What Paul Builds on the Timeline

Three doctrines in Romans that stand or fall on the order of events

Paul does not merely assume the history that Genesis records. He argues from it. At least three times in his letter to the Romans, written about AD 57, he reaches back past his readers, past Israel, past Sinai, to a first man and a first act, and each time he does it to establish something the letter cannot do without: that one man's act can save us, that no one has an excuse, and that the law made sin worse rather than curing it.

These retellings are not decoration on the doctrine; they carry it. Paul never attaches dates, but at every point he argues from the order of events, and the arguments only work if the order is history. Take the line away and they do not lose colour; they stop functioning.

The first of the three, Romans 5, is not in dispute; every reader of that chapter sees Paul walking from Adam to Christ, which is why it comes first here. The other two are rarely read this way at all: almost no one takes Romans 1:18–32 as a narrative running from Adam to the present day, and the identity of the “I” in Romans 7 is among the most argued questions in the New Testament. The case for reading them as timelines is not that it is novel. It is that each contains something that has long puzzled its readers, and in each case the puzzle dissolves the moment you notice Paul is walking a line.

Romans 5: How one man's act can save

Having shown that we are justified by faith, Paul steps back to ask how justification became possible at all, and answers with a history that runs in two directions. Backwards: our situation was settled by one man's act, before we were consulted, so we stop pretending the problem belongs to someone else. Forwards: because it was settled that way, it could be re-settled the same way, by one man acting on behalf of everyone he heads. The doctrine of Christ as our representative is not a metaphor borrowed from law courts. It is an argument from how the race is actually structured in time, and it needs a real man standing at the head of a real line.

We start here because this is the passage where nobody disagrees. That Paul walks from Adam through Moses to Christ is plain on any reading of Romans 5, and that is what makes it the place to establish the method. Whatever is disputed elsewhere, here is an apostle unmistakably arguing a doctrine from the order of events, in the most carefully reasoned letter he wrote. The readings of Romans 1 and Romans 7 that follow are not a method imported into Paul from outside. They are this method, noticed in two places where it has usually been missed.

“Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” (Romans 5:12)

Paul hangs the human condition on one act, by one man, at one point in history. The logic is representative: Adam stands at the head of the race, and his act settled the position of everyone he heads. We were not consulted; death came to us through him. For that argument to work there must be a real man at the head of the line, and a real moment when he acted. An Adam who is only a figure for everyone leaves Paul with nothing to compare Christ to.

Then he marks out an epoch:

“To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given… Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam.” (Romans 5:13–14)

“From Adam to Moses” is an era with two endpoints. Paul characterises the age between them precisely: no written command yet, and death reigning even so. Later he adds that the law “was brought in” (5:20), entering the story at a particular point. This is a man who dates by eras, and who expects his readers to follow an argument built on their order.

Those two verses are easy to skim past, and they are the hinge of the argument. Paul needs an epoch in which people were dying who had broken no command, because that is the only way to show that death was reigning by Adam's act rather than by each person's own law-breaking. Had the law always been there, every death could be put down to the dead man's own account, and Adam would head nothing. The age between Adam and Moses is the evidence that our situation was settled for us before we arrived, which is precisely the structure Christ then exploits.

On that footing Paul builds his comparison of the two men and their two acts, “just as… so also” (5:19), a parallel that carries its weight only if both stand on one real line with Moses between them. And then he deliberately breaks it. “The gift is not like the trespass” (5:15). Adam's one act brought condemnation; Christ's one act covered the accumulated trespasses of the whole line, piled up over thousands of years. Twice Paul says “how much more.” The timeline is there to be outweighed: the rescue is far greater than the damage.

Romans 1: Why no one has an excuse

Now to the two passages where the line is usually missed. The letter's opening argument has to answer a defence that every reader feels the force of. If our evil desires are simply how God made us, then it is not fair to be judged for them; we did not choose the appetites we were born with. Paul's answer is a history. God did not make the race this way. The race, having known him, turned away, and the desires and practices we now find natural are what God handed us over to, in history, as a judgment we had already earned. The fault is humanity's, not God's. That is why no one is left with an excuse, and the argument runs entirely on the order of what happened.

The difficulty most readers meet here is the pronoun. Who are “they” who “knew God” and then exchanged him? If Paul means people in general, his tenses are hard to account for: the knowing, the exchanging and the handing over are all in the past, and yet the people being described are plainly still around, because chapter 2 turns and addresses them. Harder still, three times God “gave them over,” which is an event, not a permanent condition of humanity. And then at 1:32, without warning, the tense becomes present. Read as a history that begins with the first humans and arrives at the reader, every one of those features is exactly what you would expect.

“For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:20–21)

“Since the creation of the world” is a claim about time as much as visibility: from the beginning, God's power and nature have been on display. And then verse 21 tells what happened next, in the past tense. “They knew God.” Who did? At the head of the human story stand people who knew God directly: Adam and Eve. Paul is not claiming that every person since has perceived God clearly; his verbs are more careful than that. His claim is that the race began in the light, and walked into the dark.

Verses 22 to 31 then trace the walk. The descent moves by stages: glory exchanged for images, truth exchanged for a lie, the knowledge of God deliberately let go. And three times, at each stage, comes the same verdict: “God gave them over” (1:24, 26, 28). Humanity chooses; God hands humanity over to its choice. This is not the biography of every individual. It is the history of the race, told in the past tense, in order.

Then, at the last verse, the tense turns:

“Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:32)

After a chain of past-tense verbs, verse 32 is present tense. The narrative has caught up with the reader. What began as the history of the first humans ends as a description of the reader's own day, and the very next sentence turns and addresses that reader: “You, therefore, have no excuse” (2:1). The passage is built as a timeline, from Adam to today, and it lands on you because you are on it.

So the excuse is not answered by an argument about human nature. It is answered by a sequence. We are what we were handed over to becoming, and we were handed over because we turned, and we could only turn because we first knew. Remove any one of those stages, or shuffle their order, and the verdict of 2:1 cannot be pronounced.

But Paul strips the excuse for a purpose full of grace. The descent is told under a heading he has just written: in the gospel “a righteousness from God is revealed… by faith from first to last” (1:17). We are shown that we cannot defend ourselves so that we stop trying to, and receive instead the righteousness God gives through faith in Jesus (3:21–22). The diagnosis is only there because the cure is.

This reading of Romans 1, including the grammatical case for taking verses 21–32 as a historical narrative that arrives at the present in verse 32, is argued in detail in Michael D. Russell, Seeing Good, Doing Evil (Wipf & Stock, 2020), chapter 3.

Romans 7: Why the law made sin worse

Paul has just said some alarming things about the law: that it came in so that the trespass might increase (5:20), that we are not under it (6:14), that our sinful passions were aroused by it (7:5). The obvious conclusion is that the law is the trouble. Paul's answer is stranger and more useful than a simple denial. The law is “holy, righteous and good” (7:12), and it did make things worse, and that was the point. A good command given to a compromised creature provokes what is already there and brings it into the open, so that sin might be shown to be sin and become “utterly sinful” (7:13). The law was never the cure. It was the diagnosis, made deliberately unbearable, so that we would look outside the law for a rescue and find it in Christ (8:3–4).

That claim is made by telling a story, and the story is where the trouble starts. Who is the “I”? It is the most argued question in the letter, and the reason is verse 9.

“Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died… For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.” (Romans 7:9–11)

Where in Paul's lifetime could these words sit? “Once I was alive apart from the law… sin sprang to life and I died.” Scripture does not think anyone is born sinless (Psalm 51:5), so there is no moment in Paul's own biography when sin first sprang to life. But the words fit one place in history exactly: the garden. A man alive, with no command yet to break; a command given; sin springing to life through the deceiver; death. “Deceived” (7:11) is the very word Eve uses of the serpent (Genesis 3:13). Paul is telling Adam's story as his own, because in Adam it is his own.

The commandment he cites points to a second place in history. “Do not covet” is the tenth commandment, and it “came” at Sinai. Paul is an Israelite (11:1), writing to “those who know the law” (7:1), and he stands in Israel as every Israelite does. When that commandment came, sin “produced in me every kind of coveting” (7:8), which is a fair summary of the story Israel went on to live. Not every human stood at Sinai; that part of the story is Israel's own, and it is why this chapter speaks so particularly, in the first person.

So Romans 7:7–13 is Paul explaining who he is by telling his story in Adam and in Israel, located in real history at two points: the garden and the mountain. And the point of the telling is to vindicate the law while accounting for its effect. The command was “holy, righteous and good” (7:12) both times; what went wrong went wrong in the one who received it. From verse 14 the telling changes: Paul speaks in the present tense, as one who is “unspiritual” (7:14), describing life under sin without the Spirit rather than narrating history. It ends in the cry: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” (7:24).

So the sequence is what makes sense of the law. The same thing happens twice, centuries apart, and the repetition is the argument: a good command arrives into a situation already compromised, and each time it does not cure the sin but rouses it, exposes it, and multiplies the guilt. That is not an accident of two bad outcomes. It is what law does to people like us, demonstrated once at the beginning of the race and once at the beginning of Israel, and it is why the cry of verse 24 is the right response rather than a failure of nerve. The law brought us to the point of asking for a rescuer. Only a person could be one.

Then the address widens. Chapter 8 stops saying “I” and turns to the reader: “the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free” (8:2), and by 8:9–11 it takes in everyone who is in Christ, Jew and Gentile alike. You do not enter this story at Sinai. You enter it in Adam, and you are invited out of it in Christ.

Three doctrines, one line

Three doctrines, and one shape underneath all of them: a line with a beginning, marked epochs, and a centre. In each case the line is not an illustration laid over the doctrine; it is what makes the passage work, which is why noticing it settles questions that have puzzled readers for a long time. This is why the gospel is announced as news rather than taught as philosophy. It is not a set of truths about the human condition that happen to be illustrated by a story. It is a report of what took place on a line you are standing on, and a name for the one point on that line where you can get off it. One man's act explains the descent, and one man's act answers it.

The map on this site puts dates to the line: Adam near 5159 BC on the Septuagint's reckoning, the flood generations after him, the Exodus and Sinai in the thirteenth century BC, Christ at the centre of the first. Paul supplies none of those numbers, and none of this proves a date; an apostle can retell history without settling its chronology. What it does show is that building an argument on a line from Adam is no modern eccentricity imposed on the Bible. It is how Paul reasons in the letter most concerned to explain the gospel from first principles. The map exists to make visible the line he leans his weight on.

These are also not the only such lines, even in Romans. Abraham's faith is credited before his circumcision, and the order carries the whole argument (4:9–12); chapters 9–11 retell Israel's history and extend the line into the future (11:25–26). Paul draws others elsewhere: Galatians dates the law “430 years” after the promise to Abraham and calls it a guardian “until the Seed” came (Galatians 3:17–25), so that Christ arrived “when the set time had fully come” (4:4). Luke's genealogy walks the line name by name, from Jesus back to “Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38). Paul told the Athenians that “from one man” God made every nation, and “marked out their appointed times in history” (Acts 17:26). Jesus himself reasons from “the beginning” (Matthew 19:4, 8). The three passages above are singled out because each runs the same line from Adam, and at each point the argument leans its weight on it. But the habit is the New Testament's, not only Paul's.

See it on the map

The interactive map includes the Paul's Timelines overlay: three arcs drawn above the timeline bar, one for each of the three arguments, each clickable. Open the map and switch on “Paul's Timelines” in the Layers panel, or use the link below.

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.