The exclamation “How wretched a person I [am]” is the appropriate
response to Paul’s dilemma of frustrated zealotism. The wording has parallels
in early Attic, Hermetic, Stoic, Cynic, and Hellenistic Jewish sources where
the adjective ταλαίπωρος
(“wretched, miserable”) appears, but the context of frustrated zeal for the law
in Paul’s discourse is quite different from these dualistic treatments of a
fatal conflict between the mind and the flesh, or between love’s passion and
fate’s cruelty. Paul’s exclamation cannot refer to the tension between the two
aeons or to a yearning for resurrection, which reflect the experience of
believers rather than of the pre-Christian Paul. The sentiment of hopeless
misery resonates with Paul’s admission in 1 Cor 15:9, “For I am … unfit to be
called an Apostle, because I persecuted the church of Christ.” (Robert
Jewett and Roy David Kotansky, Romans: A
Commentary [Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible; Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2006], 471)
