In this chapter, I discuss traditional conceptions of the social formations that scholars imagine as having been in Rome and that present themselves as explanatory for understanding Paul's letter. I then outline an alternative scenario. I undertake this project as an experiment in what I take to be the best critical practices of the historian who works in the study of religion. Of course, “best practices of the historian” and “the study of religion” are rightly debated activities.

Among several possible critical issues one could raise about scholarship that tries to argue for social formations in Rome that would partly explain Paul's letter, I want to focus here upon the issue of parsimony. Many people are familiar with the Rube Goldberg cartoons depicting extremely complex sets of gadgets, levers, pulleys on a contraption designed to perform some simple task. These drawings are amusing because a good mousetrap does not need eighty working parts. Given the varied constraints of different fields of knowledge – and the application of the principle of simplicity does vary by field – among relatively plausible contenders, the more economical explanation is generally to be preferred. This is one of the bedrock principles of knowledge both in the academy and more generally. The historian wants to explain particular relatively-known outcomes in terms of antecedent processes (types of causes including human activities). The parsimony here is not reduction to some totalizing theory such as psychoanalytic, crude forms of Marxist ideology, or a Foucauldian idea that “all language, culture and practice is politically loaded,” but preferring that which most fully explains the antecedent processes with the greatest economy, the fewest assumptions. This is in no way to deny the great complexity and multiple causes in history. Romantic historiography such as R. J. Collingwood's revels in the irreducible complexity of the historical and the intuitive understanding of the historical interpreter, but even these historians rather inconsistently use the principle of parsimony in their actual historical work. In the case before us, the relatively known to be explained is Paul's letter to the Romans. I will argue that numerous scholarly accounts, taken as explanations, resemble Rube Goldberg contraptions.