Romans 15


Romans 15 is the fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It is authored by Paul the Apostle, while he was in Corinth in the mid 50s CE, with the help of an amanuensis, Tertius, who adds his own greeting in. According to Lutheran theologian Harold Buls, this chapter continues the theme of the weak and strong which Paul had addressed in chapter 14, but the application is now wider than to adiaphora. "The strong are those who are well-grounded in Scripture and also in practice. The weak are not so well-grounded".

Text

The original text was written in Koine Greek.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are:

Verse 3

In verse 3, Paul quotes from the Septuagint translation of Psalm 69:
He then continues, in order to establish that Christian liberty should be lived out in the service of others and with towards the weak:
Theologian William Robertson Nicoll states that "everything that was written before" refers to "the whole Old Testament". Lutheran theologian Johann Arndt paraphrases this verse as:
Anglican Bishop Handley Moule, writing in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, suggests that Paul develops here "a great principle, namely, that the Old Testament was throughout designed for the instruction and establishment of New Testament believers". Paul elaborates a similar point in :

The gentiles

Verse 8

Revised Standard Version, English Standard Version:

Verse 9

In verse 8, Paul refers to Jesus Christ as having become the servant of the circumcision, and then finds and quotes four extracts from the Old Testament which refer to the gentiles : ; ; and. Theologian Albert Barnes says that Jesus "exercised his office – the office of the Messiah – among the Jews, or with respect to the Jews... He was born a Jew; was circumcised; came "to" that nation; and died in their midst, without having gone himself to any other people", but with three objectives in mind:
Citation from

Verse 13

Illyricum

In verse 19, Paul refers to the Roman province of Illyricum as the easternmost point of his missionary travels so far, Paul having "fully preached" the gospel from Jerusalem to this point. Illyricum stretched along the eastern coast of the Adriatic, and formed the northern boundary of Epirus and the north-western boundary of Macedonia. According to, he "went away to go to Macedonia, and having passed through those parts... he came to Greece"; Anglican Bishop Charles Ellicott argues that "the vague expression which we find in Acts 20:2,When he had gone over those parts” affords ample room for the circuit in question.
"Fully preached" in relation to the gospel is generally understood to refer to the geographical reach of its preaching: the Jubilee Bible 2000 says
and Moule suggests that "a fair paraphrase would thus be I have carried the Gospel everywhere".