N. T. “Tom” Wright has just released another paradigm-shifting book suggesting a new, more scriptural way of understanding the atonement, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. Wright delves deeply into how the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus accomplish our salvation.
A Re-translation
In most of the previous posts, I’ve offered a revised or annotated translation of the text. I thought it would be interesting — and perhaps even helpful — to accumulate these into a single text.
Unlike the earlier translations, I’ll not show the changes in brackets except where I’m not just translating but also explaining outside the text.
And I hasten to add that this is my own translation, based on my understanding of Wright but not at all the same as his own translation The Kingdom New Testament (which can be bought at Amazon).
Romans chapter 6, modified from the NET Bible translation
1 What shall we say then? Are we to remain under Sin’s dominion so that grace may increase? 2 Absolutely not! How can we who died to the dominion of Sin still live in it?
3 Or do you not know that as many as were immersed into King Jesus were immersed into his death on the cross? 4 Therefore we Christians have been buried with him through immersion into his death, so that just as our King was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new, immortal life. 5 For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be united in the likeness of his resurrection. 6 We know that our old Adamic nature — a nature controlled by Sin and merely mortal — was crucified with our King so that Sin would no longer reign over us, so that we would no longer be enslaved to Sin. 7 (For someone who has died has been freed from the reign of Sin.)
8 Now if we died with the King, we have faith/trust that we will also live with him. 9 We know that since the King has been raised from the dead, he is never going to die again; Death no longer has mastery over him. 10 For the death he died, he died to Sin once for all time and all with faith, but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11 So you too consider yourselves dead to Sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let Sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires, 13 and do not present your members to Sin as instruments to be used contrary to our covenants with God, but present yourselves to God as those who are promised immortality, and your members to God as instruments to be used for covenant faithfulness. 14 For Sin will have no mastery over you, because you are not under the Torah but under grace.
15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under Torah but under grace? Absolutely not! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, either of Sin resulting in Death, that is, having no hope of immortality, or obedience to King Jesus resulting in not only being considered faithful to the covenant but growing in actual faithfulness 17 But thanks be to God that though you were slaves to Sin, you obeyed King Jesus from the heart that pattern of teaching you were entrusted to when you were baptized, that is, your commitment to live as Jesus lived, 18 and having been freed from Sin, you became enslaved to God’s faithfulness to the covenant and to your obligation to respond to God’s faithfulness with your own faithfulness. 19 (I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh.)
For just as you once presented the parts of your body as slaves to impurity and lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your body and its members as slaves to faithfulness to the covenants, leading to being holy and clean so that you may one day live in God’s presence.
20 For when you were slaves of Sin, you were free with regard to having obey the covenants. 21 So what benefit did you then reap from your former life of sin that you are now ashamed of? For the end of those things is death with no hope of immortality. 22 But now, freed from Sin’s dominion and enslaved to God, you have your benefit leading to being made clean and holy, and the end is eternal life. 23 For the payoff of sin is death,that is, the loss of any hope of immortality, but the gift of God is eternal life in King Jesus our Lord.
