Audience of Romans 1 and 2

[mikew]

I should remind anyone reading my previous post that this analysis is a new proposal ... which makes sense in part due to my starting point of a realization that the intended (expected) audience was solely gentile. The arguments for a solely gentile audience (or similarly, an 'encoded' audience -- ie.. the audience to which the letter appears to be addressed) are fairly new ( a view argued maybe since around the 90s by scholars such as Achtemeier, Elliott, Das and Stowers ).
Also, the concepts on the wrath of God are not common to Romans scholarship. The discussion on Romans 2 does not usually address the specific type of wrath being described by Paul nor do the writings on Romans connect Paul's description of wrath with any specific discussions of wrath in the gospels or OT. I think the points I offered above should give some reason to investigate the nature of the wrath anew -- but I say this without having heard feedback on my proposal.

Romans, like everything else Paul writes, has a lot of explicit and implicit references to the Old Testament. If the target audience was Gentile, and had only been converted a few years before the writing of Romans, how were they supposed to understand those references if there were no Jews in the congregation? There is no reason to believe that pagan converts would have any idea of the significance of Hosea in Rom. 9-11. And, what's the point of the intro to Romans 7 if there was no one there who'd been raised under the Mosaic Law (AKA Jews)?

Doug

I don't see any difficult hurdles against a gentile audience.

The letter was written roughly in 58. There could be gentiles who believed in Christ for up to 20 years. The older believers started within the Jewish synagogues -- or among a throroughly Jewish context. The scripture quotes tend to present sufficient meaning with the wording of the quoted passages.such that Paul's point is established even among gentiles.
The discussions about people of Israel's heritage (Abraham, Sarah, David, Jacob, Esau ...) only required the type of knowledge which could be learned in the context of Christian gatherings.
Then Rom 7 has been observed by Thomas Tobin and Andrew Das to be an appeal to gentiles in their encounter with the law. Tobin observes:

The transition from ignorance to knowledge and from no-observance to attempted observance does not fit with the speaker being Jewish. A Jew would have known the law from an early age. Rather, what Paul seems to be appealing to here, without explicitly saying so, is what he thinks was the experience of Gentiles sympathetic to the Jewish way of life who as adults came to observe the ethical commandments of the Mosaic law. They were born and grew up without the law, but as adults they took upon themselves its observance.

(Paul's Rhetoric, 42 )

and Das notes

A handful of interpreters have recognized Rom. 7.7-25 as an instance of prosopopoiia as Paul speaks from the vantage point of the gentile seeking assistance from Moses’ Law in the battle against the passions: ‘I was once alive apart from the Law’, that is, prior to encountering that Law (Stowers 1994: 251-84; Tobin 2004: 225-50; Das 2007: 204-35).

(JSNT 2011,106)

I agree with Tobin and Das on the idea of Paul speaking of the gentile's experience. However, I would say that the experience was where gentiles encountered too much of the burden of the Jewish law and had rejected the law. Paul wrote to reestablish some recognition that the law itself was not bad.

Essentially, the text of Romans begins to make the most sense after recognizing that the intended audience was solely gentile.

[dwilkins]

I think it would be worth carefully looking at the opposite point of view. An easy read of this is Perriman's book "The Future of the People of God".

http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-People ... man+romans

[mikew]

I've read a good portion of it. He isn't exactly taking an oppositional view since he did not, as far as I recall, make an argument against the idea that the audience was solely gentile. However, his book does help to bring focus on the idea that Paul (and the Romans) was dealing with a first century wrath event. Such a proposal does not negate the idea of a final judgment of all mankind ... but merely clarifies the nature of Paul's text.

I'm not closed to any arguments against what I am presenting. Yet my main focus presently is to formally prepare an argument -- for the review by a wider audience. My hope is that my proposal will offer better grounds to find consensus on Romans.

If you want to study a bit more on some material which shows Romans (and Galatians) to be within first century Jewish eschatological expectations, checkout Thielman's From Plight to Solution.