Interpretation of the Letter to the Romans [antikvár]

Introduction When I announced Szeged Biblical Conference 28 I hoped that we would be able to open up the whole panorama of the exegetic history of the Letter to the Romans. Unfortunately, however, the shortness of time and the abundance of the material did not make it possible to achieve this goal of ours. For this reason, and without the attempt of being exhaustive, I would like to give a short list of the more significant interpreters of Paul's Letter to the Romans and to refer briefly also to the ecclesiastical and cultural historical background to them. In his commentary on the Letter to the Remand Heinrich Schlier,^ an excellent Bible scholar appreciated in several confessions, lists the most significant commentators of this epistle systematically up until 1975. In the ancient Church, the interpretations of the Letter to the Romans by Saint Augustine of Hippo^ and by Origen of Alexandria'' were decisive for a very long time. Since Origen belonged to the Alexandrian school of exegetists, he was interested in not only the verbatim interpretation but also the hidden meaning. According to the tradition of his school, he wanted to summarize the essence of the holy scripts also by the use of philosophical concepts and he worked out a refined system of allegories. He made an attempt to make a system of his hermeneutical principles in his work entitled De principiis (around 240 AD); however, this work is permeated with the polemic against the Gnostics, and this becomes also one of the polemical clues to the interpretation of the Letter to the Romans. In the Middle Ages, the borders between the branches of theology were quite blurred and thus dogmatics, moral theology and especially the part of theology dealing with eschatology and the spirituality interpretation of the Bible were not sharply divided. In the Renaissance, the return to the Greek texts had already started and thus in the Catholic Church the interest towards the original text of the Bible also ' The author follows the literature of commentaries up until 1975: Saint Thomas Aquinas, M. Luther, J. Calvin, J. A. Bengal, W. M. L. De Wette, F. Delitzsch, A. E. Vil-mar, A. Bisping, J. T. Beck, F. Godet, R. Comely, B. Weiss, W. Sandaly, E. Kühl., K. Barth, Th. Zahn, O. Batdenhewer, Th. Haering, F. S. Guthjah, J. Sickenberger, ff. Lietz-mann, C. H. Dodd, M. J. Lagrange, J. Kürzinger, E. Gaugler, J. Huby, C. K. Barrett, F-J. Leenhardt, A. Nygren, O. Kuss, J. Murrayl, W. Boor, K.-H. SchelUe, H. W. Schmidt, V. Taylor, O. Michel, E. Best, R. L. Baúles, P. Althaus, E. Käsemann, R. Grosche. ^ Schlier, H.: Der Römerbrlief, Herder, 1977, 1979. ^ Epístola ad Romanos inchoatta exposotio ed Johannes Divják 1971. Commentarii in lepistolam ad Romanos MFC 74:773-856 its critical edition and German translation was published in Freiburg in 1990. 13