For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: (Rom 8:3)
Commenting on the term "condemned sin in the flesh," James Dunn wrote the following:
κατέκρινεν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ἐν τῇ σαρκι, “he condemned sin in the flesh.” This can hardly mean that God condemned the operations of sin “in the flesh” but exempted sin’s other operations from condemnation. Sin is conceived of by Paul as a power which feeds parasitically upon human weakness and whose effective power in human affairs is limited to the flesh (σαρξ αμαρτιας). The phrase must then describe where and how God gave the decisive verdict against sin—“in the flesh.” That could suggest a divine strategy whereby the enticingness of the flesh’s weakness was used to draw sin to the flesh and so to engage sin’s power that the destruction of the flesh became also the destruction of that power. IN the most dramatic reversal of all time (quite literally), death is transformed from sin’s ally and final triumph (5:21) into sin’s own defeat and destruction. At all events the decisive enactment by God (κατεκρινεν—not just sentence pronounced but sentence effected) was clearly the death of Jesus (NIV, “condemned sin in sinful man,” is potentially misleading); the death of Christ brought the whole epoch characterized by sin’s domination of the flesh to an end. (James D.G Dunn, Romans 1-8 [WBC 38A; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1988], 422)
Joseph Fitzmyer offered the following commentary on this phrase:
he condemned sin in the flesh. The phrase en tē sarki has to be taken with the vb. katekrinen, “he condemned in the flesh,” thus explaining how and in what respect God issued the decisive verdict against sin, in that realm where sin reigned and dominated. The phrase does not mean that only the effects of sin found in the flesh itself were condemned; that would be to restrict the condemnation too much. By the death Christ underwent on the cross, the death he underwent as a human, he executed the sentencing of sin, which could only touch him as human. The vb. katekrinen expresses a negative “sentence” and its execution, viz., condemnation. Sin is again personified, now as a power that has dominated unregenerate human life (5:12; 8:2) but despoiled of such power because it has been condemned “in the flesh” of Christ. But how?
Commentators part ways in explaining how. Some would understand “in the flesh” to mean simply “by the (innocent, sinless) flesh” (of Christ). So Augustine, Contra duas ep. pelag. 3.6.16 (CSEL 60.504–5). Others would understand it of the incarnation, when the Father by sending the Son “in the flesh” implicitly passed sentence on sin. It would have been a condemnation in principle, in that the Son assumed flesh (= the human condition) without sin and lived a sinless life; so some Greek Fathers: Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 3.20.2; Athanasius, Or. contra Arianum 1.51 (PG 26.120); Theodore of Mopsuestia (Staab, Pauluskatenen, 134); and some modern commentators: Büchsel, TDNT 3.951–52; Cranfield, Romans, 383; Kühl (Römer, 256–58); Lagrange, Romains, 194; Zahn. Still others would understand it more specifically of the crucified “flesh” of Christ: the Father passed definitive judgment against sin in that the death that Christ died on the cross “in the flesh” sentenced to impotence sin that reigned in human flesh, which could touch him only in the flesh that he had in common with all human beings (see 6:6–11; 7:4); so (with differing nuances) Origen, In ep. ad Romanos 6.12 (PG 14.1095); John Chrysostom, In ep. ad Romanos hom. 13.4 (PG 60.514); Theodoret of Cyrrhus; Thomas Aquinas; Benoit, Dunn (Romans, 422), Kuss, Sanday and Headlam (Romans, 193–94), and Käsemann. Because elsewhere Paul associates the redemptive activity of Jesus with his passion, death, and resurrection, the phrase is better understood in this last sense. Cf. Col 1:22.
In any case, Paul means that the Father has thus broken the dominion of sin and its consequences over human beings. In this way was destroyed the force that Adam’s sin unleashed in the world (5:12). See Giavini, “Damnavit.” (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation With Introduction and Commentary [AB 33; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 486-87)
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