Paper to Categorize Scholarly Interpretations of Romans 12:1-2

And even liberal scholars think that whole the "Pauline" writings were composed by committed members of the Christian conjunction by, at the latest, very early in the second ampere-second and therefore deserve serious respect as both historical and theological documents.

One difficulty in translation read-only memory 12:1-2 is that this passage lies amidst the evidently quite different halves of the letter. read-only storageans 1-11 is overall (as is nonorious among Biblical students) a dim and tightly reas onenessd theological argument about the relationship surrounded by the Christian movement and the some other/older forms of Judaism (assuming that Paul and other Christians of Jewish background continued to regard themselves as Jews until the schism into two clear communities during the decades after the fall of Jerusalem). fixed storageans 12-15 is, in contrast, more(prenominal) concerned with practical issues of incorrupt conduct.

A point of feud among scholars is whether these two halves originally belonged together. O'Neill argues, for example, that these foursome chapters were originally a separate handbook of aphorisms or "proverbs" concerning proper moral conduct for Christians and were inserted into Romans, between chapter 11 and its logical sequel, chapter 16, by a later editor. He also offers a hypothetical reconstruction of what Romans may gain looked like as Paul originally wrote it. He argues that, although Rom 12:1-2 may state what was an important theological pattern for the early church, it cannot be apply

Many scholars agree that Rom 12-15 appears to be a compendium of aphorisms, largely arising out of the experience of the Hellenistic Jewish synagogues, and draw loosely together by associations of concepts, terms, or concerns, as was a normal composition technique for "wisdom" literature. If so, hence attempting to go against specific theological reasons for all the details of Rom 12-15 would be to read into it a level of profundity and sophistication that was never intended by the compiler. This would be especially true for Rom 12:1-2. If it is intended primarily as a bridge into a very different collection of materials, then it could not very likely be the sort of key educational activity of Paul's theology that Nygren considers it to be.

Other scholars, while recognizing the structural and situational differences between Rom 1-11 and Rom 12-15, prefer to point out that Paul himself could tranquillize have composed these chapters as we have them. Smiga argues that Paul, as a Hellenistic Jew, would have been familiar with such aphorisms and could easily have used them as a vehicle for explaining how the theology he has presented in chapters 1-11 needs to be applied to practical moral problems in the life of a Christian Jewish community. If so, then Rom 12:1-2 could be understood as Paul's witness summary of the key ethical concept that he is explicating in the four chapters that follow.

That is, "sin" would be understood primarily not as an individual's failure or weakness, scarce as a systemic failure of the community. The ethical emphasis would be not on the weakness of the individual, for that would be the assumed and continuing human condition, but instead on the strength of the community as a whole, and on its power, conceptualized as the spirit of Christ or as the Holy Spirit, to heal and empower each of its members. This sort of gracious yet practical ethic seems reflected in Marty Haugen's popular Eucharistic hymn, based on Rom 12:5, which asserts, "One bread, one
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