Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary
Greet One Another
Romans 16:3-16
3 Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, · WEB
Twenty-six people are greeted by name in a city Paul has never visited, and the list is a portrait of the church nobody planted.
Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their own necks for my life.
The longest greeting list in Paul's letters, and it is written to a city he has never entered — twenty-six people named, with households and clusters besides. The roads and expulsions of the empire had scattered his friends ahead of him, and the list is his map of them.
It is worth walking slowly, because it is a portrait of the actual early church. Prisca and Aquila first — tentmakers, hosts, teachers, who risked their own necks, with a church in their house Romans 16:5. Epaenetus, the first fruits of Achaia — a man remembered as a region's first believer. Mary, who labored much for us; Tryphaena and Tryphosa, who labor in the Lord; Persis who labored much — the labor-verb, Paul's own word for ministry toil, given four times and every time to women.
Andronicus and Junia — my relatives and my fellow prisoners, who are notable among the apostles, who were also in Christ before me Romans 16:7: kin of Paul, jailed with him, distinguished among the sent-out ones in the word's wider sense, and believers while Saul was still persecuting — their faith older than his.
Rufus, the chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine — a woman who had mothered the apostle somewhere on the roads, remembered with a son whose name a Gospel keeps as a Cyrenian's boy. Households of Aristobulus and Narcissus — names that fit great Roman houses, believers among their slaves and staff. Two clusters of five names with the brothers who are with them — house-meetings glimpsed whole Romans 16:14–15.
The sociology is the sermon: Jewish and Greek and Latin names, slaves' names and patrons' names, women and men, prisoners and householders — chapter 12's one-body doctrine Romans 12:5 printed as a directory. Nobody planted this church; travelers carried the gospel to the capital and it took root in kitchens and workshops.
And the section closes with the command that turns a list into an embrace: greet one another with a holy kiss. The assemblies of Christ greet you Romans 16:16 — the scattered house churches of Rome kissing across their thresholds, and the churches of the whole east, through Paul's pen, greeting the capital they had never seen.
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