Romans Introduction
The fourth-century Latin Father who is called Ambrosiaster says in the preface to his commentary on this letter that the Romans ‘had embraced the faith of Christ, albeit according to the Jewish rite, without seeing any sign of mighty works or any of the apostles’. It was evidently members of the Christian rank and file who first carried the gospel to Rome and planted it there—probably in the Jewish community of the capital.
In the time of Claudius (AD 41–54) we have the record of another mass-expulsion of Jews from Rome. This expulsion is briefly referred to in Acts 18:2, where Paul, on his arrival in Corinth (probably in the late summer of AD 50), is said to have met ‘a Jew named Aquila, … lately come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome’.
Claudius ‘expelled the Jews from Rome because they were constantly rioting at the instigation of Chrestus (impulsore Chresto)’. This Chrestus may conceivably have been a Jewish agitator in Rome at the time; but the way in which Suetonius introduces his name makes it much more likely that the rioting was a sequel to the introduction of Christianity into the Jewish community of the capital.
The effects of the expulsion order, however, were short-lived. Before long the Jewish community was flourishing in Rome once more, and so was the Christian community. Less than three years after the death of Claudius Paul can write to the Christians of Rome and speak of their faith as a matter of universal knowledge.
The expulsion edict would have lapsed with Claudius’s death (AD 54), if not indeed earlier. But in AD 57 the Christians in Rome included not only Jewish but Gentile believers. Some of the latter may have stayed on in the city after the expulsion of their Jewish brethren; if so, their numbers were greatly augmented by the time Jewish Christians were able to return. Paul indeed has to remind the Gentile Christians that, even if they are now in the majority, the base of the community is Jewish, and that they must not despise their Jewish brethren just because they outnumber them (Rom. 11:18).
The ‘good news’ is not, first and foremost, about something that can happen to us. What happens to us through the ‘gospel’ is indeed dramatic and exciting: God’s good news will catch us up and transform our lives and our hopes like nothing else. But the ‘good news’ which Paul announces is primarily good news about something that has happened, events through which the world is now a different place. It is about what God has done in Jesus, the Messiah, Israel’s true king, the world’s true Lord.
The gospel isn’t like an advertisement for a product we might or might not want to buy, depending on how we felt at the time. It is more like a command from an authority we would be foolish to resist.