Rome

Rome is the city on the Tiber River in Italy that served as the capital of the Roman Empire in the first century and was the destination of Paul’s letter to the Romans: the text opens its address “to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints” (Romans 1:7). Historically, Rome in this period was the administrative and commercial center of the Mediterranean world, with a large, mixed population of Romans, Greeks, enslaved people, freedpersons, immigrants, and a long-established Jewish community. The letter’s framing of the gospel as God’s power “for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek” (Romans 1:16) fits a congregation drawn from more than one ethnic and social group; one way to read the letter’s argument about Jews and Greeks together (for example Romans 2:6; 3:24) is as addressing precisely the tensions such a mixed house-church network would face.

Scripture does not name the founder of the church in Rome. The text does show the city as a place of movement and expulsion: Aquila and Priscilla are described as having come from Italy because Claudius had ordered all Jews out of Rome (Acts 18:2), and visitors “from Rome” appear among the crowds at Pentecost (Acts 2:10). By the time of Romans, a community already existed there, since Paul writes to believers he has not yet visited and warns them about “those who are causing the divisions and occasions of stumbling” (Romans 16:17). Near the end of Acts, Paul reaches the city and lives there under guard (Acts 28:14–16, 30–31).

The adjective “Roman” in Scripture more often marks legal or civic status than the city itself. Paul invokes his Roman citizenship when facing arrest (Acts 22:25–28), and Luke calls Philippi a Roman colony (Acts 16:12) — a civic designation granting a town a measure of Roman law and privilege. Early Christian tradition, reported by writers such as Clement of Rome and Eusebius, holds that both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome; that is a well-attested early tradition rather than something the New Testament states, and some read the “Babylon” of 1 Peter 5:13 as a coded reference to Rome, though others take it literally.

Traditions differ on what the city means for the church. In Catholic and Orthodox teaching, Rome is the see associated with Peter and Paul and, in the Catholic case, the center of episcopal authority. Many Reformation-era and later Protestant readers treat Rome in the New Testament primarily as the address of an ordinary congregation and read the letter’s doctrine of justification as the shared inheritance of the whole church, often with a critical view of later Roman claims. Others read Rome mainly as the political power to which believers owe respect but not worship (as in Romans 13). These are confessional judgments about significance; the text itself simply names the city and greets the saints in it.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.