At the beginning of Romans 7, Paul narrates a brief story about a man who, by his death, liberates a woman from the law that had governed his life. Paul uses this story to illustrate his claim that believers, through the death of Jesus, are dead to the Mosaic law that had governed Jesus's life. Origen calls the narrative an example, Clement of Alexandria an allegory, and Augustine a similitude. (1) Most contemporary exegetes identify the passage as some kind of comparison. Although the labels differ, interpretations generally follow the tradition begun with Augustine's dictum: animadvertendum est istam similitudinem in hoc differre ab ea re propter quam adhibita est, "it is noteworthy how this similitude differs from the very subject for which it is employed" (Exp. prop. Rom. 1.36). By relating a woman who is free from the law because of a man's death to Christ-believers' dying to the Mosaic law, Paul apparently produced an asymmetrical figure of speech. (2) If indeed this is what Paul has done, then exegetes have no choice except to find methods of analysis that account for the disparity. (3) In this article, I suggest an alternative interpretation: Paul's reasoning is symmetrical. The keys that unlock its symmetry are hidden within the ambiguous syntax of the clause [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (v. 2a) and the grammar of the phrase [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (v. 2b). If the first phrase is understood as "bound to the law by way of the man who is alive" and the second as "the law that governs the man," then vv. 2ab are the core of Paul's argument and clarify the logic of its movement from contrasting statement (v. 1), via analogy (vv. 2-4), to conclusion (vv. 4-6). I will trace this trajectory from beginning to end with a brief discussion of the various functions of Rom 7:1, an examination of the analogy, and a short analysis of the concluding verses.
