In these two verses Paul once again reminds the Roman believers of the situation in which they lived before they came to Christ. The meaning of the word righteousness in this verse needs some attention. In verse 18 righteousness is evidently made parallel with the truths found in the teaching you received of verse 17. But what is the meaning of righteousness in verse 19 and 20? Righteousness in these last two instances is best taken in a way related to its use in verse 18. That is, the more general meaning of righteousness in these two verses is “doing what God requires,” and in verse 18 the specific requirements that God makes are identified with the truths found in the teaching you received (from God). And because Paul speaks in this context of impurity and wickedness as the results of slavery to sin, so it is likely that the major emphasis in righteousness in this passage is on the moral and ethical demands that God makes on his people.
It is not easy to translate satisfactorily the clause you were free from righteousness. The most satisfactory equivalent in some languages is simply “you were not under obligation to do what God required.”
What did you gain? is literally “what fruit did you receive?”, a common figure for Jewish speakers, and it is translated in a variety of ways: New American Bible “what benefit did you then enjoy?”; New English Bible “what was the gain?”; Jerusalem Bible “what did you get from this?”
The question in verse 21 may be changed into a statement, “You certainly did not receive any good from the things that you are ashamed of now” or “Those things which cause you to be ashamed now certainly did not benefit you at all.” The final clause, the result of those things is death, may be translated as “these things (or experiences) cause your death” or “doing such things causes people to die.”
In verse 21 there is a problem of punctuation. The question mark may come at the point where it is in the Good News Translation (so also Revised Standard Version, An American Translation*); or the question mark may be placed earlier in the sentence (New American Bible “what benefit did you then enjoy? Things you are now ashamed of, all of them tending toward death”; see also New English Bible, Jerusalem Bible, and Moffatt).
Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1973. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .