Romans 1:1

Note

Romans opens with one long sentence: in Greek, verses 1 to 7 are a single period. Paul is writing to a church he has never visited, in the capital of the empire, and before he greets anyone he says who he is: a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, "and set apart for the gospel of God" (Romans 1:1). The verses that follow unfold what that gospel is and to whom it goes.

The word is the noun euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον), in the accusative after the preposition εἰς, "for": the gospel is the purpose for which Paul was set apart. The genitive that follows, θεοῦ, of God, names its owner and its source. Paul did not devise this message; God sent it. The next verse calls it "the gospel He promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures" (Romans 1:2), and verses 3–4 say what it is about: God's Son, a descendant of David according to the flesh, declared to be the Son of God with power by his resurrection from the dead.

"Set apart" is a perfect passive participle of aphorizō (ἀφορίζω), in the form ἀφωρισμένος. God did the separating, and Paul remains what God made him. The same verb comes in the Spirit's word to the church at Antioch, "Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul" (Acts 13:2), and in Paul's own memory of the God "who set me apart from my mother’s womb" (Galatians 1:15). It was not Paul's career he chose; it was a calling laid on him.

The English versions differ only in colour here. The King James Version has "separated unto the gospel of God", keeping the bare sense of the verb. The BSB has "set apart for", which sounds the note of something consecrated. The LSV, which never uses the word gospel, reads "having been separated to the good news of God". That is no loss: the English word gospel is the Old English godspel, good news, so the old word and the new one say the same thing.

The commentators read this first line with care. Wesley writes that "While God calls, he makes what he calls" Wesley, and that Paul was set apart even from other Christian teachers "to be a peculiar instrument of God in spreading the gospel" Wesley. He also notices that the opening already holds the letter's great themes: the prophecies, the descent from David, the resurrection, the gospel sent to the Gentiles. Matthew Henry sums up what Paul wrote as a doctrine that "set forth the fulfilment of the promises by the prophets" Matthew Henry.

In the Roman world the word was not new; even an emperor's birth had been hailed with it the Priene inscription. Paul takes up the same word and calls it the gospel of God. Scholars differ on how far he meant a contrast with the emperor's good news; but a reader in the emperor's own city heard, in the first line, whose news this was.

For someone hearing the gospel today, the verse first says where it comes from. Before it is any person's cause or any church's message, it is news God promised long ago and sent in his time. And it says that one man's whole life was set aside to carry it.