IS PAUL’S GOSPEL COUNTERIMPERIAL? EVALUATING THE
JETS 51/2 (June 2008) 309–37IS PAUL’S GOSPEL COUNTERIMPERIAL?EVALUATING THE PROSPECTS OF THE“FRESH PERSPECTIVE” FOR EVANGELICAL THEOLOGYdenny burk*i. introductionThe release of the new Superman movie in the summer of 2006 broughtwith it no little controversy when it became known that the new moviechanges one of the more well-known descriptors of Superman. The traditional, unredacted description of Superman says that he defends “truth,justice, and the American way.” But in the new movie, Superman fights for“truth, justice,” and “all that stuff.”1 The phrase’s omission in the new movieignited a political controversy among the usual suspects of the talking-headclass of American media—one side celebrating the new Superman’s globalappeal, and the other side lamenting the unpatriotic depiction of an Americanicon. These responses, predictably, reflected the polarization of the rightand left wings of the American political spectrum, with the right celebratingAmerican exceptionalism and with the left happy to see it removed fromthis popular expression.What was clear in the controversy, however, is that the once-noble idealof “the American way” has fallen into disrepute among many in Americaand abroad. Some analysts have argued that the American war in Iraq andPresident George W. Bush’s so-called “cowboy diplomacy”2 have played nosmall part in provoking a revival of domestic and foreign opposition to thevaunted “American way.” As Jonah Goldberg of The Los Angeles Timeshas said, “ ‘the American way’ now seems to have become code for arrogant* Denny Burk is assistant professor of New Testament at Criswell College, 4010 Gaston Ave.,Dallas, TX 75246.1Erik Lundegaard’s opinion editorial in The New York Times gives a history of the phrase“truth, justice, and the American way” in the Superman myth. He shows that the phrase was nota part of the original comic book, but emerged in the broadcasts of later radio and TV serial versionsof Superman. “The American way” seems to have been provoked in part by America’s struggleagainst fascism during World War II and communism during the Cold War (Erik Lundegaard,“Truth, Justice and (Fill in the Blank),” The New York Times [June 30, 2006]: Section A, page 23;on-line: aard.html).2Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar of Time magazine all but celebrate the demise of what theycall President Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” (Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar, “The End of CowboyDiplomacy: Why the Bush Doctrine no longer guides the foreign policy of the Bush Administration,”Time, vol. 168, no. 3 [July 17, 2006]).
310journal of the evangelical theological societyunilateralism that falls somewhere outside truth, justice and all that isgood.” 3The truth of the matter is that activists, politicians, and academic elitesof both America and Europe have been critical of the so-called “AmericanWay” for quite some time—at least inasmuch as the “American Way” isperceived by them as shorthand for a totalizing and oppressive AmericanEmpire. When Hugo Chávez stood before the United Nations and accusedAmerica of being an empire and charged President Bush with being thedevil incarnate, many Americans wrote off Chávez’s rant as the raving ofa crackpot dictator. 4 What many people did not realize was that Chávez’stirade against “American imperialism” reflects a fairly mainstream viewamong many scholars both within and outside of the United States. Chávezmerely gave a glimpse of the kinds of things that American academics likeNoam Chomsky have been saying for a very long time.5ii. american imperialism in new testament studiesSome people will be surprised to learn that the rhetoric of “empire” is notthe exclusive domain of secular activists and politicians. It is also the hallmark of a fledgling movement in the academic guild of NT studies. Evenamong scholars of the Bible there has been a growing antipathy towards aperceived pax Americana that is invading the world. The scholarship emerging in this movement seeks to read the NT in light of a Greco-Roman contextthat was dominated by Roman imperial ideology. While this new movementhas invaded historical Jesus and Gospel studies, 6 the movement has had aneven larger impact on Pauline scholarship.3Jonah Goldberg, “Superman vs. the Lone Ranger: Why are cosmopolitans embarrassed by theAmerican way?” The Los Angeles Times (July 6, 2006).4Hugo Chávez, “President Hugo Chávez Delivers Remarks at the U.N. General Assembly,” CQTranscripts Wire (September 20, 2006) accessed on-line: www.washingtonpost.com: “I think wecould call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the UnitedStates. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve thecurrent pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. . . . As Chomskysays here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its systemof domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to beconsolidated. . . . I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of yourdays as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up againstAmerican imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty ofnations. . . . Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against themodel of domination.”5Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York:Henry Holt, 2003).6E.g. Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). For a fairly recent counterpoint to Horsley, see Christopher Bryan,Render To Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005). Bryan points out that Richard Horsley and John Howard Yoder interpret the Gospelsto present Jesus as a non-violent rejection of Roman rule (p. 41). Bryan disagrees, contendingthat “Jesus stood foursquare with the biblical and prophetic attitudes toward political and imperialpower represented by Nathan, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Deutero-Isaiah: he would acknowledge suchpower, but he would also (and therefore) hold it accountable” (p. 42).One Line Long
is paul’s gospel counterimperial?311In what N. T. Wright has called a “Fresh Perspective” (FP) on Paul,7 thisnew strand of scholarship holds as axiomatic at least two assumptions, witha third assumption being increasingly advocated in the literature.8 First, itis assumed that the Roman imperial cult was pervasive in Paul’s missionarycontext. 9 Second, Paul’s gospel is, therefore, both theo-political and counterimperial 10 in that it offers an explicit (and sometimes “coded”) repudiationof the Roman Empire. Third, “Paul’s gospel [therefore] confronts all imperialsystems, and especially the new American empire of global consumerismand military might.” 11 In this new movement, the analogy 12 between Americaand Rome is so direct, that Pauline repudiations of the “powers”13 of his dayimply a direct confrontation of American imperial power in our own day.Thus the FP on Paul confirms the critique of American “empire” that hasbecome increasingly common among detractors of American empire such asChávez and Chomsky.The contemporary political implications of reading Paul in this light werebrought out in a conference held at Union Theological Seminary in New York(October 29–30, 2004), just a week or so before the hotly contested Presidential election of 2004. Hal Taussig described the conference this way:The very fact of the conference marked a paradigm shift for the field of NewTestament Studies. . . . Convened at a time where empire had re-emerged as oneof the most dangerous and frightening phenomena of our time, the conferenceaddressed directly the ways the New Testament today can help shape ways ofresisting and negotiating the realities of arrogant American power today. 147The phrase “fresh perspective” was coined by N. T. Wright in his 2000 Manson MemorialLecture at the University of Manchester, a lecture which was subsequently published as “A FreshPerspective on Paul?,” BJRL 83 (2001) 21–39. Wright’s recent short work on Paul also uses theterm: Paul: In Fresh Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). Although there are differences amongthe various scholars who have done work in this area, I will use “Fresh Perspective” as shorthandfor the various counter-imperial approaches to interpreting Paul’s letters.8I have taken this three-part outline of the fresh perspective from Michael J. Gorman, “Thegospel alternative,” ChrCent 122 (2005) 36.9The emperor cult flourished primarily in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. N. T.Wright, “A Fresh Perspective on Paul?” 22–23: “In Rome itself, as is well known, the Julio-Claudianemperors did not receive explicit divine honours until after their death. . . . But in the East—andthe East here starts, effectively, in Greece, not just in Egypt—the provinces saw no need forrestraint. With a long tradition of ruler-cults going back at least to Alexander the Great, localcities and provinces were in many cases only too happy to demonstrate their loyalty to the emperorby establishing a cult in his honour.”10Ibid.11Ibid.12Richard Horsley comments on the alleged analogy between America and Rome: “The UnitedStates became the heir of the world empire and now, as the only remaining superpower, indeedstands at the apex of a new world order. . . . Many Americans cannot avoid the awkward feelingthat they are now more analogous to imperial Rome than they are to the ancient Middle Easternpeople who celebrated their origins in God’s liberation from harsh service to a foreign ruler andlived according to the covenantal principles of social-economic justice. Their imperial position inthe new world (dis)order may be particularly awkward for Americans reflective about Christianorigins. For Jesus of Nazareth carried out his mission precisely among an ancient Middle Easternpeople who had been subjected by the Roman Empire” (Richard Horsley, Jesus and Empire 5).13E.g. Col 2:10, 15.14Hal Taussig, “Prologue: A Door Thrown Open,” USQR 59 (2005) 1.
312journal of the evangelical theological societyMajor papers from this conference were subsequently published in 2005in volume 59 of the Union Seminary Quarterly Review (USQR), which wastitled New Testament and Roman Empire: Shifting Paradigms for Interpretation. 15 In an introductory essay, the editors described the meeting this way:Participants at this trans-disciplinary and multi-media meeting discusseda reconsideration of the Roman empire as the New Testament’s socio-politicalcontext, examined the political resistance of early Christian communities, andconsidered and debated implications of reading the New Testament differentlyfor resistance to imperial presumptions of twenty-first century American power.We live in a context where the public face of New Testament interpretationis increasingly represented as either esoteric and irrelevant due to the perceivedintrospection of biblical scholars, or counter-productive to progressive theological praxis due to the dominance of right-wing Christian fundamentalistorientations. . . . [T]he call to resist complicity with empire in all areas is embedded in the most sacred and ancient of Christian scriptures. 16Contributors to this volume include several of the so-called “courageouspioneers” of this new scholarship: Richard Horsley, John Dominic Crossan,Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Brigette Kahl, and Waren Carter.17 One ofthese pioneers, Richard Horsley, is perhaps best known for his watershed1997 work Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, 18which is a collection of essays that brings together some of the cutting-edgescholarship concerning Paul, his letters, and his imperial context. But it ishis little book on Jesus and Empire that gives perhaps the clearest expression of the political implications of his reading of Scripture. It is here thathe tells how his reading of the Bible informs his interpretation of Americanempire and its role in the world. I quote at length:[After World War II] the United States systematically built what can only,in retrospect, be called its own empire. American’s reluctance about their empirecame out most strongly of course in the movement against the Vietnam War,which seriously divided the country. Nevertheless, President Reagan soon hadAmericans “standing tall” again, with an unprecedented military buildup andforays into Grenada and Panama.With the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, many Americans proudlyclaimed that the United States had “won” the Cold War. America emerged as15USQR 59/3–4 (2005).“Editorial Statement,” USQR 59 (2005) vii.17Richard A. Horsley, “Jesus and Empire,” USQR 59 (2005) 44–74; J. D. Crossan, “Paul andRome: The Challenge of a Just World Order,” USQR 59/3–4 (2005) 6–20; Elisabeth SchüsslerFiorenza, “Empire and Christian Testament Studies,” USQR 59/3–4 (2005) 131–39; Warren Carter,“Matthew and Empire,” USQR 59 (2005) 86–91; Brigitte Kahl, “Reading Galatians and Empire atthe Great Altar of Pergamon” USQR 59 (2005) 21–43.18Richard A. Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society(ed. Richard A. Horsley; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997). Richard Horsley, Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is the driving force behind the“Paul and Politics” group at the Society of Biblical Literature and has edited three other significant collections of essays. The first is Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000); the second Paul and the Roman Imperial Order(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2004); and the third is Hidden Transcripts and theArts of Resistance (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004).16
is paul’s gospel counterimperial?313the only remaining superpower. . . . Under another President George (W.) Bush,the U.S. government made dramatic moves to indicate that it would no longerabide by previous international agreements but would act unilaterally. Afterall, it was the sole superpower.After September 11, 2001, however . . . Americans experienced a rude awakening to the new world disorder. . . .Many Americans also began to ask, “Why do they hate us so?” And that ledto the painful recognition that not just Arab/Muslim people but many others aswell had already been asking a corresponding question: Why do Americans hateus so? The United States killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the bombing of Baghdad in Desert Storm. America caused the death of a half millioninfants and children through the sanctions against Iraq that denied themneeded medicines and adequate health care. The United States, an ostensiblyChristian country, violates the holy ground of Islam in basing military forcesin Saudi Arabia, forces that also prop up the unpopular Saudi regime thatoppresses its own people. And, say Muslims and other Arabs, America sideswith Israel in oppression of the Palestinians. Before all this, the United Statesdropped napalm and antipersonnel bombs from the sky on the Vietnamesepeople, and trained the Latin American militaries that oppressed and oftenmassacred their own peoples.More generally, the United States consumes a huge percentage of the world’sresources, including fossil fuels for SUV’s, and then refuses to go along withthe Kyoto treaty to slow down global warming that threatens life on the planet.Now global capitalism, which is not identical with but is centered in the UnitedStates, effectively controls the economy of nearly every country in the world, tomany peoples’ detriment. Even if one believes that the power that really controls the world is now global capitalism, it appears that in the twentieth centurythe United States became the heir of the world empire and now, as the onlyremaining superpower, indeed stands at the apex of a new world order. . . .The United States would have a hard time convincing the world that it isstill practicing republican virtue. Given the United States’ behavior in the world,it would be difficult for Americans to claim that they are still a biblical peoplewho hold liberation and covenantal justice as core values and commitments.Indeed, many Americans cannot avoid the awkward feeling that they are nowmore analogous to imperial Rome than they are to the ancient Middle Easternpeople who celebrated their origins in God’s liberation from harsh service to aforeign ruler. . . . 19Here Horsley describes an American cultural context that is in captivity tothe ideology of empire. What Horsley and others argue is that by and largethe whole of Western Christendom has been captivated by this pervertedideology and has subsequently missed the Bible’s counter-imperial message.It is for this reason that Hal Taussig praises “the emergence of this new fieldof study” and laments that Christians have missed the counter-imperialmessage of the Bible throughout the millennia. He writes,How New Testament scholarship, most Christian interpretation over the lastmillennium, and countless assemblies of worship and research could have missedthe contrast with Roman imperial power at the heart of early Christianity19Horsley, Jesus and Empire 3–5.
314journal of the evangelical theological societydefies imagination. One can only account for this unbelievable ignorance as ahaunting tribute to the power of denial and the complicity of Christendom inimperial domination over the past 1,200 years. 20In other words, centuries of pro-imperial prejudice have suffocated the trulycounter-imperial message of Paul. Here Taussig effectively puts into the dockthe entire history of Western interpretation of Paul’s letters.21In light of such sweeping claims, evangelicals who are concerned to seethe Bible’s authoritative message faithfully translated and applied to all areasof life will want to evaluate carefully the aims of the FP. The question,therefore, that I want to consider in the next section of this essay is this:Does this FP on Paul provide evangelicals a helpful approach to understanding the Pauline witness in his 13 NT letters? 22 Are the analogiesbetween America and Rome helpful in bringing the biblical witness to bearupon contemporary world politics? What I hope to show is that the counterimperial interpretations of Paul are motivated not merely by a “fresh” andmore accurate understanding of his letters but also by the desire of someto find in Paul an endorsement of their own political and cultural biases. Isuggest that while evangelicals may debate the pro’s and con’s of empires,this eisegetical hermeneutic does not produce a better understanding ofPaul or a more faithful application of his message. Regardless of how oneevaluates the historical claims of the fresh perspective, reading a counterimperial (and thus anti-American) bias into Paul’s gospel is not a helpfulway for evangelicals to approach Paul’s letters.iii. evaluating the fresh perspectiveThat being said, it would be an error to dismiss outright all of the scholarship adduced by counter-imperial approaches to Paul’s writings. Our knowl20Hal Taussig, “Prologue: A Door Thrown Open,” USQR 59 (2005) 2: “This volume . . . meansto mark a break with New Testament scholarship’s complicity with the imperial and imperiouscultural domination of the West.”21We have to question whether that last 1,200 years of Pauline interpretation has really beenas unenlightened as Taussig alleges. Is it not possible that no one has read the Scriptures in thisway because this new way of interpretation marks an innovation that the authors of the Scripturesdid not intend? Ironically, to foreclose that kind of possibility sounds like the kind of imperial powerplay that scholars often use when they desire to disenfranchise what G. K. Chesterton called the“democracy of the dead” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1908] 64–65). Not every new idea is a good one, nor is bowing to the latest fad in biblical criticism.22I recognize that some readers will not grant that the thirteen canonical letters bearing Paul’sname are actually authentic. Nevertheless, I believe that there are good reasons to believe thatthe apostle Paul wrote all thirteen. But defending that thesis is well beyond the purview of thisessay. So I beg the reader’s indulgence on this point. For the purposes of this essay, I will followthe lead Thomas R. Schreiner provides in his Pauline theology: “I do not argue the case for authenticity in my theology; instead I refer the readers to others who have made the case effectively. ThePauline theology offered here is distinctive in that all thirteen letters ascribed to Paul are minedto decipher his theology” (Paul Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology [DownersGrove: InterVarsity, 2001] 10). Commentators who have ably defended the authenticity of thePastoral Epistles include J. N. D. Kelly, Joachim Jeremias, Donald Guthrie, Gordon Fee, GeorgeKnight III, Philip H. Towner, Luke Timothy Johnson, William Mounce, and Thomas C. Oden.
is paul’s gospel counterimperial?315edge of the Roman Empire in the first century and consequently our understanding of the historical backdrop of Paul’s letters and mission have beengreatly enhanced by this scholarship. This contribution has value for a varietyof reasons. Nevertheless, not every historical insight has led to commensurate insight into the interpretation of Paul’s epistles. Sometimes the agendato achieve a “political” reading of Paul domesticates what Paul really said byforcing him onto a Procrustean bed of political ideology. When this happens,the message of the great apostle to the Gentiles gets sidelined. So while Ihope to affirm the best of the FP’s historical insights, the following evaluation will urge some caution with respect to the way those insights have beenapplied to the interpretation of Paul’s letters. These cautions do not applyequally to every scholar who has contributed to the literature in this field.But they are a relevant critique to some of the broad currents appearing inthis field of study. I will illustrate some of these trends with representativeexamples from the literature.1. Caution about the use of parallels. Biblical scholars have been chastened in their use of parallels for over forty years now by a little articleby Samuel Sandmel entitled “Parallelomania.”23 Sandmel warns against the“extravagance” of biblical scholars which first overemphasizes the allegedsimilarity of passages to establish “parallels” with the Bible and then seeksto describe the significance of those parallels as if they implied some necessary literary connection. 24 Sandmel’s warning applies in the present case inat least one important way. FP readings of Paul rely heavily on verbal parallels between Paul’s letters and the Caesar cult. 25 While verbal parallelscertainly exist between Paul’s vocabulary and that of the imperial cult, thecareful exegete will exercise caution in assessing the significance of thoseparallels. This warning should be heeded especially where Paul’s vocabularyoverlaps with both the imperial cult and the lxx. The tendency in FP exegesis is to identify such parallels and to assume almost automatically thatthey constitute evidence of some formal (perhaps literary) connection,implying that Paul deliberately chooses such terms in order to subvertthe ideology of emperor worship. This procedure is problematic because the23Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” JBL 81 (1962) 1–13. See also the related essay by T. L.Donaldson, “Parallels: Use, Misuse and Limitations,” EvQ 55 (1983) 193–210.24We must note that not all of the FP’s alleged parallels are between Paul and literarysources. See, e.g., John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’sApostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom: A New Vision of Paul’s Words & World (SanFrancisco: Harper, 2004), which draws heavily from archeological discoveries. Nevertheless, theapplication of Sandmel’s principle still applies.25Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society 140–41: “The starting point in recognizing that Paul was preaching an anti-imperial gospel is that much of his keylanguage would have evoked echoes of the imperial cult and ideology. . . . Insofar as Paul deliberately used language closely associated with the imperial religion, he was presenting his gospel asa direct competitor of the gospel of Caesar. . . . Paul’s borrowing from and allusions to languagecentral to the imperial cult and ideology reveal and dramatize just how anti-imperial his owngospel was.”
316journal of the evangelical theological societyassessment of the significance of the parallels is subject to being predetermined by an agenda to have a “political” reading of Paul, rather thanby paying close attention to what Paul is actually saying. 26 A reader isscarcely in a position to offer an objective evaluation of such parallels whenhis or her interpretation is being dictated by the conscious intention to challenge “conservative” readings of Paul. 27The examples of this kind of use of parallels are too numerous to reproduce here, 28 so I select only a few by way of illustration. Note first of allJ. R. Harrison’s 2002 article in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, “Paul and the Imperial Gospel at Thessaloniki.” 29 Harrison observesthat the term kuv rioÍ was used from the time of Augustus onwards as anhonorific term for the Caesars in the imperial cult. 30 Thus, for Paul to callJesus kuv rioÍ 31 meant that he was saying that Caesar is not kuv rioÍ. Such aclaim would have provoked a hostile response from subjects who may havebeen required to take a loyalty oath to Caesar. 32 In this way, Harrison identifies several other key terms in the Thessalonian epistles that have parallelsin both Jewish apocalyptic literature and the imperial cult: parousÇa andejpifavneia (1 Thess 4:15; 2 Thess 2:8); a pavnthsiÍ (1 Thess 4:17); e rhvnh kaµa sfavleia (1 Thess 5:3); swthrÇa and ejlpÇÍ (1 Thess 5:8–9). Paul’s use of eachof them (it is argued) constitutes a critique of the imperial propaganda ofhis day. 3326D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo’s caution about using backgrounds in general is instructive:“Apparent parallels to New Testament texts may so domesticate those texts that the meaning ofthe ‘parallel’ is read back into the New Testament, making it impossible to hear what the NewTestament is actually saying. . . . Sometimes the nature of the ostensible background is itselfdisputed, and in any case, it should not be allowed to control the exegesis of the New Testament.The first obligation of the interpreter of the New Testament is to try to understand the thoughtsof these documents on their own terms” (An Introduction to the New Testament [2nd ed.; GrandRapids: Zondervan, 2005] 68–69).27According to Richard Horsley, the SBL’s “Paul and Politics” group is composed of “those readyto contest the standard interpretation of Paul as a social-political conservative strictly obedientto the empire of which he was supposedly a citizen” (“Introduction: Krister Stendahl’s Challengeto Pauline Studies,” in Paul and Politics 11).28See, e.g., Crossan and Reed, In Search of Paul 11: “Christians must have understood, then,that to proclaim Jesus as Son of God was deliberately denying Caesar is highest title and that toannounce Jesus as Lord and Savior was calculated treason.”29J. R. Harrison, “Paul and the Imperial Gospel at Thessaloniki,” JSNT 25 (2002) 71–96.30Ibid. 78.311 Thess 1:1, 3, 6, 8; 2:15, 19; 3:8, 11, 12, 13; 4:1, 2, 6, 15, 16, 17; 5:2, 9, 12, 23, 27, 28.32Harrison observes that the people of Aritium swore the following loyalty oath to the emperorCaligula just thirteen years before 1 Thessalonians was written: “On my conscience, I shall be anenemy of those persons whom I know to be enemies of Gaius Caesar Germanicus, and if anyoneimperils or shall imperil him or his safety by arms or civil war I shall not cease to hunt him downby land and by sea, until he pays the penalty to Caesar in full. I shall not hold myself or my childrendearer than his safety and I shall consider as my enemies those persons who are hostile to him.If consciously I swear falsely or am proved false may Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the deifiedAugustus and all the other immortal gods punish me and my children with loss of country, safety,and all my fortune” (CIL II 172, quoted in J. R. Harrison, “Paul and the Imperial Gospel at Thessaloniki” 80).33Harrison, “Paul and the Imperial Gospel at Thessaloniki” 82–88.
is paul’s gospel counterimperial?317Of course, there is little doubt that Harrison has identified legitimateparallels between Paul and the emperor cult. But it is his assessment of thevalue of those parallels that is the question. To what extent are the parallelsdue merely to the fact that Paul and the imperial cult were drawing fromthe common stock of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part ofthe Roman Empire? Is it not possible that terms such as these would havebeen utilized by almost any religion drawing from the Greek language?Harrison himself acknowledges that the use of kuv rioÍ was not an innovationof the imperial cult, but rather that the imperial cult had appropriated theterm from “the eastern ruler cult.” 34 To some extent, therefore, we cannotrule out the possibility that some parallels are due to the fact that differentmovements are grabbing theopolitical language from the same linguisticbag. 35 Furthermore, it is manifestly clear that Paul’s selection of terms isdriven in large part by his interface with the lxx Scriptures. With respectto kuv rioÍ in particular, Paul’s primary motivation for using this term wouldhave been his desire to link Messiah Jesus with the “Lord” of the Greek OT,where the
call President Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” (Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar, “The End of Cowboy Diplomacy: Why the Bush Doctrine no longer guides the foreign policy of the Bush Administration,” Time, vol. 168, no. 3 [July 17, 2006]). * Denny Burk is assistant professor of New Testament at Criswell College, 4010 Gaston Ave., Dallas, TX 75246.
apocryphal gospel texts include the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Arabic Infancy Gospel, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Nico demus. Then there are numerous apocryphal Acts centring on the derring-do of Paul, Peter and other ea
The Gospel of the Nazarenes; or the Hebrew Gospel of MatthewMatthew This version of Matthew restores passages found in the original gospel by utilizing quotations from the lost Gospel of the Nazarenes (in black bold underlined letters) and alternate readings in the Codex Bezae (in red letters).
Mark’s Gospel The Beginning of the Good News & the New Way of Salvation To engage with Mark’s Gospel it helps first to understand what a written Gospel is and recognize what the Gospel can do for us and our spirituality. The Greek word for gospel (euangelion) meant simply a message of
discussion focuses on texts usually referred to as Gnostic gospels (the Gospel of Thomas , the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary ), but he also refers to other non-canonical gospels such as the Gospel of the Nazoraeans and the Gospel of Peter . 5 Ibid., 29. The chapter in which this discussion occurs is entitled When is a gospel
The central message of the gospel has been expressed in various ways in our time. N.T. Wright, for example, claims that ―‗The gospel' is not ‗you can be saved, and here's how;' the gospel, for Paul, is ‗Jesus Christ is Lord.'‖ 1 When asked, ―how would you present the gospel on Twitter,‖ Rob Bell responded:
gospel. Read Galatians 1: 11-12. In the first two chapters Paul argues for the divine origin of his gospel, a gospel that he did not receive from human sources. We find the heart of Paul's message in Galatians, as well as the heart of his gospel, in Galatians 2: 16: "A person is ju
1. The influence of the letter 2. New challenges to old traditions 3. Paul’s purposes in writing 4. A brief overview of Romans Introduction: The gospel of God and Paul’s eagerness to share it (1:1–17) 1. Paul and the gospel (1:1–6) 2. Paul and the Romans (1:7–13) 3. Paul and evangelism (1:14–17) A. The wrath of God against all .
2 General tips for the online map update Since maps can become out of date they are updated on a regular basis. The following options are available for carrying out updates in the multimedia system:
