What was Paul’s purpose for using the OT in his letter to the Romans?
Paul was, of course, a Jew. What he and the other apostles wished to make clear was that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah, the One whose coming was foretold in the Old Testament. The unbelieving Jews rejected our Lord’s claim to be the Messiah, and they sought to “divorce” Christianity as non-Jewish, and therefore an illegal sect. In this they failed (Acts 18:12-17). The whole Book of Romans deals with the relationship between the Old Testament and the New, the Jews and the Gentiles. Thus, Paul concludes in chapter 3 that all men, without exception (Jew and Gentile) are sinners, deserving of death, and in need of justification by faith. His final summation of man’s universal sinfulness is in Romans 3:10-18, where Paul draws together a number of Old Testament texts indicating man’s sin. Specifically, Paul wants to demonstrate the sin of the Jews, since they did not need to be persuaded that the Gentiles were sinners (see Galatians 2:15). He wants to show that even the “founding fat
