The Upper Register Blog

I was present but my memory was fading, so I began listening to the MP3 of the debate between John M. G. Barclay and N. T. Wright on “Paul and Empire” held at SBL in San Diego on Monday afternoon, November 19, 2007. Here are my notes, at times verbatim, from the first 20 minutes of Barclay’s lecture. When I do quote verbatim, I use the block-quote format.

John M. G. Barclay:  “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul”

This is the second round of a fight that started in March earlier this year. Tom and I are old friends. We go back some 28 years. I regard Tom’s work as the most balanced, measured, comprehensive, and theologically developed in the “Paul and Empire” coalition. Yet I regard his thesis as fundamentally wrong.

Areas of agreement with N. T. Wright:

Shared deep suspicion of imperial power, whether Roman, British, or American. Paul does not recognize the boundary between religion and politics. Agreement that we should not consider Paul an apolitical figure with a privatized piety. Paul is very interested in power, but does not line up on either right or left of political spectrum. Agreement that Paul’s gospel is deeply confrontational, the reign of Christ versus his enemies. The cross creates a distinction between this age and the new creation. Endorse Tom’s attempt to integrate Paul’s political thought with the rest of his theology. Agreement that we should learn from Classical scholars that the imperial cult was extremely important for most of Paul’s contemporaries in the form of festivals, games, statues, coins, temples, etc. Even agree that some of Paul’s language (euangelion, soter, kyrios, parousia, ereine, etc.) could have been heard as analogous to the language used in Imperial propaganda. But the question is not how it could have been heard, but how Paul meant it, how he framed and focused it.

Tom reads Paul’s theology as intended to counter the propaganda claims of the Roman Empire, to parody and upstage Caesar, and to undermine the Imperial cult … Tom finds this assault on Rome sometimes explicit, often implicit in Paul’s language and narrative, and occasionally – as in Philippians 3 — in code. I think, to the contrary, that Tom is simply hallucinating [laughter], that there is no evidence that Paul had the Roman Empire or the Imperial cult particularly in view, and that better understood, Paul’s theology is deeply political, but in a way that makes Rome, not a central player in the history of the world, but a bit-part, a member of a largely undifferentiated crowd in a drama governed by much greater and much more pervasive powers. [Minutes 6-7]

Negatively:

There is no evidence that Paul accords special role to Roman emperor. He never refers to any Roman governors or emperors by name, although he does mention King Aratus, thus showing he’s not averse to naming rulers. Paul never refers to Roman deities. He never refers to his Roman citizenship positively or negatively. He never identifies the cross as a Roman punishment. It is the Jews (1 Thess 2:14) or the nameless ”rulers of this age” (1 Cor 2:6-8) who killed Christ. The offence of the cross is drawn out in relation to the Jews and the Greeks, never in relation to the Romans in particular. Paul attributes his punishments and persecutions to the Jews, never to the Roman authorities. When he does refer to civil rulers, they are always anonymous and never specifically identified with Rome.

Tom and others in the ”Paul and Empire” coalition argue that Paul uses “code” or “hidden transcripts.” This whole scenario strikes me as absurd. There is not a single hint in Paul’s writings of a second meaning. Why on earth would Paul need to write in code? Paul’s letters are private communications carried by trusted friends. There were no secret police in Paul’s day opening the early Christians’ mail to look for signs of political insubordination.

What would Paul be saying that needed to be coded? That Caesar is not God or son of God? Philo said so openly and more or less directly to the emperor’s face. That Roman governors were responsible for terrible miscarriages of justice? Josephus says that time and again in public writings that were even presented to emperors. That the empire brings as much war as peace, injustice as justice? Even Tacitus, from the heart of the establishment, can see that and say that in his famed history of Rome. That one should not take part in the Imperial cult? Paul said that in 1 Corinthians with regard to eidolothuta.  Josephus said the cult was useful neither to God nor human beings. The image of Paul as too afraid to say what he thinks strikes me as bizarre. Paul expected persecution. He would hardly have tried to avoid it by speaking in code.

We should learn from the history of exegesis:  the Valentinians teach us that once you start looking for code in Paul, you can end up just about anywhere you want.

At base, Tom’s argument works by inference:  the Roman Empire was so important, Paul must have said something specifically about it. Rome and Caesar must be somewhere in Paul’s letters. We just have to adjust our spectacles. But if we are determined to find it, we will.

You know the story of the little boy in the crowd watching as the emperor paraded down the street in his supposedly new clothes and was bold enough to say, “But the emperor is naked!” I feel like that little boy, only in this case, when I am bidden to watch the emperor walking around Paul’s letters, I rudely blurt out, “But I see no emperor!” [Laughter] Sorry to be so impolite, but I try to tell the truth. 28 years ago you taught me, Tom, in reading the New Testament to pay very close attention to what is actually there and not to read any theologies or history-of-religions backgrounds that have to be imported into the text. I learned well from you during those two enthralling years of Cambridge supervision and I have come back to remind you of your lesson. [Laughter]

But what if Paul has his own peculiar perception of the world? What if the event that dominates history for Paul is not the Roman Empire but the cross and resurrection of Jesus and the new creation that these events inaugurated? What if that event changes Paul’s understanding of history? We have to read Paul’s letters according to his vision of reality, not according to that of his contemporaries.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under SBL, N. T. Wright, Paul & Empire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.