Byzantique

Romans 5

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Text · Romans 5

Peace with God Through Faith

1Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, awe have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3Not only that, but we also boast in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces endurance, 4endurance produces proven character, proven character produces hope, 5and hope does not put to shame, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to bus.

6For when we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might even dare to die. 8But God demonstrated his own love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved from wrath through him! 10For if, while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more will we be saved by his life now that we have been reconciled! 11Not only that, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ

12Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, in this way death has come to all men, because all have sinned. 13For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not charged to anyone's account when there is no law. 14Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one to come.

15But the gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through the trespass of the one man, how much more have the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ abounded to many! 16And the gift cannot be compared to the result of the one man's sin; for the judgment that arose from one trespass brought condemnation, but the gift that arose from many trespasses brought justification. 17For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through the one man, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ!

18So then, just as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. 19For just as many were made sinners through the disobedience of one man, so also many will be made righteous through the obedience of one man. 20Now the law came in so that the trespass might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more, 21so that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Textual notes
  • a 5:1 we 𝔐244 56.1% ¦ let us 𝔐116 PCK TH WH 42.9%
  • b 5:5 us. For ¦ us, if indeed, WH {Note: The reading of WH would eliminate the paragraph break.}
Commentary
Verse Romans 5:12

Because of which

St. Paul's closing clause turns on two Greek words: ἐφ’ ᾧ (eph' hō). The Latin Vulgate made them in quo, "in whom," giving "in whom [Adam] all sinned," and on that footing the Christian West, following St. Augustine, read the verse as teaching inherited guilt: the whole race held culpable for the first man's sin. David Bentley Hart calls the Vulgate's rendering "one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history."1

Most English versions correct in quo to "because all sinned," and the base text here (TCENT/BTV) reads the same: "death has come to all men, because all have sinned." Yet this still inverts St. Paul. Taken as a plain causal conjunction, "because all sinned" makes universal death the result of our sinning.2 St. Paul says the reverse. ᾧ is a relative pronoun, and on Hart's reading its referent is death (θάνατος / thanatos): death spread to all, and because of that death all sinned. Mortality entered through Adam (Genesis 3:19), and in its shadow every person sins. Death is the root of our sinning, not merely its wage. Hart accordingly renders the clause "whereupon all sinned"; the EOB, "because [of which] all sinned."3 As James Payton notes of the Eastern Fathers, death itself "leads human beings to sin."4

We inherit from Adam not guilt but death, and death has become the occasion of our own sin, for which we, not Adam, are answerable.

  • 1David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 296. Hart renders ἐφ’ ᾧ "whereupon" and judges even "because all sinned" inadequate, reading the verse as a chiasm.
  • 2Which is not entirely wrong (cf. Romans 6:23), but is not the point St. Paul is making in this verse. Romans 5 is describing the situation of the entire human race, whereas Romans 6 is speaking chiefly of personal agency and its eschatological outcome. So while St. Paul can say that the "wages of sin is death," he also portrays death itself as the enslaving condition transmitted from Adam, within which all come to sin.
  • 3Laurent Cleenewerck, ed., The Eastern/Greek Orthodox Bible: New Testament (Laurent A. Cleenewerck, 2011), Rom 5:12.
  • 4James R. Payton Jr., The Victory of the Cross: Salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 42.
Referenced elsewhere

New Testament text: Text-Critical English New Testament (TCENT) — © Robert Adam Boyd, CC BY 4.0. Texts & Translations →