Technical post alert: I am using this space to work out and invite feedback on my response to Kevin Grasso’s response to Matthew Thiessen’s interpretation of Romans 2:28-29. Due to time constraints, I am going to drop right into an ongoing and fairly technical discussion of the syntax of Romans 2:28-29, which reads as follows:
28 οὐ γὰρ ὁ ἐν τῷ φανερῷ Ἰουδαῖός ἐστιν οὐδὲ ἡ ἐν τῷ φανερῷ ἐν σαρκὶ περιτομή, 29 ἀλλ’ ὁ ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ Ἰουδαῖος, καὶ περιτομὴ καρδίας ἐν πνεύματι οὐ γράμματι, οὗ ὁ ἔπαινος οὐκ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλ’ ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ.
Most English translations render Romans 2:28-29 much like the NRSVue does:
For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not the written code. Such a person receives praise not from humans but from God.
Those who translate the passage this way often conclude that Paul here redefines the term “Jew” as a reference to believers in Jesus regardless of their ethnicity.
In the fall of 2017, I was persuaded by Matthew Thiessen’s defense of a translation proposed earlier by Hans Arneson:
For it is not the outward Jew, nor the outward circumcision in the flesh, but the hidden Jew, and the circumcision of the heart in spirit and not in letter, whose praise [is] not from humans but from God.
I am not convinced by Thiessen’s larger argument that Rom 2:17-29 refers to a Gentile who calls himself a Jew, but Arneson’s translation seemed to offer a straightforward reading of a puzzling text, and to cohere well with a view that I find persuasive on other grounds: In this passage, Paul is not redefining who is and who is not a “Jew”; he is stating which Jews receive praise from God.
I offered a variation on the Thiessen - Arneson translation when I taught Romans in the fall of 2017, 2019, and 2021, and I would have been happy to continue doing so if Kevin Grasso had not argued on linguistic grounds that the Thiessen - Arneson translation is untenable. Here is my summary of Grasso’s argument:
(1) The negative particle οὐ at the beginning of verse 28 must negate what immediately follows. If the verb were negated, as required by Arneson's translation, the negative particle should come immediately before the verb ἐστιν rather than before ὁ ἐν τῷ φανερῷ Ἰουδαῖός. (2) The verb ἐστιν in verse 28 requires a predicate not just the dummy subject “it is,” and the relative clause that Arneson assigns to the verb as its predicate (a) is too far away at the very end of verse 29, (b) never appears as a predicate when it is used as a relative pronoun in the Greek New Testament and, (c) outside the NT, the relative pronoun οὗ always occurs before the verb when it is used as a predicate. (3) The linguistic principle of contrastive focus leads us to expect a positive statement in 29a corresponding to the negation in v. 28.
(You can watch Grasso’s own explanation on YouTube or read it in this Biblingo blog post.)
As a result, Grasso concludes, we have to take verses 28 and 29 as two contrasting statements about who, according to Paul, is a “Jew.” Grasso offers this translation:
“For it is not the outward one who is a Jew, nor is it the outward one in the flesh that is circumcision, but the one in secret is a Jew, and circumcision is circumcision of the heart by the spirit, not the letter, whose praise is not from humans, but from God.”
I find Grasso’s argument mostly compelling ... with one major exception. According to Grasso, the relative clause, “whose praise is not from humans, but from God” (οὗ ὁ ἔπαινος οὐκ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλʼ ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ), “is best taken as ... describing the internal Jew”:
The assertion of the clause is not ‘It is the internal Jew whose praise is from God.’ Rather, the assertion is ‘The internal one (or Jew), whose praise is from God, is a Jew.'
My question has to do with the word order of the Greek text. Grasso concludes that the relative clause should go with “the internal one” and not with “Jew,” but he does not explain why the antecedent of the relative pronoun, οὗ, is ὁ ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ (“the internal one” or “the one in secret”) and not Ἰουδαῖος (“Jew”).
I suggest that the antecedent is more likely to be Ἰουδαῖος (“Jew”), the word that follows ὁ ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ, and which Grasso — correctly, I think — takes as the predicate of the verbless clause, ὁ ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ Ἰουδαῖος (“the one in secret is a Jew”).
This way, we have a parallel structure in vv. 28 and 29, with Ἰουδαῖος standing in predicate position in both verses:
28 οὐ γὰρ ὁ ἐν τῷ φανερῷ Ἰουδαῖός ἐστιν / For not the one in the open is a Jew ...
29 ἀλλ’ ὁ ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ Ἰουδαῖος, / but the one in secret [is a] Jew.
(Scholars who argue that Ἰουδαῖος is the subject in v. 28 and the predicate in v. 29 are influenced by the requirements of modern German and English translation more than by Greek syntax.)
Since the relative pronoun is more likely to refer back to its nearest antecedent, the final relative clause “whose praise is not from humans, but from God” (οὗ ὁ ἔπαινος οὐκ ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλʼ ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ) will qualify what Paul means by “Jew”: Paul is not speaking of Jews in general but of those who receive praise from God.
The repetition of “Jew” as the predicate in both verses suggests that it qualifies the assertions in both: The only Jews who will receive praise from God, according to Paul, are those who, as verse 29 explains in the clause I have skipped, are circumcised in the heart not merely in the flesh. (I take the contrast between the spirit and letter in v. 29 as a rhetorical rather than an absolute opposition. Paul is not denying that one physically circumcised can be circumcised in the heart.)
In then end, then, Thiessen is still correct to claim that “The central focus of Rom 2:28-29 is the praise of God, not true Jewishness or true circumcision” (2014: 377). With John Barclay, I take it that Paul is not redefining Jewishness as a category that now includes Gentile Christians rather than ethnic Jews. Paul’s point instead is that Jews who receive praise from God are those who have been circumcised in the heart not merely in the flesh.
Further Reading:
