<p>3:1 <i>What advantage then has the Jew? </i><i>Or what is the profit of circumcision?</i><i>- </i>Whilst accepting Paul&rsquo;s Divine inspiration, I have always found the logic of this and the next few verses to be difficult and twisted. It&rsquo;s as if Paul wishes to say something nice about the Jews to as it were keep on board the Jews in his audience, having spoken against the significance of natural Jewishness so strongly in 2:27-29. But what he says there isn&rsquo;t quite compensated for by the reasoning he now comes out with- or so it seems to me. If natural descent is so irrelevant and Jewishness has been redefined, what real advantage is there, then, in being ethnically Jewish? &ldquo;Advantage&rdquo; translates a Greek word which is a superlative meaning more &lsquo;pre-eminence&rsquo;, &lsquo;exceeding abundance&rsquo;. Paul appears to say that the Jews do have indeed such a superlative position; whereas elsewhere in this context Paul speaks as if the Jews are as sinful as or even more sinful than the Gentiles, and that both are &ldquo;under sin&rdquo; (Rom. 3:9). Both need baptism into Christ to be the true seed of Abraham (Gal. 3:27-29). Paul&rsquo;s claim that their amazing blessing and advantage is because the Law was given to their fathers seems to strangely contradict the Law being elsewhere described as &ldquo;weak and beggarly elements&rdquo; (Gal. 4:9), &ldquo;weak through the flesh&rdquo;, whose glory was nothing, as dirty garments, compared to the excellency and surpassing wonder of Christ. I therefore suggest in the light of all this that we may be justified in reading Paul&rsquo;s words in Rom. 3:1,2 as a kind of sarcasm: &ldquo;What superlative, amazing pre-eminence then has the Jew Or what profit at all is there in being circumcised Much every way, indeed The important thing to note is that the oracles of God were firstly given to them&hellip;&rsquo;- and then Paul builds on that point to speak of Israel&rsquo;s disobedience to those commandments, leading up to his crescendo of convicting Jew and Gentile as desperate sinners who must throw themselves upon God&rsquo;s grace.&nbsp;</p>