At stake is the accurate record of the early proclamation of the saving gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. In terms of the progress of redemption, this speech of Paul at Antioch, delivered at the heart of the trade routes of Asia, represents the fullest record of an early proclamation of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations of the world, which therefore embodies a significant step beyond the record of Peter’s summary of the gospel as preached at Pentecost. 

God’s glory in the Gospel connects directly to the display of his righteousness when he declares righteous a sinful human being, a depraved, wrath-deserving sinner who has repeatedly violated God’s law. That he might be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus,” God offered his Son “as a propitiatory sacrifice through his blood” (Rom. 3:26, 25). This justification by God of the guilty sinner through the substitutionary death of Jesus, received by faith alone, openly displays the righteousness of God.

Was Paul’s letter to the Romans the first time this “Gospel” was declared that so wondrously displays the righteousness of God in the justification of the sinner through the blood of Christ?

By no means! Before any written Gospel had been published, during the twenty years in which apostolic proclamation alone defined the Christian Gospel, Paul preached the doctrine of the “rising and falling church”—justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law.

When and where did he make this proclamation?

During his first missionary journey into Asia, as he preached in the synagogue of Antioch of Pisidia.

What exactly did he say?

Let it therefore be known to you, men and brothers, that through this man, the forgiveness of sins is being proclaimed to you. From all the things from which you are not able to be justified by the law of Moses, all who believe in this man are justified (Acts 13:38, 39).

Rather remarkable is the translation of the root δικαιόω as “freed” rather than “justified” twice in this passage, as it appears in the 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV).

It would be impossible to discover the thinking behind the Revised Standard Version of 1952 in its rendering of “freed” rather than “justified.” The RSV, it should be remembered, was the first major effort to provide a new translation of the Bible into English that would replace the King James Version of 1611, made almost 350 years earlier. The RSV is basically a good rendering of Scripture, representing a more “literal” rather than a “dynamic” translation. It is frequently used as a helpful tool by Bible translation societies. Yet one might re-imagine the climate of the 1950’s in which the RSV originated in cooperation with the National Council of Churches. Significant resistance to the translation arose when the classic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 read, “Behold, a ‘young woman’ (rather than a ‘virgin’) shall conceive and bear a son…” As a consequence, this version of the Bible was rejected outright by evangelicals of the day.

In the prevailing climate that produced the RSV, it can easily be imagined that its translators could have concluded that the phrasing in Luke’s report of Paul’s speech in Acts 13 was “too Pauline” to be “authentically Pauline” at this early stage in his life and ministry. To read “everyone who believes” is “justified from everything from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses” might have appeared to them as simply incorporating “too much Paul” into this early speech in the Israelite synagogue of Antioch. These statements agree so perfectly with Galatians and Romans, Paul’s later writings, that it might have been concluded that they represented a “reading back” into Paul’s earlier speech in Acts the more refined theology of his subsequent formulations of doctrine.

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