These seven verses are a single sentence in Greek — the longest opening of any letter Paul wrote, and by some distance the most loaded. The ordinary Greek letter began A to B, greetings; Paul takes the A and hangs three descriptions on it, then takes the gospel and hangs the whole history of Israel on that, and only reaches the to B in verse 7. He is writing to a congregation he has never met, in the capital of the world, to ask for their backing; everything he says about himself here is credentials.

⚠ “A slave of Christ Jesus.” Doulos is the ordinary word for a chattel slave — owned property, not hired help. KJV, ASV and NIV all soften it to “servant”; NWT reads “slave,” and it is right — a first-century reader in Rome, a city where perhaps a third of the population was enslaved, heard the harder word. The softening has a long pedigree and an uncomfortable history: “servant” makes the metaphor safe for people who owned slaves. We keep slave. Note also that Paul puts it first, before the apostleship: the title he leads with is the one with no status in it at all.

“Called as an apostle, set apart.” Apostolos is simply “one sent” — an envoy carrying another man’s authority. Aphōrismenos, “set apart,” is from the same root that gives the word Pharisee (Hebrew parush, “separated one”), which is either a coincidence or a very dry joke from a man who had been one. The phrasing also lands on the prophets’ own vocabulary: Jeremiah was told he had been known in the womb and “set apart” before he was born.

⚠ “Appointed Son of God in power” (v4). Horisthentos — from horizō, to mark out a boundary, appoint, determine (the root of English horizon). Read flatly it says the resurrection made him Son of God, which is why the verse has been a battlefield since the second century: some early readers found adoptionism in it, and translators have handled it in three ways. KJV and ASV read “declared to be the Son of God with power,” which resolves the difficulty in the English; NWT also reads “declared God’s Son”; NIV has “appointed the Son of God in power.” Both senses are within the word’s range. The commonest scholarly reading now takes the two kata phrases as a pair — a two-stage description of the same person, Davidic descendant according to the flesh, installed as Son-in-power according to the Spirit of holiness — and many judge verses 3–4 to be an existing creed Paul is quoting, older than the letter. We render appointed, which is what the verb ordinarily means, and leave the argument in view rather than settling it inside the translation.

“The obedience of faith” (v5). Hypakoēn pisteōs — a famously ambiguous genitive. It can mean the obedience that consists in believing, the obedience that comes from faith, or faithful obedience as one idea. KJV “obedience to the faith” makes it doctrine; NIV “the obedience that comes from faith” picks one option and prints it. We keep the ambiguity, because Paul does, and because the phrase reappears in the letter’s very last sentence (16:26) — the whole of Romans is bracketed by it.

⚠ “Called to be holy ones” (v7). Hagiois means “holy ones” — people set apart. English “saint” comes from Latin sanctus and now carries fifteen centuries of freight the Greek does not have: a canonised elite, a category of the exceptional dead. KJV, ASV, Douay and NIV all print “saints”; NWT reads “called to be holy ones,” which is tighter, and we follow it on the merits. Paul is addressing an ordinary mixed congregation of slaves, freedmen and householders, and calling every one of them the word.

He has never been there. Every other Pauline letter is written to people he converted; Romans is written to a congregation founded by somebody else — possibly by Jewish pilgrims who had been in Jerusalem at Pentecost. That single fact explains the shape of these verses: the flattery is careful (“your faith is being announced in the whole world”), the request is delicate, and in verse 12 he catches himself. He has just said he wants to give them a spiritual gift; then he adds, in effect, and be given one — “that we may be encouraged together… each by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.” The correction is the most attractive sentence in the paragraph.

“Given a good road.” Euodōthēsomai is literally “to be well-roaded” — eu, good, plus hodos, road — and it had already faded into meaning “to prosper.” But Paul is asking for a journey, so the buried image is awake here in a way it usually is not. KJV “I might have a prosperous journey”; ASV the same; TLB flattens the whole thing to “God willing.” ⚠ He gets his road, three years later and in chains, at government expense (Acts 27–28) — which the reader of Acts already knows and the writer of this sentence does not.

⚠ “To Greeks and to barbarians… I am a debtor.” Barbaros is onomatopoeia: to a Greek ear every foreign language sounded like bar-bar-bar, so a barbarian is simply someone whose speech you cannot parse. Paired with “wise and senseless,” the two phrases divide the entire human race twice over — by culture and by capacity — and Paul says he is in debt to all four groups. The metaphor is worth pausing on: he does not say he has a gift for them, he says he owes them money he has already been given for their account.

Everything before this is throat-clearing and everything after is argument. These two verses are the letter’s statement of theme, and they are among the most consequential sentences ever written in Greek. Every clause is load-bearing.

“I am not ashamed.” A litotes — understatement by denial — and pointed, given the address: the message is about a provincial executed by Roman authority in the most degrading way the empire had, and Paul is announcing it to the city that did the executing. ⚠ Textual note: the Byzantine tradition reads “the gospel of Christ,” and KJV and Geneva print it; the earliest manuscripts have simply “the gospel,” which is what the critical text and this translation follow.

“God’s power for salvation.” Dynamis — the word behind dynamite, though the explosive was named after the Greek and not the other way round, and preachers who reverse that are describing a nineteenth-century invention. In Greek it means capacity, the power to do a thing. And sōtēria was an everyday word before it was a religious one: rescue, deliverance, coming through something alive; it is what you call it when a doctor saves a patient or a general saves a city.

⚠ “To the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Not a courtesy. Prōton states an order of priority that the letter will spend chapters 9–11 defending, and it is also the plain sequence of Acts — the message goes to the synagogue in each city before it goes anywhere else. Two words here quietly set up the hardest question in the letter: if it went to the Jew first, what happened?

⚠ “God’s righteousness… from faith to faith.” Dikaiosynē theou is the single most argued-over phrase in the letter, and the argument is grammatical before it is theological. Is it a righteousness that belongs to God (his own covenant faithfulness, his putting-things-right); a righteousness that comes from God as a gift to human beings; or a righteousness that counts before God? Luther’s account of his own turn hangs on exactly this: he had read it as the righteousness by which God judges and hated the phrase, and then read it as the righteousness God gives — after which, he wrote, “I felt myself straightway born afresh and to have entered through the open doors into paradise itself.” The modern discussion has largely reopened the first option without abandoning the second. And ek pisteōs eis pistin, “from faith to faith,” has never been settled either: from God’s faithfulness to human faith, from one degree of faith to another, or simply faith from start to finish. We keep the Greek’s own economy and let the note carry the options.

⚠ The quotation is Habakkuk 2:4 — the verse this library flagged as a planted thread when it published Habakkuk 1, where the prophet climbs his watchtower to wait for an answer and the answer, in the next chapter, is this line. The Hebrew reads “the righteous will live by his emunah”, a word that means faithfulness, steadiness, reliability quite as much as belief; the Greek Paul quotes drops the pronoun, which is what lets the sentence be read the way he reads it. It is the New Testament’s most quoted verse (here, Galatians 3:11, Hebrews 10:38), and the sentence the Reformation was built on. Geneva and KJV print the famous form, “The just shall live by faith”; NWT “the righteous one will live by reason of faith.” ⚠ The Greek is ambiguous about where the phrase attaches — the righteous-by-faith will live, or the righteous will live-by-faith — and Paul may well be exploiting both.

“Is revealed” — twice, in consecutive sentences. Apokalyptetai, the verb behind apocalypse: to uncover, take the lid off. God’s righteousness is revealed in verse 17; God’s wrath is revealed in verse 18. Both are present tense, both are happening now, and the repetition is the hinge of the argument: the same act of uncovering shows two things at once.

“Hold the truth down.” Katechontōn — to hold fast, hold back, hold down. It is a physical picture: the truth is not absent, it is being pinned. KJV “who hold the truth in unrighteousness” is ambiguous in modern English (it can be read as possess); ASV “hinder the truth”; NIV and NWT both read “suppress.” We keep the wrestling image.

⚠ “His invisible things… are clearly seen.” A deliberate oxymoron — ta aorata, the un-seeable, kathoratai, is seen right through — and it is the single verse behind two thousand years of natural theology. The claim is modest as stated: what is visible is “his eternal power and divinity” (theiotēs, divine-ness, a quality) — and not, note, theotēs, deity itself, the stronger word Paul uses in Colossians 2:9. KJV prints “Godhead” for both and loses the distinction; ASV “divinity”; NWT “Godship.”

“Without a defense.” Anapologētous — the negative of apologia, the speech a defendant makes at his trial. Not “without excuse” in the sense of having no excuse handy: without a case. The courtroom is where this whole argument is going, and Paul has just told the jury there will be no defence speech.

“They became futile… their uncomprehending heart was darkened.” The sequence is precise and it is not primarily about morals: they knew, they did not honour or thank, and the consequence lands on the mind. Emataiōthēsan is built on mataios, empty, worthless — the word the Greek Old Testament uses for idols themselves. Chasing empties, they were emptied.

“Claiming to be wise, they were made fools.” Emōranthēsan — from mōros, the root of moron. The verb is passive: not “they became stupid” but “they were made stupid,” which in this paragraph has an agent. KJV “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” — one of the sentences that has survived intact into ordinary English.

⚠ “They exchanged the glory… for a likeness of an image.” Two things are happening at once here, and both are quotations. First, the sentence is lifted almost whole from Psalm 106:20 — “they exchanged their glory for the likeness of an ox that eats grass” — where the subject is Israel at Sinai, making the golden calf. The reader who catches it discovers that the indictment of the pagan world is being written in the vocabulary of Israel’s own worst day, which is exactly the trap chapter 2 is about to spring. Second, the list runs man — birds — four-footed animals — creeping things: the creature-order of Genesis 1 read in reverse, from the image of God back down to the things that crawl. It is a de-creation, and this library has met the pattern before — Zephaniah 1 opens by sweeping the same list off the ground. Man was made in an image; here he makes one, and it is a downgrade in four steps.

⚠ Paredōken — “gave them over” — occurs three times (verses 24, 26, 28), and the three occurrences are the skeleton of the paragraph. The verb is judicial: it is what a magistrate does when he hands a prisoner to the executioner. And it is the same verb used throughout the Gospels of Jesus being handed over — by Judas, by the priests, by Pilate — which is either a bleak accident of vocabulary or a deliberate one.

What the punishment IS. The structure of the sentence is worth seeing plainly: God does not answer the exchange by sending a disaster. He answers it by letting go. The penalty for wanting a thing more than God is being given the thing. It is the argument later made in the sentence about hell being locked from the inside, and it is here first.

“The truth of God for THE lie.” The Greek has the article — not a lie but the lie, one specific falsehood, which the previous verses have already named: worshipping the made thing instead of the maker. KJV “changed the truth of God into a lie” drops the article; ASV and NWT keep it. The verb, metēllaxan, is the strengthened form of the “exchanged” of verse 23 — a trade, made twice, and each time downward.

This is among the most argued-over paragraphs in the Bible, and the librarian’s job here is the same as everywhere else: report the words, report the readings and their pedigrees, and cast no vote. What follows is vocabulary first, then the positions.

The words. Paul does not use the ordinary social words for men and women (anēr, gynē) but the biological pair thēleiai and arsenes — “females” and “males” — which are the two words the Greek Old Testament uses in Genesis 1:27, “male and female he made them.” Chrēsis, “use,” was a standard term in Greek moral writing for sexual use. Para physin is “alongside/contrary to nature,” a phrase from Stoic ethics, common in Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo and Josephus on the same subject. ⚠ And Paul himself uses para physin once more in this letter — at 11:24, of God grafting a wild olive branch into a cultivated tree “contrary to nature” — which establishes that in his usage the phrase is not automatically a term of absolute moral condemnation. That is a datum, not an argument; both sides cite it.

The readings. The traditional and majority reading, held across the ancient church, the medieval West and East, the Reformers, and most churches today, takes the paragraph as a general judgment on same-sex sexual activity, grounded in the creation pattern the vocabulary evokes. A revisionist reading, argued since the later twentieth century, holds that the practices actually visible in Greco-Roman society were pederasty, the use of slaves, and cultic prostitution — and that the ancient world had no concept of a fixed sexual orientation, so that what Paul describes is exploitation and excess rather than the modern category. Against that it is pointed out that Paul’s terms are the plain biological ones rather than the age- or status-specific vocabulary Greek possessed, and that he includes women, which the pederasty framing does not cover. A further reading treats the whole paragraph as a description of idolatry’s consequences in stock Hellenistic-Jewish rhetoric rather than as free-standing legislation. These are the positions; the library does not adjudicate them.

⚠ What everybody agrees on, and almost nobody quotes. This paragraph is a rhetorical trap, and it is sprung eleven verses later. Paul is writing in the voice of standard Jewish preaching about Gentile decadence — the sort of thing his readers would nod along to — and the moment the nodding is loudest he turns: “Therefore you are without a defense, whoever you are who judges; for in what you judge the other you condemn yourself, since you who judge practise the same things” (2:1). The list is bait. Reading chapter 1 without chapter 2 is reading the set-up and walking out before the point.

The shelf. KJV “vile affections… that which is against nature… burned in their lust”; Douay “passions of ignominy”; ASV “vile passions”; NIV “shameful lusts”; NWT “disgraceful sexual appetites”; TLB abandons translation for paraphrase and expands the passage considerably beyond what the Greek says — a good illustration of why a paraphrase is a poor place to settle a disputed text. We render the terms flatly and leave the interpretation to the reader who owns it.

⚠ The pun is the point of verse 28. They did not approve (edokimasan — to test something and find it good) of keeping God in accurate knowledge; so God gave them over to an adokimon mind — an unapproved one, a mind that has been tested and failed. The word was used of counterfeit coin and of metal that does not pass assay. KJV “reprobate mind” carries the same idea through Latin; ASV “reprobate”; NWT “disapproved mental state.” Keeping approve in both halves is the only way to hear it in English, so that is what we do.

The vice list, and how it sounds. Twenty-one items, and the Greek is doing things English cannot quite follow. Verse 29 pairs phthonou phonou — envy, murder — two words that differ by one letter, a near-rhyme that pins the small sin to the large one. Verse 31 is a run of four words all built on the negating alpha: asynetous, asynthetous, astorgous, aneleēmonas. English can only get at that with a repeated preposition, so we read “without understanding, without agreement, without natural affection, without mercy” — four negatives in a row, which is the shape if not the sound. Astorgous is the sharpest of them: storgē is family affection, the love that does not have to be earned, and its absence is listed as a vice.

⚠ Textual note. The Byzantine tradition adds porneia, “fornication,” near the head of verse 29, and KJV and Geneva print it; the earliest manuscripts do not have it, and the critical text omits it. The list is long enough that a copyist adding one more is the easier accident to explain.

What is actually in the list. Worth reading slowly, because it is not what the paragraph’s reputation suggests. Of twenty-one items, the overwhelming majority are social and verbal — greed, envy, strife, deceit, whispering, slander, arrogance, boasting, disobedience to parents, breaking agreements, having no pity. Paul’s catalogue of a society that has let go of God is mostly a catalogue of people being unbearable to live near.

“Not only do them but also approve of those who practice them.” Syneudokousin — to consent with, take pleasure along with; the same verb Luke uses of a young man named Saul standing over Stephen’s coat pile and approving of his killing (Acts 8:1), which is a detail the writer of this sentence is unlikely to have forgotten. The climax of the indictment is not the doing. It is the applauding — the move from committing a thing to building a society that cheers it — and the verb is the same root as the approve pun four verses earlier, so the paragraph closes on the word it turned on.

⚠ And then the sentence that comes next. Romans has no chapter divisions — those were added by Stephen Langton around 1227 — and this one falls in a bad place. The next words are “Therefore you are without a defense, whoever you are who judges,” and they are aimed squarely at the reader who has just enjoyed the list. KJV “have pleasure in them that do them.” The chapter break lets people stop one verse early, and a great deal of the passage’s history has depended on their doing so.