You must do this is literally “and this.” The force of these two words is to tie Paul’s conclusion (vv. 11-14) to what he has previously said. This relation may be expressed in a number of ways. The New American Bible (“take care to do all these things”) and Phillips (“why all this stress on behavior?”) go essentially the same route as the Good News Translation, while many other translations merely use a particle or a few particles (Revised Standard Version “besides this”; New English Bible “in all this”; Jerusalem Bible “besides”; An American Translation* “all this especially”). Moffatt takes “this” as a modifier of the word rendered hour by the Good News Translation and so translates “and then you know what this Crisis means.” However, both the grammar and the context indicate that “this” is better taken as a reference to what precedes than to what follows.
The word here rendered hour (used by Paul elsewhere in 3.26; 1 Corinthians 4.5; 7.29) may be a difficult term to translate. Basically the meaning is that of “time,” not time as a chronological sequence but as something having a special significance. An American Translation* translates this word by “this critical time” and Moffatt by “Crisis.” The New English Bible renders the entire phrase as “in all this, remember how critical the moment is.” The Jerusalem Bible has “besides, you know ‘the time’ has come,” with a long note explaining the meaning of “the time.” In English the word hour (so Good News Translation and Revised Standard Version) seems to come nearest to expressing Paul’s meaning and eliminates the need for a long theological note. In some languages, however, the word “day” comes closer to expressing “critical time”—for example, “you must do this for you know this is the very day.” One must not assume that in such receptor languages “day” is taken any more literally than hour is in English.
In Greek verse 11 is all one sentence and the last part is “for now our salvation is nearer than when we believed.” The verb “believed” is an aorist tense and must be taken as a reference to the time in the past when the Roman Christians first became believers. For this reason the verb is best translated when we first believed (see also Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, Moffatt, An American Translation*). It is better to maintain the idea of “to believe” than to introduce a non-Pauline expression such as “than it was when we were converted.” If an object of the verb is demanded in the receptor language, then “Jesus Christ” is best supplied; one must avoid using a post-Pauline expression such as “than when we first accepted the faith.”
Once again a noun, “our salvation” is transformed by the Good News Translation into a verb phrase, the moment when we will be saved. If the passive expression we will be saved must be changed into an active one, then God is the agent: “when God will save us.”
In a number of languages the most appropriate general expression for time would not be moment but “day”; hence, “the day when God will save us is now closer than it was when we first believed in Jesus Christ.”
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 .