Thanks for the review.

I am presently doing a translation and (simplistic) commentary on Romans. I do however have a full time paying job and a family with 4 young children so it is a slow process.

This is what I wrote on one of the passages you quoted above.

2.14

For when gentiles who by nature don’t have the law, do what the law requires, these, although without the law, are their own law.

Paul is talking here about the proselytes, non-Jews who, throughout the Greek and Roman world, had accepted the tenets of Judaism. Most translations get this wrong and put the ‘by nature’ in the second phrase thus “For when gentiles who don’t have the law, do by nature the things of the law…” It should be obvious that no one in the world keeps the law by nature, whether it be the ancient Mosaic law or any other law. You keep the law either because you are compelled to for fear of punishment or by choice because you accept that it is useful. Paul is specifically talking about the Mosaic law here, the Jewish law; he is simply using the example of the gentile proselytes to illustrate the principle that you need to do more than just hear the law. In other words, the proselytes are not officially Jews but the law is active in their lives. Many had accepted it because it provided a moral light which was lacking almost everywhere else in the Roman empire. And it was mainly to these that Paul preached the Gospel and who became the backbone of the new church outside Palestine.

2.15

They are the kind of people who show that they have committed themselves to the purpose of the law,

But not the literal “the law is written on their hearts” because that phrase tends to mean ‘instinctively’ or ‘by nature’ in modern English.

‘Written on the heart’ in Biblical use refers to a positive, free commitment.

such that their consciences witness within them as to the rightness or wrongness of their various thoughts.

The law which they have adopted thus becomes a guiding moral light for them. It can therefore be as much a pain as a pleasure to them but at least they have accepted to live by it and the sacrifice that that entails. Paul speaks specifically of the dilemma of living by the law in chapter 7. One of the shameful consequences of the mistranslations referred to in vss. 14 and 15 above is that they condone the idea that the gentiles are able to keep the law without ever being taught what that law is, in other words they are born with a conscience and superior intellect that enables them to know the difference between right and wrong, but that the Jews do not have such an inbuilt conscience or enhanced intellect and therefore need a written law to educate them as to the nature of morality. This is a subtle anti-Semitism, which has existed in the church for many centuries and represents a complete turn around from the issue Paul himself had to deal with, which was that the Jews were anti-gentile and therefore excessively proud. The church moved away from the anti-gentile but to the equally proud anti-Jew prejudice when it lost its roots in Palestine and adopted mainly Greek thought processes.

Unfortunately, if Paul’s meaning is corrupted at this point, the entire message of Romans will be compromised. The fairness and impartiality of God, which for Paul is the bedrock of his faith and his teaching, will have been turned into its diametric opposite and it will be possible to believe things about God which are in reality evilly unfair, but as though they were fair things. This is particularly the case in chapter 9.