Liberated by the spirit from the law of sin and death: pre-Nicene Christian writers on νομος ‘law’ in Romans 7:21–8:2

This dissertation is a study of the reception history of selected verses from Romans 7:21–8:2 in the first three centuries of the Common Era, up to and including Origen. The large range of interpretations of Romans 7:21–8:2 and its νόμος ‘law’ phrases in today’s scholarship has led to division among Pauline scholars. As yet, no comprehensive study on the interpretation of Rom. 7:21–8:2 by the early church has been undertaken and deployed in the study of this passage. This dissertation fills this lacuna by investigating four of the most pressing questions that continue to divide today’s Pauline scholars through the lens of the early writers: (1) whether the text should be understood as autobiographical (who is the ‘I’ of Rom. 7:21–8:2, and more broadly, 7:14–8:2?), (2) the meaning of νόμος in the νόμος phrases in Rom. 7:21–8:2, (3) the manner in which the νόμος phrases work on human beings, whether they are internal or external to the human being, and (4) to what extent did Greco-Roman thought impacted the early Christian understanding of this passage. The authors studied in this dissertation are Tertullian, Theodotus the Valentinian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. There are three primary reasons that Origen was chosen as the end terminus. Firstly, the proximity of Origen and those who wrote before him to the language and culture of Paul would have given them a privileged access to Paul’s world. Secondly, Origen, the latest of these authors, was the first extant Christian author to write biblical commentaries, and especially a commentary on Romans. Therefore, the dissertation examines the earliest readings of these verses before the authors’ interpretations were coloured by myriads of biblical commentaries. And thirdly, these authors wrote before the Roman Empire officially embraced Christianity (325 CE), and thus before there was a stricter oversight of theological works; these authors would have been less constrained by authority when they wrote. These criteria helpfully limit the number of authors studied because the extant references to and comments on Rom. 7:21–8:2 significantly increases from the fourth century onwards, which would have made it unmanageable for a dissertation. This dissertation argues that the early writers were primarily preoccupied with promoting self-mastery (a virtuous life) and keeping the vices at bay when they made use of Rom. 7:21–8:2. It further argues that the authors were primarily interested in the struggle or combat between that which is worldly and that which is otherworldly as depicted in Rom. 7:23, the verse that was by far the most popular and most referred to by the four authors. Furthermore, although the four authors interpreted the νόμος phrases in similar ways, not one author understood every νόμος phrase in the same way as another author. In stark contrast to contemporary scholarship of Rom. 7:21–8:2, the dissertation demonstrates that not a single early author understood any of the occurrences of νόμος to refer to ‘the Law of Moses’ (the Torah). Still further, the earliest readers of Rom. 7:21–8:2 approached the text with predominantly Greek philosophical categories and these early authors––apart from Origen, who addressed nearly all of the questions that contemporary scholars raise––had no problems with this passage (none but Origen raised any concerns about any of the verses in their extant writings), including the identity of the ‘I’. Moreover, only Tertullian and Origen explicitly mentioned external forces as connected to ‘the law of sin’, whereas Theodotus and Clement do so too, although not when they addressed Rom. 7:21–8:2. Finally, all authors understood the ‘I’ to be applicable to Paul and to the audience of the writers, who were presumably fellow Christians, but possibly all people. The dissertation contributes to today’s scholarship by presenting for the first time a comprehensive study of the earliest extant readers of Rom. 7:21–8:2. The findings will enrich contemporary scholars’ readings of Rom. 7:23–8:2 and will shift the concerns and focus that scholars have concerning this passage, such as putting too much emphasis on the identity of the ‘I’ or reading all or most occurrences of νόμος ‘law’ as referring to the Law of Moses. The dissertation further contributes to scholarship by demonstrating that the primary use this passage had for the early authors was as a proof text for arguments concerning the interior struggle that every human feels when faces with the choice to embrace either worldly things or heavenly things, or in arguments to show the struggle between that which is good in the person (the body, created good by God) and that which is evil in the person (sin, or sinful and disordered thoughts, created by the freedom of the will to choose evil). As such, these findings lend further support to certain ways of reading Romans 7–8 in contemporary scholarship. The methodology used in this dissertation closely follows that of Jennifer Strawbridge: for each early Christian author who made use of the passage, I present a thorough analysis of the context in which it occurs, the manner in which it is used, and the distribution of its use throughout different genres. Finally, the dissertation is structured around the four early Christian authors, with emphasis on their interpretations in the light of the four significant dividing questions mentioned above.

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