What was the point, after all, of being part of Abraham’s family? Simply this (as Paul had expounded it in one synagogue after another across Turkey and Greece): according to Genesis itself and to many subsequent Jewish traditions, the call of Abraham was the divine answer to the sin of Adam. What we have in Abraham is therefore the promise that God will deal once and for all with sin and with the death that it brings in its wake. That is how the first four chapters of Romans work.
