Paul´s Letter to the Romans and Ancient Associations

Pauls letter to the Romans has been described as the most analyzed writing of western literature. However, no study has yet compared it with the closest institutional parallels for the Roman Christ group(s)that is, the permanent, private associations that were formed especially by trade guilds, migrant communities, and cultic worshippers in Rome and throughout the Roman empire. This project applies the full range of data from Greco-Roman associations to our understanding of the Christ groups in Rome as reflected in Pauls letter to the Romans. This comparison is needed, first, because of the widespread acknowledgement that Paul addresses a specific community situation and does not, as was once thought, simply provide a summary of his developed theology and, second, because of the persisting disagreement about what that communal situation is and why Paul writes to them. Greco- Roman associations are especially useful for better understanding the social and organizational practices of the Roman Christ groups because they provide different types of data. While we know about the Roman Christ groups almost entirely from literary texts, most of what we know about other Roman associations comes from inscriptions. This means that we have better data about their size, finances, activities, leadership structures, and internal and external relations and this knowledge can be used to suggest new possibilities and reign in current hypotheses about the Roman Christ groups. Currently, divergent reconstructions of the institutional structures of early Christ groups in Rome and their relationship to Jewish groups function to support competing interpretations of Pauls letter to the Romans. By comparing our limited data on the Roman Christ groups with their closest contemporary institutional parallels, this project aims to better ground the reconstruction of the Roman Christ groups social and organization practices in its Roman context and so provide a more secure basis for interpreting Pauls letter to the Romans. The results promise to be consequential because of the outsized influence of Pauls letter to the Romans on our understanding of Roman Christianity, Pauls thought, and for Christian theology and contemporary cultures more generally.