of law and the fulfillment of duty,1 and so was used in legal contexts for the punishment that a person justly deserved according to the law.2 And in the Greco-Roman world of earliest Christianity, the term continued to be closely associated with judicial justice and most often connoted the idea of retributive punishment. So the common Latin translation of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ came to be iustitia Dei (“the justice of God”), both in the Old Latin translation, which was produced at the end of the second
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