Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text: Ideas
The customs, offices and ideas a first reader knew without being told, what each meant then, and the nearest thing you already know.
Greeks, barbarians and the nations
Greeks split humanity into Greeks and barbarians, people whose speech sounded like babble. Jews split it into Israel and the nations. Paul uses both maps.
To the people of the capital, everyone from the provinces sounded as if they were mumbling. Greeks divided the human race in two: Greeks, and everyone else, whom they called barbarians. They also tended to think of themselves as the wise ones. Jews had their own way of dividing the world: Israel, and the nations, or Gentiles. Jews often called the nations simply the Greeks, because so much of that world spoke Greek. When Paul says he owes the gospel to Greeks and barbarians, and to Jew and Greek, he is using both maps at once.
Greeks counted everyone else in the world barbarians, and usually thought of themselves as wise and others as foolish. Wright explains that the word probably came from the way other languages sounded to Greek ears, meaningless mumbling beside the music of Greek. To a true Greek even Latin-speaking Romans were barbarians. Some educated Jews classed themselves as Greeks, but Greeks still counted them barbarians. Jews divided the world differently, into Jews and the rest. They called the rest the nations, the Gentiles or sometimes the Greeks, since in Jewish eyes the wider world was a Greek-speaking one (Wright). The word for nations could exclude Israel or could mean peoples in general, Israel included. Jewish people regarded idolatry and sexual immorality as the marks of Gentile life. Greeks were the most anti-Jewish of peoples, Keener adds, so a gospel for both Jew and Greek was a gospel for everyone in between. On Malta the common people spoke Punic. Keener notes that Greeks used barbarian for any non-Greek speaker and did not expect kindness from such people. Wright and Bird write that Paul's new people was called from among Jews, Greeks, barbarians and anyone else, and was no longer defined by ethnicity.
An analogy: a capital city that calls everyone outside it provincials, and a minority faith that calls everyone outside it unbelievers. Someone who says he owes a debt to capital and provinces, insiders and outsiders alike, has refused both ways of sorting people.
Paul's debt to Greeks and barbarians in Romans 1:14 uses the Greek map of the world, and his Jew and Greek two verses later uses the Jewish one. The islanders of Acts 28:2 are barbarians only in the sense that they did not speak Greek. Colossians 3:11 names Greek and Jew, barbarian and Scythian among the distinctions that no longer rank people.
Not a matter of capital and provinces within one country. Barbarian put a person outside Greek speech and culture altogether, even a Latin-speaking Roman. The Jewish line between Israel and the nations ran by descent and worship, not by belief alone, and neither map sorted people by color.
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- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Romans 1:5-6, 1:14-15, 1:16 and 1:24-32, and on Acts 28:2
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on Romans 1:14 and 1:23
- N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One, comment on Romans 1:14-17
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World, ch. 16, A Primer on Pauline Theology, and ch. 20, Colossians, Philemon, and Ephesians
