Paul is not primarily talking here about the salvation of "the Jew."

He says it all sincerely. This is God's single plan, through Torah-equipped Israel, for the world.

It is as though Paul cannot get tired of saying it: if you want to know who we are, we are people in whom God is at work, because of and according to the pattern of the Messiah, for the benefit of you and of the wider world.

Why shouldn't he just toss words around and let them fall in neat sound bites unrelated to the subtle and sustained line of thought he has been following?)

5:21 forms the climax of a three-chapter build-up of sustained exposition of the nature of apostleship as the embodiment of the gospel, the gospel of God's faithfulness in the Messiah, and also the climax of a thrice-repeated sequence of just such a double statement about the Messiah's death on the one hand and the apostolic ministry on the other.

But, as we shall see presently, in Scripture, in second-temple Jewish literature, and in Paul himself, not least in Paul's reading of Scripture, God's way ofputting the world right is precisely through his covenant with Israel. This is the theme that will emerge clearly in the exegesis in due course. God's single plan to put the world to rights is

The whole point of Abraham in Romans 4, as I have said before in relation to Galatians 3, is not that he is an "illustration" or an "example," as though the saving plan consisted of the simplistic narrative, "Humans sin; God rescues; all is well (and, by the way, God has done this here and there in the past as well)."

Rather, unless we are absolutely forced to deny it, we should assume that when Paul appears to be laying down first principles about God's future judgment, he is laying down first principles about God's future judgment.

But its own internal irony, claiming the Scriptures as its sole authority but needing to misread them to force through its central point, has come home to roost, albeit through the oblique and frequently misleadingly stated so-called new perspective.