Reading Romans Right

Correcting Common Misreadings, Restoring Paul’s Original Intent

By: Keith Giles, Matthew J. Distefano

Narrated by: Co-Pilot Audio Solutions

For the longest time, Paul's Epistle to the Romans has been used to justify misogyny, homophobia, eternal conscious torment, and blind allegiance to the State. However, the truth is that the Apostle Paul never intended his letter to the Church in Rome to teach any of those things. That's why co-authors Keith Giles and Matthew J. Distefano have collaborated to correct these misunderstandings and illuminate the true meaning of Paul's theological masterpiece for today's Christian listener.

Leveraging the scholarship of a variety of Pauline scholars like Douglas A. Campbell, N. T. Wright, David Bentley Hart, Lucy Peppiatt, and others, Giles and Distefano masterfully move chapter by chapter through Romans to reveal Paul's original message to the Church in Rome—and to all of us—which is one of hope, freedom, and universal reconciliation for everyone, everywhere.

The Quoir Bible Series from Quoir Publishing is dedicated to clarifying the true message of the Scriptures and correcting toxic theologies imposed upon the text by those seeking to advance specific denominational perspectives. Whenever possible, our hope is to illuminate the message of the Bible—warts and all—so that Christians today can rediscover the beautiful truth it contains and make sense of the more problematic texts.

©2025 Quoir LLC (P)2025 Quoir LLC

Fascinating take on Romans

This book mostly follows the thought of Pauline scholar Douglas A. Campbell, whose work I’ve read and admired for some time. I also enjoy Keith’s and Matthew’s other books and their podcast. The authors are writing to a lay audience, and while they are at times irreverent, their reading of Romans is quite powerful. For anyone who struggles with the apostle Paul and his more controversial statements in scripture, I encourage you to read this. I like Paul much more than I used to! Looking forward to more Quoir books on scripture. Keep up the good work, guys.

A juvenile and unserious attempt of a new apocalyptic perspective on Paul

I was so disappointed by this book which I was predisposed to give a favorable listen, curious to hear an apocalyptic interpretation of Paul how to read Paul rightly.

The juvenile and unserious tone was set from the beginning, though thankful it was not as thick throughout the book as it was in the beginning.

For example, in dripping sarcasm, the authors characterized the traditional understanding of penal substitutionary atonement as “God becoming human in order to beat the s&$t out of himself.” No serious defender of PSA embraces such a caricature. It’s fine if one wants to critique PSA, but creating straw men to knock down may earn you points with your buds but it’s not likely to convince anyone.

The other issue is the use of ‘prosopopeia’ which is the theory that Paul speaks in the voice of his opponents and then critiques them. I think most would agree that Paul does this and it’s usually clear when he does it (Shall we sin that grace may increase? May it never be!). However the authors don’t lay out a way to understand when it is less clear. For example, Romans 1:18-32 is, acc to the authors, prosopopeia, in other words Paul didn’t believe anything in this periscope, but his opponents did. But it’s unclear why this is the case, other than it doesn’t fit with their theory of what their Paul would say (God can’t have wrath), and besides, Paul obviously wouldn’t be anti-sexual sin and if you disagree it’s because you’re a homophobe.

Overall, I wanted to like this book and give it a fair hearing, but I ended up just regretting buying it and wishing I didn’t waste my time on it.