Romans 1

The more literal term is “apostle,” a messenger such as a delegate or an ambassador sent to deliver a message. The title “apostle” came to mean disciples handpicked by Jesus to tell his story and spread his teachings. The title usually referred to the 12 original disciples of Jesus and to Paul, who met Jesus in a miraculous encounter while Paul was traveling to Damascus to arrest Christians (Acts 9:5).

The Greek word for “good news” is euangelion, from which we get words such as evangelize and evangelical.

The only Bible Jews or Christians had was the Old Testament. It would take another 300 years for church leaders to agree on which books belonged in the New Testament. In Paul’s day, those books were just being written, copied, and passed along from one church to another.

The Greek word is Christos. Messiah is the Hebrew version spoken by Jewish people. Christ is the Greek version, spoken as the international language of Jesus’s day. Both words mean “anointed one,” as in a prophet anointed by God or a king anointed by a nation. Followers of Jesus became known as Christians, taking their name from “Christ,” a title that identified Jesus as the Messiah, the Anointed One promised by the prophets. First-century Roman historian Tacitus (about AD 56-120) described Christians as “a class hated for their abominations. . . . Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”

“Grace” sounds like a vague word that’s hard to define. In fact, it’s a specific word that can be hard to define: charis. When Bible writers use it to describe God’s expression of grace to people, the word comes in different shades: mercy, kindness, love. We have to look for context clues if we want to understand how the writer used the word. One interpretation of God’s grace is this: “Grace is God accepting us the way we are and exactly where we are in our lives, yet it’s also his unwillingness to leave us there.” That may cover all the shades of “grace.” We should probably add that Paul says we can’t earn the right to any of it (Romans 9:16). In the Casual English Bible, we typically substitute “kindness” for “grace,” because the word “kindness” is more easily grasped and is a key feature of grace. But in Paul’s letter to Romans, we go back to “grace” because this is Paul’s greatest surviving work and the most theological. Some scholars describe this letter as the first thorough work of Christian theology. If you can handle Romans, you can wrap your welcoming arms around God’s grace.

“Goodness” comes from the Greek word dikaiosynē, often translated “righteousness.” Bible experts debate what Paul meant when he talked about the “righteousness of God.” Righteousness can refer to integrity, purity, and justice. Some scholars say it also describes God as someone we can trust to do what he said he would do. In this case, righteous might be “God’s way of righting wrong” (New English Bible). Or it might be described as his divine gift of power, which saves us. Whatever Paul had in mind, context clues from reading this whole letter suggest God’s goodness (righteousness) was good news.

Paul is paraphrasing Habakkuk 2:4. Bible experts debate what Paul meant by this cryptic phrase. German scholar Martin Luther (1483-1546), a Roman Catholic monk, eventually got himself excommunicated from the church partly because of what he read into this phrase. He saw an idea that inspired a Christian protest movement that became known as the Protestant Reformation. Luther, the father of Protestant churches, said Paul seemed to be teaching that we are saved through our faith, not through obeying religious laws or by observing rituals, such as confessing sins to a priest or taking Communion in a church service. Another way some read the phrase: Good (righteous) people show their faith by the way they live. Another: Good people will live because of God’s faithfulness—meaning that we can trust God to save us as he promised to do.

Christians are so divided over how to understand what Paul says about homosexuality that church denominations have split over this very topic. Some say they believe Paul is speaking for God when Paul writes this letter and others like it. Other Christians say they doubt that God would want to be blamed for what Paul wrote, and that Paul was expressing his personal opinion rather than revealing something God told him to say. These Christians argue that Paul would have been surprised that his letters ended up in the Holy Bible, and that if he had known it would turn out that way, he might have made some changes in his letters.