the day before the road to Damascus were going to happen. It’s just now he’s like: “Okay, now they’re happening.” So it’s a shift in his time table, and we’re going to see, once in Romans and once in another of his epistles, he refers to himself as a Pharisee in the present tense. So he doesn’t see himself as having made this huge shift, and that’s part of his approach. When he approaches his fellow Jews it’s not: “You have to abandon this false religion you have and come and…” It’s: “The Messiah you’ve been waiting for has come. And this is who he is and this is what that means.” That’s his approach, and so then they will make the same acknowledgment that he did.