Week 40 Romans
There’s a lot of OT-related content in Paul’s letter to the Roman church and I was asking myself the question: why is Romans so heavy with the OT & with what I’d call Israelitisms?
The church in Rome would have had Jewish people in it. I wondered how many? A whole lot? I started digging for demographic info.
Pretty quickly I realized I was on shaky ground. I couldn’t even find the population of the city of Rome (estimates were from under 500,000 to more than a million).
I wondered how many Jewish people lived in the city of Rome? Numbers were all-over-the-map from lows of 10,000 on up to 100,000. But no hard data.
What was the size of the church in Rome? Forget-it.
And what about my main question? What was the ratio of Jewish to non-Jewish people in the church? Well…take your pick.
Paul was writing to both Jewish & non-Jewish people. He addresses Jews. And Greeks. And Jews & Greeks. But the high volume of OT content is a surprise. If the church wasn’t majority-Jewish people then why the big chunks of OT material in Romans 2 3 4 7 9 & 11? And the dozens of OT references?
So a regular bible-reader is faced with a couple of questions. How much attention do I need to pay to the OT-related matters that I’m not even asking? And a second practical question: is it better for me to spend more time on the NT content that relates to contemporary issues?