New Testament · Paul's Letters
The gospel argued whole, all have sinned, justified by faith, no condemnation, God for us.
Paul's fullest statement of the gospel, written to a church he had not founded and had not yet visited, partly to introduce himself before asking for support. It moves like a legal argument with a doxology inside: every mouth stopped, righteousness given through faith, peace with God, the Spirit, the groaning creation, and the unbreakable chain at the end of chapter eight. Chapters nine to eleven, which readers often skip, are the emotional centre, where Paul wrestles with the standing of his own people and concludes that God has not rejected them. The last chapter is a long list of greetings, and it rewards a slow read: a woman named as a deacon, another called outstanding among the apostles, and a scribe who breaks in to greet the readers himself.
If you remember one thing
The most systematic thing Paul ever wrote, and the book behind more than one reformation. Chapter 8 is where the argument turns into doxology.
“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Romans 8:1
Romans 9
Election and God's freedom in choosing. This chapter sits at the center of the long disagreement between Reformed and Arminian readings, and both sides read it carefully.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
The first human being, formed from the dust and given the garden to keep. Paul later treats him as the head of the old humanity, the man through whom death entered, set against Christ as the head of the new.
The man God called out of Ur with a promise of land, offspring, and blessing for all nations, at an age when he had none of the three. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all trace their story back through him. Paul makes his trust in the promise, credited to him as righteousness, the pattern of faith itself.
A tentmaker who, with her husband Aquila, hosted churches in their home in three cities and took the eloquent Apollos aside to explain the way of God more accurately. She is usually named first of the pair, which was unusual enough to be worth noticing.
The names at the beginnings and ends of the letters, which most readers skip. They are the actual shape of the early church: a courier, a runaway slave, a treasurer of a city, a woman who hosted a congregation in her house, two women whose disagreement was serious enough to be named in a public letter.
A Pharisee trained under Gamaliel who persecuted the church until he was stopped on the road to Damascus. He then spent thirty years planting churches across the Roman world and writing the letters that make up roughly a third of the New Testament. He was a Roman citizen by birth, which is why he could appeal to Caesar.
A quiz for Romans is on the workbench. In the meantime, the games for the judges, the kings, and the prophets are open.
