These verses are nothing other than an exegesis of the scripture quotation given in verse 3. Verse 4 is an illustration from everyday life: the man who works receives his wages from something he has earned, not as a gift. But despite the fact that matters of work and wages are commonplace, the semantic and syntactic construction of this verse may require considerable alteration—for example, “A man who works gets money for what he has done, but people do not say that his money is a gift; rather, they say that he earned it.” The second clause of verse 4 may also be rendered as “but he does not think that his wages are something which the one who hired him gave him as a gift.”

Verse 5 takes up where Paul left off in the previous verse. Here the contrast between “work and wages” and “faith and grace” is made clear. It is the faith of the believer that God takes into account, not the works of the man who tries to earn his own salvation. In these two verses there is a play on words which is almost impossible to introduce in a translation: regarded and takes into account are the same words in Greek. Declares … innocent renders the verb which is translated elsewhere to be put right with God. As indicated earlier, this verb was one which Paul took over from the law court; and he uses it to describe the man whom God had declared innocent in his court, and who therefore was in a right relation with God. In order to put him right with himself (literally “for righteousness”) is actually a noun phrase, and has essentially the same meaning as the verb phrase just discussed.

The translation of verse 5 involves two principal problems. The first is in the rendering of works, and the second involves the rather extreme complexity of relations between the various events expressed in this rather long sentence.

One difficulty arises from the fact that there is an abrupt shift in the area of meaning of works from verse 4 to verse 5. In verse 4 work is to be understood in the ordinary sense of working for pay. In verse 5, however, the concern is not with work in the ordinary sense of physical activity but with “working for merit with God.” In order to indicate this difference in the meaning of work in verse 5, some translators have transposed the first clause to follow the clause dealing with faith in God—for example, “the man who puts his faith in God rather than in his work” or “the man who trusts God rather than his work.” This, however, still implies a rather specialized meaning for the word “work.” Hence, in some languages “work” has been made quite specific—for example, “as for the man who does not work to gain merit with God” or “… to gain God’s favor.” But even in this instance it may be better to place the initial clause after the clause speaking of faith in God—for example, “as for the man who trusts God rather than trusting in what he does to gain God’s favor.”

Since there are seven different basic clause structures in verse 5, it is by no means easy to arrange them in such a manner that they will be clearly related one to another, particularly in languages in which words such as “faith” must be expressed as verbs, and in which the passives must be changed to actives. A proper treatment of the restrictive attributive clause who declares the guilty to be innocent complicates the picture even further, and in some instances the rearrangement requires certain radical shifts—for example, “But let us consider the man who trusts God rather than trusting in his works. God then takes into account the fact that this man trusts him and he says this guilty man is really innocent. In this way God puts the man right with himself.” Or, “Let us think about the man who simply trusts God rather than trusting what he does to gain God’s favor. It is God, of course, who can say this guilty man is innocent, and thus it is God who takes into account this man’s faith in order to put the man right with God himself.” As in all such instances of restructuring, it is essential that careful attention be paid to the pronominal reference in order to avoid misleading or awkward constructions.

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 .