No. 6. >> Eric's question about the congregation in Rome was a good one. Thank you for your comments. I'm Josh, by the way. And I would like to ask a related question. What do we know about the background of the church in Rome? >>PROFESSOR DAVID I. M. LEWIS: Hello, Josh. And welcome to this course on the epistle to the Romans. And in response to your question I can give a short answer and a long answer. The short answer first: What do we know about the situation of the church in Rome? And the short answer is: Not much. We really don't know much about how that church was founded and what was going on in that church. We do know this: There were Christians in Rome and thus, congregations in Rome. And none of those congregations were founded by an apostle. Paul had not yet come to Rome. And although there's an argument that Peter had founded the church at Rome, an argument that's usually used by the Roman Catholic Church today. Peter was not in Rome when Paul wrote this epistle, either. If Peter were in Rome, we would expect that Paul would greet him somewhere in the context of his epistle. But Paul does not. The answer being that neither Paul nor Peter nor any other apostle has yet come to this church. And so the short answer, Josh, is this: What do we know about the church in Rome? Well, we know that there were Christians in Rome in 57 AD and that Paul wrote an epistle to these Christians in Rome. That's what we know. Now, the long answer is a reconstruction, a possible reconstruction of what was going on. Okay. We know that the apostles did not found the church at Rome. Later traditions would argue that the church at Rome was founded by Peter. And this was probably an attempt to bolster the authority of the patriarch or the pope of Rome by saying that their church was founded by the first of the apostles, by Peter himself. But this is -- if we look at the evidence in Acts and in Romans, we don't see that there was any apostle in Rome until Paul comes there under arrest in the year 62 AD. So it's evident from how Paul writes that he did not found this church. And it is evident that Peter was not there, either, for Paul would have greeted him if Peter had been there. And so here I would like to give a possible reconstruction of the history of the Roman church. Point 1, in 30 to 33 AD at the feast of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was given to the 12 apostles in Jerusalem and when they preached that first sermon and when 3,000 Jews and converts were converted to Christianity and baptized that day, we know that some of those who were there who heard Peter speak that sermon in Acts 2 were from Rome. If you look at Acts 2 Verse -- if we look at Acts 2 Verse 10, we see that Romans were present at Pentecost. Roman Jews. Well, then we can theorize perhaps that some of those Jews from Rome heard Peter and were among the 3,000 that believed and were baptized that day. And then some of them may have then returned to Rome after the feast of Pentecost had been celebrated. They would have brought back to Rome their faith. And they would have been the ones to found the first congregation or the first congregations in the city of Rome. Point 2, since Rome was the center of the Roman Empire, there were a lot of people who used to travel to Rome and from Rome. So it's very likely that after the days of Pentecost that many Christians who may have been converted after Pentecost nevertheless may have found their way to the city of Rome. And then these Christians would have either joined the existing congregations, probably we should think in terms of house churches. Or they may have founded their own churches. And so we could have had people from Pentecost go to Rome and bring their Christian faith. We could have had other travelers come to Rome and bring their Christian faith. At this point the church at Rome would have probably been very Jewish in character just as the church was everywhere in those early years of the church. So we can surmise from this that those Jewish Christians may have continued practicing some of the Jewish traditions, such as circumcision, eating kosher, even following the Jewish festivals and all of that. Okay. Point 3, in this time Gentiles may have also been converted to the Christian faith. Some of these Gentiles may have joined some of those Jewish house churches in Rome and then maybe adopted some of the Jewish lifestyle and some of their practices. But it's also very likely that Gentiles who had been converted to Christianity and who had not felt a need to obey the torah had also come to Rome. And thus, founded their own churches. So some people surmise that there could have been in Rome the existence of parallel Christian bodies. Jewish Christians who were very much devoted to Jewish piety and observing the torah. And then Gentile Christians who did not feel the need to follow the torah and obey Jewish piety. Point 4, in the year 49 AD the emperor Claudius evicted all of the Jews who lived in Rome from the city. The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that this came about because of a conflict among the Jews centered around a person named Chrestos. Now, many Christian scholars and historians have argued that Chrestos is kind of a veiled reference to Jesus Christ. So they surmise that the Jewish Christians and the Jews who were not Christians in Rome had a conflict over Jesus. And that this conflict led to enough of an altercation that Claudius evicted all of the Jews out of his city. Now, it's for this reason that the two people Priscilla and Aquila met Paul later on in Asia Minor. They met Paul because they, too, had been evicted from Rome at this time. So they go to the east where they meet Paul and then become his partners in ministry. Point 5, after the Jews had been evicted from Rome, only Gentile Christians would have remained. And so some people surmise that after 49 AD, what used to be a mainly Jewish Christian form of the faith would have been replaced by now a more dominant Gentile form of Christianity. And so Point 6, when Jews eventually began to return to Rome, Jewish Christians, they would now come to a place where the Gentiles were in control. It is now no longer a majority Jewish Christian church but now a majority Gentile Christian church. And so then because of this there may have been specific conflicts between Jews and Christians in Rome. And so those who believe that Romans was written in part to address those concerns would say: This is the reason why Paul is writing. The Jews have been expelled from Rome. They've returned. Now the Gentiles are the ones who are in the power and you've got bickering and arguing between the Jews and the Gentiles going on. We don't know if this is in fact true. But some people would argue on the basis of the internal evidence of Romans that this is what's going on. From this we can go onto what we know. Around 60 to 62 AD Paul was imprisoned in Rome. Paul was brought to Rome in chains. And then for two years, 60 to 62, he was under house arrest. And then after this arrest again history lapses and we're not sure what happened. One tradition said that Paul was executed at the end of his two-year arrest at the end of 62 AD. Another tradition says that Paul was released, that he actually did conduct his missionary work in Spain that we know he hoped to conduct by reading the end of Romans and that perhaps he also conducted further ministry in east perhaps at the island of Crete. And that later both Paul and Peter were executed under the persecution that was instigated by Emperor Nero later in the 60s. This is not -- again, this is not -- there's not a lot that we definitely know about the situation of the church at Rome. But again the short answer would be that we know there were Christians in place in Rome in 57 AD when Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans. Again to go back to the short answer, there's not a lot we know about the situation of the church in Rome. All we really know is there were Christians there in 57 AD when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans. We know from the book of Romans that there were Jewish Christians in Rome and we know there were Gentile Christians in Rome. We know Paul intended to come there. We know from the Book of Acts that Paul eventually did come to Rome. And that basically is what we truly know about the church at Rome.