THE PRIORITY OF THE PERSONAL

Paul and the Christians of Rome
(Romans 16:1-27)

The long list of names that concludes Paul’s letter to the Romans looks, at first glance, an unlikely topic for a sermon. In fact, it is an unusually rich source of information about the composition and social background of Christian community in ancient Rome. And, as Rob Yule shows in his final message on Paul’s letter, preached at Greyfriars Classical Service on 9 December 2007, it is a timely reminder of the importance of the personal dimension and of inter-personal relationships, if Christianity is to remain a friendly and authentic movement today.

Personal touches

What could be more boring than a list of names! About as edifying as reading the telephone directory!

How wrong could you be!

The distinguished English Anglican layman Sir John Lawrence tells a wonderful story that illustrates the importance of lists of names. He recounts how Paul Sudhakar, an Indian philosopher and pupil of Radhakrishnan, the former president of India, was converted by reading the genealogy of Jesus recorded in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew! In joy he exclaimed: ‘Then Jesus really existed!’ (‘Truth in Religion’, Sobornost, 6.5 [Spring, 1972], p. 319). Unlike the gods of Hindu mythology, he realized that Jesus was a real person who actually lived!

Scholars have compared the names of the people Paul greets in Rome with names which appear on ancient Roman inscriptions. They’ve found an interesting corroboration of the historical accuracy of the New Testament. Many of the names in Romans 16 show up on inscriptions from ancient Rome, but not from other cities of the Roman Empire. It’s like Smith being a common name in New Zealand but not in China, or Choi being a common name in Korea but not in New Zealand.

Personal tone

Each of these names is a person as real as yourself — however hard you may find them to pronounce! These greetings are a window into the friendly inter-personal relationships in the early church. Paul commends ‘our sister Phoebe’, greets ‘my dear friend Epenetus’, speaks of Ampliatus ‘whom I love I the Lord’, and invites them to ‘greet one another with a holy kiss’.

Commenting on such greetings, New Zealand poet James K. Baxter writes, ‘Paul’s words have a tone of informal friendship — it is the voice of mutual love within the family of the Lord Jesus…. The tone of warmth cannot be set aside as an unessential factor. No; it proceeds from the Holy Spirit. The movement of the Spirit is always to personalize….’ (Thoughts about the Holy Spirit [Wellington, Futuna Press, 1973], p. 26).

Personal trust

The greetings of Romans 16 differ from those in other letters of Paul. In Romans Paul greets individuals, not churches; and the list of greetings is unusually long. Both differences reflect the peculiar circumstances of this letter. Romans is the only letter Paul wrote to a church that he hadn’t founded or visited. He’d never met most of the Christians in Rome, and knew only a few of them personally.

In his missionary journeys Paul has established churches throughout the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and now he wants to recruit Roman believers to support his bold vision of establishing churches in the West Roman Empire as far as Spain.

So Paul is trying to win the confidence of strangers for his future plans. This long list of names are his referees. He writes to them as trusted people who can vouch for his integrity, that he is trustworthy too. ‘Yes, we know this guy. He’s no fly-by-night operator who will rip you off or abuse your goodwill. This guy is the genuine article. He works hard to support himself. He’s got a proven track record, and a big vision to reach the Roman world for Christ. He’s worth us supporting.’

Paul’s correspondents

Paul greets 26 people, 24 of whom he names. ‘Priscilla and Aquila’ were expelled from Rome by Emperor Claudius in AD 49, moved to Corinth, and Paul stayed with them there (Acts 18:1-3). They must have returned to Rome after Emperor Nero readmitted Jews to Rome in AD 55, because they’re now listed as recipients of his letter.

Their gender

Nine of the 26 names are women: ‘Priscilla’, ‘Mary’, ‘Tryphena’ and ‘Tryphosa’, ‘Persis’, ‘Rufus’s mother’, ‘Julia’ and ‘Nereus’s sister’, and most think that ‘Junia’ was also a woman’s name, which would perhaps make ‘Andronicus and Junia’ a married couple.

The fact that Paul greets women in such a friendly manner shows how utterly undeserved is his reputation as a male chauvinist. He commends four of these women — but no men! — as hard workers. He respects women as colleagues in leadership. Obviously he didn’t expect the church to be a one-armed paperhanger, using only 50% of its membership, but to use its entire workforce, female as well as male, in service of Christ’s mission.

Their social background

Could ‘Rufus’ have been the son of the man mentioned in Mark’s Gospel (15:21), who was forced to carry Jesus’ cross on the way to Golgotha?

Inscriptions indicate that ‘Ampliatus’, ‘Urbanus’, ‘Hermes’, ‘Philologus’ and ‘Julia’ were common slave names in Rome — members of the lower class.

There are two upper class names. ‘Aristobulus’ was probably the grandson of Herod the Great and a friend of Emperor Claudius. ‘Narcissus’ was probably the well-known person in Rome of this name: a rich, powerful freedman, who had the ear of Emperor Claudius. Paul doesn’t greet them personally; only those who belong to their household. This means they weren’t believers themselves, but owned the premises where the believers met.

The list suggests that about one third of the Roman Christians were freemen or women and two thirds were slaves. Peter Lampe, the German scholar who has investigated these names (‘The Roman Christians of Romans 16’, in Karl Donfried, The Romans Debate, pp. 216-30), says that several Roman Christians during the first century went so far as to sell themselves into slavery to finance the support of Christian brothers and sisters (p. 229).

Paul’s companions

‘Timothy’ was Paul’s personal assistant: his constant companion on his journeys. Do you know what is the best way to learn a job? Become the personal assistant of someone who’s an expert. By serving them and doing their menial jobs, you’ll learn the tricks of the trade and how to do what they do. That’s how Elisha learned how to be a prophet — by being Elijah’s servant (1 Kings 19:21).

‘Gaius’ was Paul’s personal host in Corinth, where he wrote his letter to the Romans. He may well have been the man whose premises were next door to the synagogue in Corinth, who had hosted the Messianic Jewish believers after they were thrown out of the local synagogue (Acts 18:7-8).

‘Erastus’, you could describe as Paul’s personal patron — an influential man, director of public works in the Corinth City Council.

‘Tertius’, was Paul’s personal secretary, to whom he dictated his letter to the Romans — the longest letter Paul wrote, with nearly 7,100 words in Greek. Like Alfred Hitchcock making a brief appearance in his own movies, Tertius enters the script here and identifies himself as the person who wrote it down.

‘Phoebe’ was a wealthy deaconess and benefactor in the church at Cenchrea, the port of Corinth. Official mail in the Roman Empire was normally sent by a runner. But such was the importance of this letter that Paul gave it to Phoebe as his personal courier, for safe keeping. She carried the papyrus sheets, wrapped in a waterproof skin, a month’s journey of 1,500 kilometres by sea across the Adriatic to Rome.

I wonder if she had any inkling how influential the document she was entrusted with would be in the future. She was probably going on other business — like the businessmen of Greyfriars who frequently travel overseas on business. God uses such people. Have you ever considered using your travel for God’s purposes?

The priority of the personal

The long list of names that ends Paul’s letter to the Romans is not only a rich source of information about the Christian community in ancient Rome. It is a timely reminder to us of the importance of the personal dimension and of inter-personal relationships, if our Christian churches are to remain friendly and our Christian witness be authentic today.

The personal nature of the church

Paul’s concluding doxology praises the wisdom of God in the creation of the church, which he describes as a ‘mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known’ (16:25-26). The church is a mystery. It is not a bland one-dimensional institution, but rich a multi-faceted community comprising people of great variety of social origin, class backgrounds, and personal skills.

The word ‘ekklesia’, ‘church’ is nowhere in Romans used of the entire Christian community in Rome, but of the small house churches (like that of Aquila and Priscilla, 16:5) scattered around the capital city. They had no central worship facility, no central organization, and in their variety and distribution reflected the different Jewish synagogues from which they sprang. How different from this friendly, personal, family-based movement was the hierarchical institution which grew up around the monarchical bishop of Rome in the late 2nd century.

The personal nature of evangelism

Paul says that God is using this mysterious grouping of people for a great purpose — ‘so that all nations might believe and obey God’ (16:26). The church is God’s task-force to spearhead the evangelisation of the world. It is so modest and ordinary that it sneaks under the radar of the powerful and influential, till too late they recognise it as a threat to their power and try to persecute and destroy it — as the Emperor Nero did in AD 64, only a few years after Paul wrote this letter.

In the 1970s, Indian evangelist George David became so concerned about the ineffectiveness of much modern evangelism, that he began a research project to find out why. This led to a remarkable little book The Eclipse and Rediscovery of Person (New Delhi, Theological Research and Communication Institute, 1976).

George David discovered the secret of the early church’s success: its emphasis on the person. ‘The unit for evangelism is not the isolate, autonomous individual,’ he says. The unit for an effective evangelistic outreach is the person. The person is man in the totality of his relationships. Man divorced from his interpersonal and ecological relationships — the autonomous individual — is a creation of the ideology of secularism and its cultural process, secularization.’ (pp. 10-11).

He concludes with a challenge that Paul would have endorsed: ‘The establishment of a shared relational self with those we seek to evangelise is a necessary condition and the most potent channel or medium for the communication of the Gospel.’ (p. 96).

This is what God did, sharing himself with us in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. This is what Paul did, cultivating the personal friendship of his past and prospective converts. This is what we should do, if we are to be effective in making Jesus known today.

Rob Yule, 9 December 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church