Jews are spoken of throughout in the third. Further, when Paul speaks of the Jews in chaps. ix.-xi., it is as ‘‘my brethren,” “ my kins- men according to the flesh,” not ours nor yours, as would have been the case had the bulk of the Church been of Jewish origin. :
-(d) Chap. xv. 15 f. τολμηροτέρως δὲ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν κ.τ.λ. Here Paul justifies himself, in closing, for writing as he has done—especially, perhaps, for writing so decidedly in chap. xiv.-xv. 13—to the Romans. The reason he gives is unmistakable. He is a minister of Jesus Christ, a priest in the service of the Gospel; the offering he has to lay on the altar is the Gentiles, and he writes to the Romans because they are Gentiles, to further them in their faith, that when they are presented to God it may be an acceptable offer- ing, sanctified in the Holy Spirit. There is no evading this argu- ment ; to say that in vers. 17-20 Paul’s justification of this presenta- tion of himself as minister of Jesus Christ eis τὰ ἔθνη is directed against Jewish-Christian suspicions and insinuations (cf. 2 Cor. x. 12-18, xii. 11, 12) may or may not be true, but is quite irrelevant ; even if there were such suspicions, and even if they had begun to find acceptance in Rome, the Gentile character of the Church at Rome as a whole is here put beyond question.
(e) Less stress can be laid on passages like vi. 17 f. (ἦτε δοῦλοι τῆς ἁμαρτίας), though they have undoubtedly something which recalls the ἐξ ἐθνῶν ἁμαρτωλοὶ of Gal. ii. 15. By the time he has reached chap. vi. Paul is quite entitled to assume that his readers were once slaves of sin, without suggesting anything about their nation- ality. Neither do the suggestions of particular sins (e.g., in vi. 12-14) throw any real light on the question. All kinds of bad things are done both by Gentiles and Jews. But discounting weak and un- certain arguments, there is a plain and solid case for maintaining that the great bulk of the Church at Rome was of Gentile origin.
2. Evidence for the Jewish-Christian character of the Church.
(a) There are passages in which Paul includes himself and his readers in the first person plural; now no one, it is to be observed, is included with him in the superscription, so that “we” must mean “you and I”. Thus iii. 9 προεχόµεθα; are we (Jews) surpassed ? But it is very natural to suppose that Paul here, as is his rule, allows his opponents (real or imaginary) to state their own objec- tions in their own person, the “we”’ neither including himself nor his readers ; or if he speaks in his own person, it is the national con- sciousness of the Jew, which Paul of course shared, and not the joint consciousness of Paul and his readers, which is conveyed by the plural. Another passage of the same kind is iv. 1: ᾿Αβραὰμ τὸν