In the epistle of Romans, the Apostle Paul declares that, through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, God bared his holy arm before the nations and wrought salvation in fulfilment of his promises. This gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. It delivers the Jews from the condemnation of the Torah they were under and Gentiles from their state of exclusion, grafting them into the one people of God, in which they share in the spiritual blessings of Israel.
Yet at the heart of this glorious declaration of God’s work of salvation lie troubling questions of divine faithfulness. For while the gospel is making inroads among the Gentiles under the ministry of Paul and others, the Messiah has largely been rejected by his own people.
Paul recognizes the troubling force of this challenge, appreciating that its import is theodical. If the Jews have been cast off or stumbled so as to fall completely—as the situation might appear to some—then the very character of the covenant-keeping God is thrown into doubt and a dark shadow is cast over the gospel itself.
How can the stumbling of Israel be squared with God’s covenant commitment to his people? Paul begins to answer this by presenting himself, a Benjaminite descendant of Abraham, as proof that God has not in fact rejected his people Israel (11:1). As in the days of Elijah, God has reserved a chosen remnant of grace in his day (11:2-5).
How can the conversion of the Gentiles and the stumbling of Israel fit into God’s purposes? Paul denies that the stumbling of Israel occurred in order that they might fall, but rather happened in order that the Gentiles might be included and that, through their inclusion, Israel might be made jealous (11:11). Paul believes that his own ministry as the apostle to the Gentiles is involved in God’s purpose in this regard.
He employs the image of an olive tree with natural branches cut off and wild branches grafted in to illustrate the situation. The wild branches are grafted in contrary to nature, contrasting with the natural branches, which, even if broken off, could easily be grafted in again. The wild branches grafted in enjoy their place by a sort of double grace—not only are they supported by the root, as the natural branches are, but their very inclusion in the tree is solely by virtue of a radical act of gracious ingrafting.
Paul cautions Gentile believers not to vaunt themselves over the natural branches, knowing that the natural branches enjoyed by nature some sort of title to God’s covenant riches that they never possessed. As graciously adopted children in the family of the covenant they ought to act in a manner that provokes jealousy in the wayward natural sons, faithful Gentiles manifesting the riches that the Jews rejected (privileges enumerated in 9:4-5).
Just before his argument erupts into in its doxological crescendo, Paul declares a divinely established symmetry between the deliverance of Gentiles from their formerly unbelieving state and the mysterious act by which, through the mercy shown to Gentiles, Israel itself might be shown the most remarkable mercy (Romans 11:30-32).
Christians have differed in how they have made sense of Paul’s argument in Romans 11, arguably the crux text for discussions of the future of Israel. The question of the identity of the ‘all Israel’ of verse 26 that will be saved is one that serves to manifest much of the range of different readings that are on offer.
A minority of interpreters, John Calvin and N.T. Wright among them, have identified ‘all Israel’ in verse 26 as the ‘Jew-plus-Gentile people of God in Christ.’ Others, like William Hendriksen, have argued that it refers to the full complement of Israel’s remnant elect, who alone constitute true Israel. The ‘fulness’ of Israel (verse 12) refers to the complete number of the various remnants of elect Israelites over the centuries, not any more general salvation of the people of Israel. In both these positions, national Israel mostly disappears. This, it seems to me, introduces serious problems into Paul’s argument, as it is precisely the question of God’s commitment to his promises to national Israel that is at issue. The remnant may serve as an assurance that God isn’t finished with national Israel yet, but by themselves they certainly do not constitute a fulfilment of his commitment to the Jewish people.
Devolving all old covenant promises onto the Messiah—along the lines that Pastor Jeff Meyers suggests—seems to get God off the hook with a technicality, undermining the very logic of the Messiah’s representation. For God to strip the olive tree of almost all of its natural branches and repopulate it with grafted wild branches instead raises serious questions about the tree’s continued identity. Even if we maintain that the Messiah is the root of the olive tree, bearing all of the branches, the olive tree is not reducible to its root, much as the body of Christ isn’t reducible to its head. The identity of Israel can be focused upon and borne by the Messiah, but it cannot simply be alienated onto the Messiah. As Paul says in the context, ‘the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.’
Indeed, Paul’s claim in verse 15 suggests the most startling homology between the Messiah and the nation of Israel, even in its state of rejection: the rejection of Israel is the ‘reconciliation of the world’ and their acceptance would mean ‘life from the dead’. The story of the Messiah, cast away for the reconciliation of the world, is recapitulated in his people according to the flesh: just as the Messiah was raised from death, so must Israel be. And, when they are, it will mean resurrection.
The symmetries with Paul’s statement in 5:10 (‘For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life’) must be noted here. Just as Gentiles were reconciled by the death of the Messiah, so they were reconciled on account of the rejection of Israel. Just as we were loved while enemies, so Israel is still now beloved, even though they are enemies of the gospel. The people of Israel still have a part to play in redemptive history, a part to which the deep narrative logic of their national story determinedly gestures forward.
James Jordan, in ‘The Future of Israel Reconsidered: Another Look at Romans 11’ (Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper 18, August 1994), presents a biblical case for the claim that Paul’s argument in Romans 11 relates to a future (for him) large scale conversion of Jews to Christ, which occurred immediately prior to the destruction of Israel in AD70. This interpretation depends heavily upon a specific preterist reading of Revelation and appeals to the supposed implications of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 for Israel’s national identity and the Jew-Gentile bipolarity—Israel’s covenant history is over and the ‘True Israel’ of the Jew-Gentile people of God takes her place. In Revelation 11 there is a recapitulation of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ in the two witnesses, after which the rest of the city gives glory to God (11:13), in which Jordan sees the fulfilment of Romans 11:25ff. The national story of Israel supposedly meets its end as if with one final burst of water from a sputtering spigot before slowing to the smallest trickle of individuals.
As Tim Gallant points out, there are several problems with this reading.[1] One relatively minor objection is that it restricts the converted Jews to the city of Jerusalem, excluding from consideration the overwhelming majority of Jews who were elsewhere in Israel, or in the Diaspora. It also rests almost entirely upon a novel reading of Revelation 11, while lacking any external confirmatory evidence for its truly remarkable claims, claims that must bear all the weight of the exalted language and expectation of Romans 11—the ‘banishing of ungodliness from Jacob’, the salvation of ‘all Israel’ and their ‘fulness’, a more exceeding blessing for the world than their trespass that brought salvation to the Gentiles, etc.
The destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 is an event of epochal significance in New Testament theology, representing the decisive end to the old age with its covenantal order and the full establishment of the new covenant age. The shadow of this event lies over the entirety of the New Testament. Like Jordan, my reading of Revelation is essentially a preterist one. I also share Gavin D’Costa’s concern that we resist notions of a dual covenant—even though Jews and Gentiles stand in differing relation to it, there is only one olive tree and Gentiles now participate in the spiritual blessings of Israel (cf. Romans 15:27; Ephesians 2:11-22).
AD70 has ramifications for Israel’s continuing identity, an identity which—even if it isn’t simply alienated from them as some suppose—can only be fulfilled in their rejected Messiah. Nevertheless, this neither abolishes nor straightforwardly ‘secularizes’ their peoplehood. There is such an abundance of biblical prophecy and promise concerning Israel in both the Old and New Testaments that must either be ignored or spiritualized away in order to accomplish this.
Besides all of this, the troubling questions of theodicy and narrative continuity that Paul wrestles with in Romans and elsewhere are greatly exacerbated by supersessionist positions. Promises whose relation to fulfilments—fulfilments divorced from any natural reading of the promises in question—can only be grasped in terms of highly involved hermeneutical systems and theological frameworks are appropriately viewed with suspicion, as are those who make them. When God claims, for instance, that the ‘offspring of Israel’ will not cease from being a nation before him forever (Jeremiah 31:35-37), to interpret these words as a reference to the Church is greatly to strain both the text and the credulity of its readers and to raise unsettling concerns, if not about the truthfulness of God’s promises, at least about their clarity. If God has already fulfilled the word of Romans 11, it seems as though, relative to what the text might have led us to expect—a dramatic, glorious, and climactic revelation of the greatness of God’s mercy and wisdom in the fulness of time—it was somewhat of a damp squib.
Likewise, when Israel’s national history is presumed to have reached its terminus in the destruction of Jerusalem or AD70, save to the degree that it was transposed into the story of the Church, much of the narrative energy and many of the driving concerns of the Old Testament must simply be abandoned after the advent of Christ. As Gentile Christians we are the children of Abraham (Romans 4), vitally connected to the story of Israel (1 Corinthians 10:1-11), sharers in their spiritual blessings (Romans 15:27), and one new Jew-Gentile people in Christ (Ephesians 2:11-22), in whom the Jew-Gentile opposition is no longer determinative of covenant membership. Such convictions, against the distortions of movements such as dispensationalism, can excite our crucial recognition that the Old Testament is a word that addresses us in Christ. However, there are dangers lying in the other direction here: of spiritualizing the Old Testament away from the obstinate particularity of Christ’s people ‘according to the flesh,’ as Gerry McDermott has highlighted.
In presuming that we already know how the story of Israel ends, we are in considerable danger of reading Scripture inattentively, unalert to the many threads of the story of Israel—in Old and New Testaments—that are still loose, waiting to be tied up. One of the salutary effects of adopting a reading of the New Testament’s teaching concerning Israel, the New Covenant, the Church, and the future that doesn’t presume that all the loose ends are sewn up in Christ’s first advent may be a greater attentiveness to the many suggestive details and unresolved narrative threads in the Scripture.
For instance, Luke gives us several details that anticipate a restoration of Israel that does not seem to have yet occurred. In the Olivet Discourse, for instance, Jesus prophesies the judgment of AD70, but also indicates events beyond that: “They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24).[2] The similarity of the last clause of this statement with Romans 11:25 should be noted. In 22:30, Jesus promises the apostles that they will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, suggesting the probability of Israel having some role to play in the future.
Even after the death and resurrection of Christ, the apostles want to know when the kingdom will be restored to Israel (Acts 1:6) and present Jesus to the Jews as the Messiah ‘appointed for them’ who will fulfill the promise of the great Prophet whom Israel will hear (3:19-26). The expectation of the restoration of Israel and the dramatic surprise of its non-occurrence is a crucial driving theme of Acts: the book begins with the question of the time of Israel’s restoration and ends with the judgment of Isaiah 6:9-10 (Acts 28:23-28).[3] Acts begins with similar themes to 1 Kings—a departing David, the establishment of officers in the new regime, a gift of the Spirit of wisdom, and the building of a temple—and ends on a similar note as 2 Kings, with decisive judgment on Israel and a Jewish remnant in exile at the heart of a Gentile empire which destroys Jerusalem, with their former imprisonment somewhat relieved and kind treatment from the nations.
The open-endedness of Acts remains today: the exile of Israel still hasn’t been truly ended. However, the restoration of the nation of Israel—after the remarkable preservation of the Jews through centuries of oppression and pressures that have destroyed countless other peoples—may be a little cloud the size of a man’s hand rising from the sea. This indeed is a remarkable event that has occurred in the sight of all the nations, of such magnitude that many have been led to reconsider former opinions. Like Gerry McDermott, I was also once a supersessionist, yet believe that the re-evaluation of the place of Israel is a task facing the Church today, a task that promises both a deeper understanding of who we are and of the meaning of the Holy Scriptures.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Tim Gallant, ‘Judah’s Life from the Dead: The Gospel of Romans 11’ in The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 37ff. I highly recommend that people read Gallant’s longer treatment of Romans 11:26.
[2] In Matthew’s account, Jesus seems to anticipate a future coming in which he will be welcomed by Jerusalem (23:39).
[3] This, in turn, sets up questions that animate the book of Romans.
In the epistle of Romans, the Apostle Paul declares that, through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, God bared his holy arm before the nations and wrought salvation in fulfilment of his promises. This gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. It delivers the Jews from the condemnation of the Torah they were under and Gentiles from their state of exclusion, grafting them into the one people of God, in which they share in the spiritual blessings of Israel.
Yet at the heart of this glorious declaration of God’s work of salvation lie troubling questions of divine faithfulness. For while the gospel is making inroads among the Gentiles under the ministry of Paul and others, the Messiah has largely been rejected by his own people.
Paul recognizes the troubling force of this challenge, appreciating that its import is theodical. If the Jews have been cast off or stumbled so as to fall completely—as the situation might appear to some—then the very character of the covenant-keeping God is thrown into doubt and a dark shadow is cast over the gospel itself.
How can the stumbling of Israel be squared with God’s covenant commitment to his people? Paul begins to answer this by presenting himself, a Benjaminite descendant of Abraham, as proof that God has not in fact rejected his people Israel (11:1). As in the days of Elijah, God has reserved a chosen remnant of grace in his day (11:2-5).
How can the conversion of the Gentiles and the stumbling of Israel fit into God’s purposes? Paul denies that the stumbling of Israel occurred in order that they might fall, but rather happened in order that the Gentiles might be included and that, through their inclusion, Israel might be made jealous (11:11). Paul believes that his own ministry as the apostle to the Gentiles is involved in God’s purpose in this regard.
He employs the image of an olive tree with natural branches cut off and wild branches grafted in to illustrate the situation. The wild branches are grafted in contrary to nature, contrasting with the natural branches, which, even if broken off, could easily be grafted in again. The wild branches grafted in enjoy their place by a sort of double grace—not only are they supported by the root, as the natural branches are, but their very inclusion in the tree is solely by virtue of a radical act of gracious ingrafting.
Paul cautions Gentile believers not to vaunt themselves over the natural branches, knowing that the natural branches enjoyed by nature some sort of title to God’s covenant riches that they never possessed. As graciously adopted children in the family of the covenant they ought to act in a manner that provokes jealousy in the wayward natural sons, faithful Gentiles manifesting the riches that the Jews rejected (privileges enumerated in 9:4-5).
Just before his argument erupts into in its doxological crescendo, Paul declares a divinely established symmetry between the deliverance of Gentiles from their formerly unbelieving state and the mysterious act by which, through the mercy shown to Gentiles, Israel itself might be shown the most remarkable mercy (Romans 11:30-32).
Christians have differed in how they have made sense of Paul’s argument in Romans 11, arguably the crux text for discussions of the future of Israel. The question of the identity of the ‘all Israel’ of verse 26 that will be saved is one that serves to manifest much of the range of different readings that are on offer.
A minority of interpreters, John Calvin and N.T. Wright among them, have identified ‘all Israel’ in verse 26 as the ‘Jew-plus-Gentile people of God in Christ.’ Others, like William Hendriksen, have argued that it refers to the full complement of Israel’s remnant elect, who alone constitute true Israel. The ‘fulness’ of Israel (verse 12) refers to the complete number of the various remnants of elect Israelites over the centuries, not any more general salvation of the people of Israel. In both these positions, national Israel mostly disappears. This, it seems to me, introduces serious problems into Paul’s argument, as it is precisely the question of God’s commitment to his promises to national Israel that is at issue. The remnant may serve as an assurance that God isn’t finished with national Israel yet, but by themselves they certainly do not constitute a fulfilment of his commitment to the Jewish people.
Devolving all old covenant promises onto the Messiah—along the lines that Pastor Jeff Meyers suggests—seems to get God off the hook with a technicality, undermining the very logic of the Messiah’s representation. For God to strip the olive tree of almost all of its natural branches and repopulate it with grafted wild branches instead raises serious questions about the tree’s continued identity. Even if we maintain that the Messiah is the root of the olive tree, bearing all of the branches, the olive tree is not reducible to its root, much as the body of Christ isn’t reducible to its head. The identity of Israel can be focused upon and borne by the Messiah, but it cannot simply be alienated onto the Messiah. As Paul says in the context, ‘the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.’
Indeed, Paul’s claim in verse 15 suggests the most startling homology between the Messiah and the nation of Israel, even in its state of rejection: the rejection of Israel is the ‘reconciliation of the world’ and their acceptance would mean ‘life from the dead’. The story of the Messiah, cast away for the reconciliation of the world, is recapitulated in his people according to the flesh: just as the Messiah was raised from death, so must Israel be. And, when they are, it will mean resurrection.
The symmetries with Paul’s statement in 5:10 (‘For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life’) must be noted here. Just as Gentiles were reconciled by the death of the Messiah, so they were reconciled on account of the rejection of Israel. Just as we were loved while enemies, so Israel is still now beloved, even though they are enemies of the gospel. The people of Israel still have a part to play in redemptive history, a part to which the deep narrative logic of their national story determinedly gestures forward.
James Jordan, in ‘The Future of Israel Reconsidered: Another Look at Romans 11’ (Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper 18, August 1994), presents a biblical case for the claim that Paul’s argument in Romans 11 relates to a future (for him) large scale conversion of Jews to Christ, which occurred immediately prior to the destruction of Israel in AD70. This interpretation depends heavily upon a specific preterist reading of Revelation and appeals to the supposed implications of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 for Israel’s national identity and the Jew-Gentile bipolarity—Israel’s covenant history is over and the ‘True Israel’ of the Jew-Gentile people of God takes her place. In Revelation 11 there is a recapitulation of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ in the two witnesses, after which the rest of the city gives glory to God (11:13), in which Jordan sees the fulfilment of Romans 11:25ff. The national story of Israel supposedly meets its end as if with one final burst of water from a sputtering spigot before slowing to the smallest trickle of individuals.
As Tim Gallant points out, there are several problems with this reading.[1] One relatively minor objection is that it restricts the converted Jews to the city of Jerusalem, excluding from consideration the overwhelming majority of Jews who were elsewhere in Israel, or in the Diaspora. It also rests almost entirely upon a novel reading of Revelation 11, while lacking any external confirmatory evidence for its truly remarkable claims, claims that must bear all the weight of the exalted language and expectation of Romans 11—the ‘banishing of ungodliness from Jacob’, the salvation of ‘all Israel’ and their ‘fulness’, a more exceeding blessing for the world than their trespass that brought salvation to the Gentiles, etc.
The destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 is an event of epochal significance in New Testament theology, representing the decisive end to the old age with its covenantal order and the full establishment of the new covenant age. The shadow of this event lies over the entirety of the New Testament. Like Jordan, my reading of Revelation is essentially a preterist one. I also share Gavin D’Costa’s concern that we resist notions of a dual covenant—even though Jews and Gentiles stand in differing relation to it, there is only one olive tree and Gentiles now participate in the spiritual blessings of Israel (cf. Romans 15:27; Ephesians 2:11-22).
AD70 has ramifications for Israel’s continuing identity, an identity which—even if it isn’t simply alienated from them as some suppose—can only be fulfilled in their rejected Messiah. Nevertheless, this neither abolishes nor straightforwardly ‘secularizes’ their peoplehood. There is such an abundance of biblical prophecy and promise concerning Israel in both the Old and New Testaments that must either be ignored or spiritualized away in order to accomplish this.
Besides all of this, the troubling questions of theodicy and narrative continuity that Paul wrestles with in Romans and elsewhere are greatly exacerbated by supersessionist positions. Promises whose relation to fulfilments—fulfilments divorced from any natural reading of the promises in question—can only be grasped in terms of highly involved hermeneutical systems and theological frameworks are appropriately viewed with suspicion, as are those who make them. When God claims, for instance, that the ‘offspring of Israel’ will not cease from being a nation before him forever (Jeremiah 31:35-37), to interpret these words as a reference to the Church is greatly to strain both the text and the credulity of its readers and to raise unsettling concerns, if not about the truthfulness of God’s promises, at least about their clarity. If God has already fulfilled the word of Romans 11, it seems as though, relative to what the text might have led us to expect—a dramatic, glorious, and climactic revelation of the greatness of God’s mercy and wisdom in the fulness of time—it was somewhat of a damp squib.
Likewise, when Israel’s national history is presumed to have reached its terminus in the destruction of Jerusalem or AD70, save to the degree that it was transposed into the story of the Church, much of the narrative energy and many of the driving concerns of the Old Testament must simply be abandoned after the advent of Christ. As Gentile Christians we are the children of Abraham (Romans 4), vitally connected to the story of Israel (1 Corinthians 10:1-11), sharers in their spiritual blessings (Romans 15:27), and one new Jew-Gentile people in Christ (Ephesians 2:11-22), in whom the Jew-Gentile opposition is no longer determinative of covenant membership. Such convictions, against the distortions of movements such as dispensationalism, can excite our crucial recognition that the Old Testament is a word that addresses us in Christ. However, there are dangers lying in the other direction here: of spiritualizing the Old Testament away from the obstinate particularity of Christ’s people ‘according to the flesh,’ as Gerry McDermott has highlighted.
In presuming that we already know how the story of Israel ends, we are in considerable danger of reading Scripture inattentively, unalert to the many threads of the story of Israel—in Old and New Testaments—that are still loose, waiting to be tied up. One of the salutary effects of adopting a reading of the New Testament’s teaching concerning Israel, the New Covenant, the Church, and the future that doesn’t presume that all the loose ends are sewn up in Christ’s first advent may be a greater attentiveness to the many suggestive details and unresolved narrative threads in the Scripture.
For instance, Luke gives us several details that anticipate a restoration of Israel that does not seem to have yet occurred. In the Olivet Discourse, for instance, Jesus prophesies the judgment of AD70, but also indicates events beyond that: “They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24).[2] The similarity of the last clause of this statement with Romans 11:25 should be noted. In 22:30, Jesus promises the apostles that they will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, suggesting the probability of Israel having some role to play in the future.
Even after the death and resurrection of Christ, the apostles want to know when the kingdom will be restored to Israel (Acts 1:6) and present Jesus to the Jews as the Messiah ‘appointed for them’ who will fulfill the promise of the great Prophet whom Israel will hear (3:19-26). The expectation of the restoration of Israel and the dramatic surprise of its non-occurrence is a crucial driving theme of Acts: the book begins with the question of the time of Israel’s restoration and ends with the judgment of Isaiah 6:9-10 (Acts 28:23-28).[3] Acts begins with similar themes to 1 Kings—a departing David, the establishment of officers in the new regime, a gift of the Spirit of wisdom, and the building of a temple—and ends on a similar note as 2 Kings, with decisive judgment on Israel and a Jewish remnant in exile at the heart of a Gentile empire which destroys Jerusalem, with their former imprisonment somewhat relieved and kind treatment from the nations.
The open-endedness of Acts remains today: the exile of Israel still hasn’t been truly ended. However, the restoration of the nation of Israel—after the remarkable preservation of the Jews through centuries of oppression and pressures that have destroyed countless other peoples—may be a little cloud the size of a man’s hand rising from the sea. This indeed is a remarkable event that has occurred in the sight of all the nations, of such magnitude that many have been led to reconsider former opinions. Like Gerry McDermott, I was also once a supersessionist, yet believe that the re-evaluation of the place of Israel is a task facing the Church today, a task that promises both a deeper understanding of who we are and of the meaning of the Holy Scriptures.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Tim Gallant, ‘Judah’s Life from the Dead: The Gospel of Romans 11’ in The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 37ff. I highly recommend that people read Gallant’s longer treatment of Romans 11:26.
[2] In Matthew’s account, Jesus seems to anticipate a future coming in which he will be welcomed by Jerusalem (23:39).
[3] This, in turn, sets up questions that animate the book of Romans.
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