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"Hearing read, as I do continually, the Epistles of the blessed Paul, my heart leaps up, and my longings set me glowing, as I recognize the voice so dear to me, and seem to image the speaker as all but present to me, and to see him in discourse. But I mourn because all do not know this man as they should know him. It is from hence our myriad evils spring, from our ignorance of the Scriptures.'

CHRYSOSTOM, Preamble to Homilies on the Romans.

"Imagine the world without St. Paul; it would mean the detention of Christianity, perhaps for centuries, on the borders of Asia. Imagine the Bible without St. Paul; it would mean Christian truth only half revealed, Christian life only half understood, Christian charity only half known, Christian faith only half victorious.'

ADOLPHE MONOD, Saint Paul, Cinq Discours.

The Epistle to the Ephesians is one of the divinest compositions of man. It embraces every doctrine of Christianity.' S. T. COLERIDGE, Table Talk.

In thy Orcharde (the wals, buttes and trees, if they could speak, would beare me witnesse) I learned without booke almost all Paules Epistles. Of which study, although in time a great part did depart from me, yet the sweete smell thereof I truste I shall cary with me into heaven.'

NICHOLAS RIDLEY, to his College, Pembroke Hall,
Cambridge.

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

CIFT OF

EDGAR HUIDEKOPER WELLS

JAN 4 1527

Introduction

ROMANS

Genuineness of the Epistle. The Epistle to the Romans as a whole is universally admitted to be the work of St. Paul. Critics who have freely assailed the Pauline authorship of, for instance, Ephesians have left Romans alone. External testimony, in early allusions and quotations, is ample. But internal testimony, in the court of common sense, is abundantly adequate. It would demand a large credulity to believe that this Letter, in which long ranges of strong and subtle thought are inextricably interwoven with the deepest personal experiences and emotions, could be the product of literary personation; an art which can scarcely be said to have come to any sort of maturity till within modern times.

Integrity of the Epistle. But a question has been raised whether the Epistle left St. Paul's hands just as we have it. Some features of the text, from the end of chap. xvi. onwards, invite inquiry of this sort. Are chaps. xv. and xvi., though certainly by St. Paul, suitable to a Letter to Rome? Particularly, does the list of names, xvi. 1-15, fall in with his relation to the Roman Mission? For we gather plainly from the Epistle that he had not yet visited Rome. Yet here is a group of names, of unexampled length, many of them mentioned with peculiar personal affection, and all belong to residents at Rome. May not this passage

have crept in somehow from elsewhere? Might not Phlegon, Patrobas, Persis and the rest have been, for example, Philippian or Thessalonian friends, and may not a message to them have fallen out of its true place, and then have been added somehow to the Roman letter?

To this and similar questions it appears sufficient to reply by a few brief notes of fact. First, not a single known manuscript of the Epistle (there are some 300 such), unless accidentally injured, fails to give the Epistle complete, comprising these chapters in the received order; with the sole exception of the great final Doxology (on which see the note in this volume). As regards St. Paul's intimacy with a large group of Roman residents, the difficulty cannot be thought serious. Rome was a centre to which there was perpetual gravitation from all parts of the Empire. We have only to assume that his old friends Aquila and Priscilla had recently migrated back (Acts xviii. 2) to Rome from the Levant, and that what they had done had been done, in the course of a few years, by one here and another there of St. Paul's converts or other Christian acquaintance in Macedonia, Achaia, Galatia, or Asia, and we have more than enough to account for the greetings of chap. xvi.

It is remarkable, by the way, that many of the names in that chapter, Amplias, Urbanus, Tryphena, Rufus, Philologus, and others, are names found at Rome in cemeteries of the imperial age used for members (freedmen or slaves) of 'Cæsar's household' (see note in this volume on Phil. iv. 22).

The late Prof. Hort, one of the most fearless while sober and learned of recent English critics, in an essay printed in Bishop Lightfoot's Biblical Studies, has unreservedly defended the practical entirety, as we have it, of our Epistle.