Читать книгу Paul Among the Gentiles: A "Radical" Reading of Romans - Jacob P. B. Mortensen - Страница 32

The majority of scholars contend that Romans was intended for both Jews and Gentiles, albeit primarily for Jews.1 This is based on external and internal evidence from the letter. The external factors concern the possible (but speculative and hypothetical) ethnic composition of Roman believers in Christ at the time of Paul. However, we have no evidence with which to reconstruct the Christ-believing community/communities in Rome prior to Paul’s letter.2 Romans provides the earliest evidence of any Christ-believing people in Rome. Regardless of how many – if any – Jews or Christ-believing Gentiles Claudius expelled from Rome in 49 AD, that event can have no bearing on our understanding of the audience of the letter. On the other hand, the internal factors relate to Paul’s explicit mention of the identity of the interlocutor in Rom 2–4, the strong and the weak (14–15), the greetings at the end of the letter, and various other aspects of the letter (1–11). The majority of scholars take these factors to imply an at least partly Jewish audience.

Stanley Stowers and Runar Thorsteinsson suggest speaking of the encoded audience/reader, rather than the real, historical, or actual audience, to avoid speculation concerning the ethnic composition of the actual (historical) Roman congregation.3 The encoded reader/audience is the manifest audience in the text, and it constitutes a strategy within the text; this is the reader the author himself constructs, for example, when Paul writes to ‘all the Gentiles, including yourselves‘ (1:5) or when he writes ‘I am speaking to you Gentiles’ (11:13).4 Thus, the encoded reader/audience is the reader explicitly inscribed in the text, and a feature of the text itself. According to Stowers and Thorsteinsson, the encoded/intended reader was not necessarily identical to the actual readers of the letter when it arrived in Rome. We can never know who the actual or empirical readers were; they remain in the sphere of a historical reconstruction that may easily become speculation.5 And even though from a historical point of view we may be certain that there were Jews in Rome,6 it simply does not follow that the letter was addressed to them.

To reveal the purpose of Paul’s letter, it is crucial to determine the identity of the encoded/implied reader or audience. Hence, the starting point for an analysis of the audience of Romans follows from the text-internal evidence, which reveals the encoded or intended audience. The audience of Romans may be confirmed only by the letter itself. However, and here we may be moving beyond what Stowers and Thorsteinsson (and others) have suggested: if the literary function of the letter’s encoded reader/audience turns out to have a bearing on the purpose of the letter (primarily the paraenetic part of the letter), these two – in combination – may also constitute a weighty argument concerning the (actual, historical) addressees of the letter.7 Consequently, if we can argue for the unity and continuity of the letter from chapter 1 to chapter 16, the unity, continuity, and sequence of the letter may establish a firmer point from which to draw conclusions about the actual and historical addressees in the Roman congregation.