Romans 11:15

For if the casting away of them is the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?

This verse is another conspicuous example of the translators' adding words to the text in order to clarify what they thought to be the meaning; but if there is a case of butchering a text in all the Bible, this is it. They put no less than five shafts into this one! They supplied two verbs, one in the present tense and another in the future tense, and also threw in a prepositional phrase to boot. Given this kind of liberty, there is hardly any meaning that might not be imported into any text. Our first concern is to rewrite this verse without its human additives, thus:

Romans 11:15, For if the casting away of them the reconciling of the world, what the receiving but life from the dead?

What was Paul saying? He had just mentioned the possibility of saving a few Jews; and it was of them that he said, "What the receiving but life from the dead"! Every Jew Paul converted was viewed by him as one baptized out of a cemetery. The hardened, judicially condemned and sentenced nation (fleshly Israel) was morally and judicially dead. Yet even from THAT NATION some were being saved, and the converts were indeed as life from deadness!

Casting away of them the reconciling of the world ... as is the other clause, is a reference to the preceding verse, making Paul's meaning respective of that and not directed to some future event. The future tense is not in this verse at all except by the gratuitous indulgence of the translators. "Shall be" is their word, not Paul's.

The millennial, or future wholesale Jewish conversion theories which are imported into this verse through the human additions to the text, encounter an impossible antithesis. Since the reconciling of the world (a universal concept) is said already to have been accomplished by the fall of Israel, their "fullness" if viewed as some future wholesale acceptance of Christianity would have to be viewed as accomplishing something even more wonderful than the "reconciling of the world," and, pray tell, what could that be? The scriptures do not teach any such thing, but quite the contrary, Jesus himself asking plaintively,

Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8).

It's too bad that Jesus didn't know about all that wholesale conversion of Jews out of fleshly Israel that our translators boldly said, "shall be"!

How could people have done such a thing as importing such fantastic speculations into Paul's word here? Perhaps no better example may be found of "how" such a thing happened than that which appears in the works of the beloved Lard himself. He wrote:

Here again we supply "will be" or "shall be," and so make the apostle assert the future conversion of the Jews. This course seems necessitated by the nature of the case![19]

Ones does not question the sincerity of such a man as Lard; but the judgment of any person who will "supply" words to make an "apostle" of Jesus Christ "assert the future conversion of the Jews" can simply not be relied upon in that instance. It is precisely in what people have made Paul say here that the trouble lies. It is held as axiomatic by this writer that if Paul had believed in a future conversion of fleshly Israel, he would have trumpeted the fact to the skies in words that no one could avoid understanding. The above words of the beloved Lard are an admission that the future conversion theory regarding Israel is what people have made Paul say, and not what Paul wrote. Amen.