Introduction

The Weightiest of the Commentaries

Paul was not the first of the apostles to write—Thessalonians, the two Corinthian letters, and Galatians all precede Romans—yet Romans stands first in the collection all the same, because Scripture, Theophylact notes in the short Argument that opens his exposition, orders its books by weight and not by date, “as one who has a debt to be a minister of Christ, and as to those who preside over the world.” The observation sets the tone for what follows. Of all the epistles Theophylact expounds, Romans receives the most sustained and doctrinally exacting treatment, tracking the closest argument Paul ever wrote across all sixteen of its chapters.

The commentary stands in unusually close relation to a single predecessor. Saint John Chrysostom had preached thirty-two homilies on Romans in Antioch some seven centuries earlier, and Theophylact draws on them at nearly every verse, compressing sermons that could run to several thousand words apiece into a phrase or two of running comment. He is not a mere abridger—he selects, sharpens, and on occasion quietly corrects the emphasis he inherits—but the debt is open and constant, and a reader who knows Chrysostom’s homilies will recognize their working even where Theophylact gives them in a single sentence.

Argument and Structure

Theophylact does not impose the elaborate architecture that some readers of Romans have found in it—he does not, for instance, mark off a formal doctrinal half from a formal moral half with the precision some interpreters give the letter. He instead follows Paul phrase by phrase, chapter by chapter, from the salutation and the announcement that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation” in chapter one, through the indictment of Gentile and Jew alike under sin, the free gift of righteousness through faith illustrated from Abraham, the new life given in baptism, and the struggle and deliverance of chapters seven and eight, to the practical exhortations of chapters twelve through fifteen and the roll of personal greetings that closes the letter. What a reader gains is not a scheme imposed from outside but the sense of walking the argument at the Apostle’s own pace, with a guide who pauses exactly where the Greek itself poses a difficulty.

Chapters Nine Through Eleven: Foreknowledge and Election

Nowhere is Theophylact’s care more evident than in his handling of the three chapters where Paul wrestles with the unbelief of Israel. His interpretive key is set earlier, at the end of chapter eight, where he glosses “whom he foreknew, he also foreordained” by insisting that the order of the two words matters: “the foreknowledge is first, then the foreordination,” for calling alone does not suffice—“there is need also of the choice.” God’s foreordaining will answers to what his foreknowledge already sees in those who are called; it does not stand behind it as an unconditioned decree.

He carries that key into the two hardest images of chapter nine. Facing the potter who shapes one vessel for honor and another for dishonor from the same lump of clay, Theophylact is explicit that Paul intends the figure to teach silence and trust before God’s dispensations, “not that he might do away with our free will, nor that he might show us to be idle and unmoved”—the same lump yields different vessels because of “the use of those who handle them,” not because the clay itself is predetermined to one end or the other. And when Paul turns, in chapter eleven, to the wild olive grafted in among the natural branches, Theophylact reads the unbelief of Israel as neither final nor arbitrary: those cut off “if they abide not in unbelief, shall be grafted in again, for God is able to graft them in again.” Election, on this reading, runs together with human response rather than overriding it—the patristic account that the Eastern commentators before and after Theophylact held in common, and that gives his treatment of these chapters their settled, unanxious tone.

How to Read This Commentary

Because Theophylact comments lemma by lemma—quoting a short run of Paul’s own words and then unfolding it before moving to the next—the commentary rewards a reader who keeps the text of Romans open alongside it rather than reading the exposition as a continuous essay on its own. The compression that lets him cover the whole epistle in a single volume also means that a difficulty raised in one verse is sometimes answered several verses later, once Paul’s own argument supplies the resolution; patience with that rhythm is repaid. Readers new to Paul’s most demanding letter will find in Theophylact a guide who never loses sight of the ordinary believer for the sake of the argument, and who treats even the driest grammatical question as, in the end, a door into how the Apostle wants his hearers to live.