Compiled from Naked Bible Podcast episode 419, part of the “Paul’s Use of the Old Testament” series — a conversation between podcast hosts Trey Stricklin and Dr. Michael Heiser, with guest Dr. Matt Halstead making his ninth appearance on the show. The episode continues directly from the prior installment on Malachi and surveys Romans 1–3. Opening small talk has been trimmed; content is organized topically rather than strictly chronologically.
Halstead frames the episode as a direct continuation of the previous one on Malachi. There, Israel’s election and vocation — chosen from the outset in Malachi 1, then shown to have failed in that vocation — is reconfigured around the coming “messenger,” identified as a messianic figure who redeems Israel’s identity and priestly calling. Halstead’s thesis for Romans is that Paul performs the same kind of move: Israel’s election and vocation are reconfigured around the Messiah throughout the letter, and Paul does this not as an innovation but because he is so immersed in Israel’s story that the story itself shapes how he reads the Old Testament. The result, in Halstead’s view, is “fresh meaning, fresh application” that nonetheless stays consistent with the Old Testament’s original context.
For the early chapters of Romans, Halstead isolates two organizing concepts that Paul reconfigures around the Messiah: πίστις language (faith/faithfulness) and Torah-keeping. The Greek word πίστις can mean either “faith” or “faithfulness,” and Halstead argues Paul exploits that breadth deliberately throughout Romans.
Paul closes his opening greeting by saying he received grace and apostleship “for the obedience of faith” (εἰς ὑπακοὴν πίστεως) among all the nations. Halstead reads this genitive construction as deliberately ambiguous, capable of meaning either “the obedience that comes from faith” (an act of obedience to Jesus) or “the obedience that is faith” (faith itself construed as the obedient act) — and argues Paul means both at once. He draws a parallel to Revelation 1:1’s “the revelation of Jesus Christ,” a phrase scholars likewise read as intentionally double — both the revelation that is Jesus Christ and the revelation from Jesus Christ.
This matters, Halstead argues, against a common surface-level reading that pits Pauline faith against works, as though πίστις were mere mental assent. He notes that ὑπακούω (“to obey”) and ἀκούω (“to hear”) share a common root — the same root behind the English “acoustic” — and that in Jewish thought, “hearing” already implies obedient response. The connection surfaces directly in the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4, recited in Greek as Ἄκουε, Ἰσραήλ, “Hear, O Israel”), a creedal text Israel committed her life to. Several scholars Halstead follows read Paul’s “obedience of faith” as an echo of the Shema’s own believing-loyalty concept — except that Paul has opened it to the Gentiles and re-centered it on Jesus the Messiah. Far from novel, this is exactly what Malachi already anticipated: Israel’s vocation reconfigured around the coming messenger.
Halstead identifies Romans 1:16–17 as foundational — “almost every word in this text is disputed among scholars” — particularly the quotation from Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous shall live by faith.” He argues πίστις here is better translated “faithfulness” than “faith,” both because of cultural baggage around the English word “faith” (which can suggest mere assent, foreign to Paul) and because of the underlying text itself.
The Hebrew (Masoretic) text reads, roughly, “the righteous by his faithfulness shall live” — emphasizing the human believer’s loyalty to Yahweh. The Greek Septuagint instead reads “the righteous by my faithfulness shall live,” shifting the referent to God’s own faithfulness. Paul’s quotation omits the pronoun entirely — neither “his” nor “my” — which Halstead takes as a deliberate move preserving the ambiguity between both ideas rather than resolving it.
Returning to Habakkuk’s original context (the prophet’s complaint about Babylonian oppression and the call to trust God’s coming justice), Halstead argues the Hebrew and Greek witnesses actually complement rather than compete: the righteous live by trusting a God who is himself faithful — divine and human faithfulness are two sides of one coin, not rival readings. He also notes that Habakkuk 1:4 already complains that “the law is paralyzed” because Israel herself was failing to keep Torah — meaning the prophet never envisioned “faithfulness” as separable from Torah obedience in the first place. Paul, however, re-wraps that same faithfulness-concept around the Messiah rather than Torah-keeping, treating loyalty to Jesus as the new equivalent of covenant loyalty to Yahweh.
Halstead points to the Dead Sea Scrolls’ own commentary on Habakkuk (the pesharim) as a Second Temple parallel worth flagging. The Qumran sectarians, commenting on this same “righteous shall live by faith” text, interpret it as referring to those who obey Torah and remain loyal to the Teacher of Righteousness — an individual whose precise identity remains debated among scholars but whose function, for the sect, was that of an inspired interpreter. Structurally, Qumran ties faith-language to obedience plus loyalty to a person, much as Paul does — the difference being that Paul does not tie πίστις to Torah-keeping the way Qumran (and most Jews of the period) would have been comfortable with, even though, Halstead insists, Paul still believes loyalty to Jesus is what actually fulfills Torah.
Halstead next turns to Romans 3:21–22, where the standard translation reads that “the righteousness of God” has been revealed “through faith in Jesus Christ, for all who believe.” He first notes the passage’s discontinuity-in-continuity: righteousness is manifested “apart from the law,” yet “the law and the prophets bear witness to it” — meaning Paul is not inventing something foreign to Torah’s own trajectory, only going beyond its original scope in a way the Prophets themselves anticipated.
He then argues the standard rendering mistranslates the genitive: rather than “faith in Jesus Christ” (an objective genitive), the phrase πίστις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ should be read as a subjective genitive — “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.” His grammatical case rests partly on redundancy: if the verse already says “for all who believe,” restating “faith in Jesus Christ” just beforehand is needlessly repetitive. Reading it instead as God’s righteousness manifested through Christ’s own faithfulness, and only then received by human faith, avoids the redundancy and ties the verse back to the Habakkuk quotation in chapter 1, where both divine and human faithfulness were already in view. It also answers the question Paul raises in Romans 3:1–5 — whether Israel’s unfaithfulness nullifies God’s faithfulness — with a single answer: God’s faithfulness is enacted through the Messiah’s own faithfulness.
Turning to the second reconfigured concept, Halstead works through Romans 2:12–15, where Gentiles “who do not have the law by nature” nonetheless do what the law requires, the law’s work “written on their hearts” — and Romans 2:25–29, where an uncircumcised Gentile who keeps Torah’s precepts is reckoned circumcised, while a circumcised lawbreaker is not, because true circumcision is “a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not the letter.”
He stresses this is not Paul inventing new categories: heart-circumcision is drawn directly from Deuteronomy 10:16 (“circumcise the foreskin of your heart”), Deuteronomy 30:6 (Yahweh himself will “circumcise your heart”), and Jeremiah 4:4 (“circumcise yourselves to Yahweh, remove the foreskin of your hearts”). The discontinuity — that a Gentile believer need not undergo physical circumcision — is real, but Torah and the Prophets had already anticipated this kind of internal reconfiguration. For Paul, heart-circumcision now means belief and loyalty toward Jesus the Messiah.
Halstead identifies a rhetorical move underlying all of this: Paul’s reason for setting aside Torah-observance as the marker of covenant membership is not only that Christ fulfills it, but that Torah itself could never secure Israel’s calling in the first place — it only ever exposed Israel’s failure (a point Halstead ties back to Habakkuk’s own complaint that “the law is paralyzed”). If Torah only highlights failure, it cannot be the ground of assurance that one belongs among God’s elect; that assurance instead comes from being “in Messiah Jesus.” Paul makes the same point explicitly later in the letter: “do we overthrow the law by faith? By no means — we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31), and again at Romans 10:4, where Christ is “the culmination of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Torah is not discarded; it is fulfilled in and reconfigured around the Messiah.
Halstead next examines Romans 2:17–24, where Paul indicts Jewish hearers who rely on Torah and consider themselves “a light to those who are in darkness” — and then turns their own behavior against them, charging that their lawbreaking has made “the name of God blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” quoting Isaiah 52:5.
In its original Isaianic setting, this line functions as part of Yahweh’s reassurance to Israel in exile — a citation Halstead reads through the words of biblical scholar Richard Hays, who describes it as a word of comfort precisely because Israel’s oppressed condition lets the nations despise God’s apparent power, giving Israel all the more reason to trust that God will act to vindicate his own name. Paul, by contrast, deploys the same line as a word of reproach against Israel herself. Halstead notes ongoing scholarly debate over whether Isaiah’s original sense was comfort or judgment, but treats the question as largely beside the point: even granting the “worst case” that Isaiah meant comfort, Paul’s recontextualization is not faulty exegesis. Paul reads Israel’s exile through the larger narrative arc of her vocation to be a light to the nations (rooted, in Halstead’s broader framework, in the Genesis 11–12 movement from Babel to Abraham’s call) — Israel’s actual, historical exile demonstrates that she has become prisoner of the nations rather than their rescuer, and that fact, growing out of her own covenant unfaithfulness, is what Paul’s quotation is built to expose. Whether Isaiah’s words were originally comfort or judgment, Paul’s point about Israel’s present failure stands on its own.
Pulling back to the larger interpretive principle, Halstead describes Paul as reading the Old Testament dialogically — neither imposing categories foreign to the text’s original context, nor approaching the text as a blank slate. Paul’s Damascus road christophany functioned, in this account, not only as a conversion event but as a hermeneutical rupture: Paul “never read his Old Testament the same way again.” Yet Halstead is careful to note Paul did not become a believer simply by reading Scripture differently — he became one through a supernatural encounter, which then transformed how he read everything he already knew.
Citing Seyoon Kim’s The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, Halstead argues the christophany did not meet a blank mind: Paul already carried a Jewish worldview, shaped further by Second Temple categories he had “already sniffed out” but “didn’t know what to do with” until that encounter gave them a center. The relationship runs both directions — the Old Testament makes sense of the christophany, while the christophany simultaneously re-situates how the Old Testament itself is read — a mutually interpretive dialogue Halstead takes to characterize Paul’s hermeneutic for the rest of his life.
Halstead closes by outlining how his own book divides the letter, with each section built around the same reconfiguration principle:
Both hosts close by naming the labor this kind of reading requires: modern readers, unlike Paul, did not grow up immersed in Israel’s story and worldview, so reconstructing the messianic profile that Paul takes for granted — the work of the preceding episodes in this series — has to be done deliberately and “painstakingly,” where for Paul it would have come naturally. Heiser frames the broader pastoral aim as equipping preachers and teachers with tools to connect rarely-preached Old Testament books (Malachi among them) to the New Testament texts that depend on them. The next episode in the series turns to how Paul retells the stories of Israel — Abraham, Adam, and the Exodus — across Romans 4–8.