Romans — who's who

Born in Tarsus in Cilicia, probably in the first decade of the first century CE, a Roman citizen by birth, raised as a Pharisee, educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel. Converted on the road to Damascus in the mid-30s by a vision of the risen Jesus. Spends the next two decades founding and tending churches around the eastern Mediterranean. Writes Romans from Corinth in the winter of 56-57 CE on the eve of the trip to Jerusalem that will end with his arrest. He is executed under Nero, probably in 64 or 65, beheaded as a Roman citizen on the Ostian Way outside the city.

The professional scribe to whom Paul dictates Romans. Named explicitly at 16:22, where he inserts his own greeting: I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord. He would have sat with a stylus taking down Paul's dictation over multiple sessions, probably with revision and second drafts. Whether he had a hand in the phrasing is unknowable; the dense argumentation is clearly Paul's. What is certain is that the letter is a co-production, and the human face of that co-production is Tertius.

A deacon of the church at Cenchreae, the eastern port of Corinth, mentioned at the start of chapter 16. Paul commends her to the Roman church: I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints. She carries the letter to Rome on her own business and probably reads it aloud at its first reception there. She is one of the very few women named with an official ecclesiastical title in the New Testament.

Married couple from Pontus, leather-workers of the same trade as Paul. Driven from Rome by Claudius's expulsion of the Jews around 49 CE; Paul met them in Corinth and worked alongside them; they later moved to Ephesus. By the time of Romans they have returned to Rome and host a church in their house. Paul names them at 16:3 as my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life. Priscilla is named first — unusual in ancient practice and probably a mark of her relative prominence.

Named at 16:7 as outstanding among the apostles. A woman — which caused translators for centuries to masculinize the name to Junias. Modern scholarship has restored the female form. She is, alongside the general greeting of the apostles at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, the only woman in the New Testament identified with the title apostle.

Not a contemporary of Paul but the figure on whom the demonstration of justification by faith in chapter 4 turns. Paul argues that Abraham was reckoned righteous (Genesis 15:6) before he was circumcised (Genesis 17) and centuries before the law was given at Sinai. Abraham is therefore the father not only of the circumcised but of all who walk in the footsteps of the faith that he had before he was circumcised. The argument is the structural pivot of the doctrine of justification by faith.

The first-person voice that emerges at 7:14 in one of the most contested passages in Paul: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Who the I is — Paul before conversion, Paul as a believer struggling with sin, Adam, Israel under the law, or simply rhetorical humanity — has been argued for two thousand years. The passage has been quoted by every later writer in the Western tradition who needed to describe weakness of will.

Named at 5:12-21 as the figure through whom sin and death entered the world, and contrasted with Christ as the figure through whom grace and life entered. The contrast — the first Adam and the last Adam — is one of Paul's central typological arguments and appears also in 1 Corinthians 15. In Romans 5 Paul uses it to show that just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's righteous act leads to justification and life for all.