Same-Same
For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, Romans 8:3 NASB
Likeness of sinful flesh – Translations like this drive me crazy. Actually, in this case, Paul drives me crazy. I just don’t know what to make of him. Did he really think “flesh” was sinful? That’s Gnostic. Sounds like Plato, Plotinus, and the rest of the dualism crowd. And what is this about the Messiah being sent in “sinful flesh”? If the Messiah is in sinful flesh, then how can he be sinless? Even worse, if he’s in sinful flesh, what hope is there for any of us? This verse is just plain confusing.
Not that Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther didn’t get a lot of mileage out of it. This is one of those “prooftexts” for the idea of sinful nature, an idea that we know comes from Greek philosophy, not the Hebrew Scriptures. But it’s well ingrained in our post-Reformation religious culture. You’re guilty because you were born! All mortality is sinful. You can’t help it. It’s a “body” problem. With that kind of thinking we might as well become Buddhists and seek escape from the material world. The Hebrew idea of “person” (nephesh) is embodied. There is no dualism between body and soul. If Paul is Jewish (and he is), is he simply another rabbinic victim of Hellenism, or is he just crazy? What can he possibly mean with this ridiculous expression?
Let’s start with homoíōma, the Greek word behind the translation “likeness.” Schneider gives us the Christian perspective:
This rare word means “what is similar,” “copy,” with a stress on the aspect of “similarity.”. . . In Rom. 8:3 and Phil. 2:7 Paul uses the word with reference to Christ’s earthly life. In Rom. 8:3 he stresses the reality of Christ’s humanity by saying that he came in the “likeness” of sinful flesh; he entered the nexus of human sin but without becoming subject to the power of sin, as would be implied if Paul had simply said “in sinful flesh.” The homoíōmadenotes likeness in appearance but distinction in essence. With the body the intrinsically sinless Christ becomes the representative of sinful humanity in order that by destroying this body God might cancel human sin. The term homoíōma is clearly an attempt to overcome the difficulty of having to say that the Christ in whom human sin is condemned is not himself a sinner. The word may well be an inadequate one, face to face with the mystery of Christ’s person and work, but it is not docetic as some suppose. Christ is not just a heavenly being with an external human form; he is fully and truly human, but not a sinner.[1]
Does this comment really help? I’m not sure. It’s loaded with Trinitarian, dual-nature assumptions. I can see why Paul uses the word to demonstrate the humanity of the Messiah. As a Jew, this was never in question. But Paul is writing to a Jewish/Gentile audience and in the first century there were a lot of “god-men” floating about, so it might have been particularly important to squash the idea that Yeshua was like Caesar or Mithra. The Jewish Messiah is human, not a disguised god in human garb. Of course, this becomes a huge problem for the Church about 200 years after Paul and results in the dual-nature doctrines. You know, those proclamations of the Church that, as Millard Erickson so aptly put it, we believe because they are absurd so they must be from God. I doubt that Paul was a Hellenist. I am quite certain he wasn’t a Trinitarian. Nevertheless, this verse surely makes him sound like a 16th Century Reformed commentator.
Let’s suppose that all Paul meant was that Yeshua, the Messiah, didn’t come divinely disguised, that he was, in fact, really human, just like the rest of us. “In the flesh,” so to speak. If Paul had written, “sending His son in the flesh” I could understand the thought. But the addition of hamartía (sin) just confuses everything. We must remember, “The Hebrew terms translated by hamartía and the like . . . do not have an exclusive religious use, so that it is easy in translation either to import this or to weaken it. No uniform or self-contained concept of sin is present in the OT authors, and detailed questions of linguistic history further complicate the matter . . . the Hebrew term does not have the primary sense of ‘sin,’ for what is often in view is transgression of custom, or law, or a treaty, or obligation, with the guilt that this implies.”[2]
This is important. We have translated hamartía as if it means “sin,” and as a result, we have all these impossible dilemmas. But what if we translated the Greek word according to its Hebrew context. Then we might discover that Paul is saying nothing more than that the Messiah was sent in the flesh subject to all the customs, laws, obligations and possible guilt just like us. The Messiah lived in a world that rebelled, a world that rejected the norm, and hamartía is the Greek way of expressing this Hebrew thought. [Maybe . . . there are some significant developments in the LXX and rabbinic thought that seem to direct us away from a straightforward Hebrew understanding, but that’s for later]. If Paul follows that idea of the Messiah in his own cultural period, then maybe what he is writing to these Gentile believers is simply a statement that Yeshua isn’t like the god-men of the surrounding culture and that he is just like us, thrown (sent) into a world where obligation, custom, and law require one thing and human beings tend to do just the opposite.
Of course, there’s still another problem (isn’t there always with Paul?). Paul continues this thought with the phrase “and as a sin offering.” That certainly sounds like Paul thought the Messiah died for our sins. That’s what the translators thought, or wanted you to think, because the word “offering” isn’t in the Greek text. What it literally says in Greek is “and for sin.”
Now what in the world is Paul thinking?
Topical Index: likeness, homoíōma, flesh, sárx, sin, hamartía, offering, Romans 8:3
[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 686). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
[2] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 44). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
