Romans, Epistle to the

Romans, Epistle to the, an epistle written from Corinth, in the year 59, by St. Paul to the Church at Rome to correct particularly two errors which he had learned the Church there had fallen into, on the part, on the one hand, of the Jewish Christians, that the Gentiles as such were not entitled to the same privileges as themselves, and, on the other hand, of the Gentile Christians, that the Jews by their rejection of Christ had excluded themselves from God's kingdom; and he wrote this epistle to show that the one had no more right to the grace of God than the other, and that this grace contemplates the final conversion of the Jews as well as the Gentiles. The great theme of this epistle is that faith in Christ is the one way of salvation for all mankind, Jew as well as Gentile, and its significance is this, that it contains if not the whole teaching of Paul, that essential part of it which presents and emphasises the all-sufficiency of this faith.

Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)