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Hi, everyone. This is part two of Chris Tillilling's paper on Carl Bart and the book of Romans.

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In the previous episode, I presented the first part of my paper on Karl Bart's Romans commentary.

I summarised what biblical scholars might do when reading Romans, you know, the sort of things we try to answer.

Why Paul wrote Romans to this particular group of people in Rome?

You know, we try to get to the bottom of why Paul thought he was achieving something with this

letter. We'd be careful to present and weigh up all of the most likely ways of reading Paul's

Greek, looking at the grammar

of the Greek letter and that sort of thing. We think about how people in an, on a shame culture,

presumably similar to Paul's, might hear Paul's language. And, you know, in all of these things,

we're attempting to clarify the historical situation of Paul's

letters and avoiding that great sin.

I mean, this is the great sin for biblical scholarship, anachronism.

You know, we wouldn't think it right to read the book of revelation, would we, as if the locusts that you read about there were really UN helicopters sent to destroy Brexit.

And in the same way, we wouldn't want to read Paul outside of his historical context.

And that's what biblical scholarship is trying to do to look at the historical situatedness of Romans.

But Bart seems to do the exact opposite.

He seems to impose theological and philosophical structures

...