the very advent of divine justice, willing selflessly to take on the burden of ruling the empire. In his monumental commentary on Romans, Robert Jewett declares, “The argument of Romans revolves around the question of which rule is truly righteous”—Christ’s or Caesar’s—“and which gospel has the power to make the world truly peaceful.”50 This important insight has long been blunted, if not completely obscured, by the tendency of Christian interpretation to read Romans 1–3 in terms of a universal human