It is often remarked that reading the New Testament epistles is like reading someone else’s mail. In a very fundamental way, that is not true, because the faith of the Church from the beginning was that these writings were for all Christians, not just the single congregations to which they were addresssed.
Nonetheless, this week’s text from Romans 16:1-16 conveys a heavy dose of the feeling that one is getting a peek into other people’s personal relationships. Paul names and greets a number of Christians in Rome. One question is how he knew so many people in a place which he had never visited. Yet some of them, like Prisca and Aquila, are clearly frequent travelers that Paul would have met elsewhere.
Another interesting question is why Paul felt it important to greet so many in Rome by name. Writing to other places like Corinth or Ephesus, places he had visited, he includes almost no personal greetings. There’s an almost inverse relationship. He greets by name writing to places he’s never been like Rome and Colassae, but hardly at all when writing those he met in person. N. T. Wright’s suggestion is that it’s the caution of any writer or speaker to people he knows well: if you mention one you have to mention everyone so as not to being playing favorites.
Not playing favorites may also be part of the motivation for exceptionally long list of names at the end of Romans. After Paul has talked about the need for acceptance and fellowship between the “strong” and the “weak” parties in Rome, he deliberately and even-handedly offers a hearty greeting to many people of both stripes.
Another fascinating aspect of this list of names is their grouping, sometimes clearly, sometimes deducible, by the “churches” or smaller assemblies in which they gathered for worship and fellowship there in Rome. A New Testament scholar friend tells me these groupings illustrate various social strata in Roman culture and demonstrate the diversity of the church from its inception. Jews, wealthy Romans, slaves, and freed slaves are all recognizable by the names they have. And women are named as prominent leaders, even an “apostle” among the early Christians.
And this personal touch of Paul’s also speaks how important is each member of the Body of Christ. Some of those named here we know nothing about other than their names. Yet they were witnesses and servants of the Lord and loved by God there in their own time and place. May we each remember how true that is of us and our fellow Christians today.