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How did the imperial cult affect Christians in the Roman Empire? “Jesus is lord, not Caesar.” Many scholars and preachers attribute mistreatment of early Christians by Roman authorities to this fundamental confessional conflict. But this mantra relies on a reductive understanding of the imperial cult. D. Clint Burnett examines copious evidence—literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological—to more accurately reconstruct Christian engagement with imperial divine honors. Outdated narratives often treat imperial divine honors as uniform and centralized, focusing on the city of Rome. Instead, Burnett examines divine honors in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth. While all three cities incorporated imperial cultic activity in their social, religious, economic, and political life, the purposes and contours of the practice varied based on the city’s unique history. For instance, Thessalonica paid divine honors to living Julio-Claudians as tribute for their status as a free city in the empire—and Christian resistance to the practice was seen as a threat to that independence. Ultimately, Burnett argues that early Christianity was not specifically antigovernment but more broadly countercultural, and that responses to this stance ranged from conflict to apathy. Burnett’s compelling argument challenges common assumptions about the first Christians’ place in the Roman Empire. This fresh account will benefit Christians seeking to understand their faith’s place in public life today.
Over the centuries, Paul has been understood as the prototypical convert from Judaism to Christianity. At the time of Pauls conversion, however, Christianity did not yet exist. Moreover, Paul says nothing to indicate that he was abandoning Judaism or Israel. He, in fact, understood his mission as the fulfillment of the promises to Israel and of Israels own destiny. In brief, Pauls gospel and mission were set over against the Roman Empire, not Judaism.
In this book Bruce Winter explores the varied responses of the first Christians to requirements to render divine honors to the Caesars as the conventional public expression of loyalty to Rome and its rulers. How did they cope with the culture of emperor worship when they were required to give their undivided loyalty to Jesus? First examining the significant primary evidence of emperor worship and the enormous societal pressure the first Christians would have faced to participate in it, Winter then looks at specific New Testament evidence in light of his findings. He examines individual cities and provinces and the different ways in which Christians responded to the pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and participate in the conventional expressions of loyalty to the Roman Empire.
“Above all, Romans is a letter about Spirit-enabled participation and transformation in Christ and his story, and thus in the mission of God in the world.” This commentary engages the letter to the Romans as Christian scripture and highlights the Pauline themes for which Michael Gorman is best known—participation and transformation, cruciformity and new life, peace and justice, community and mission. With extensive introductions both to the apostle Paul and to the letter itself, Gorman offers background information on Paul’s first-century context before proceeding into the rich theological landscape of the biblical text. In line with Paul’s focus on Christian living, Gorman interprets Romans at a consistently practical level, highlighting the letter’s significance for Christian theology, daily life, and pastoral ministry. Questions for reflection and sidebars on important concepts make this especially useful for those preparing to preach or teach from Romans—the “epistle of life,” as Gorman calls it, for its extraordinary promise that, through faith, we might walk in newness of life with Christ.
The five articles and Simon Price's response at the core of this book were originally papers delivered in a session of the Paul and Politics Group at the 2000 SBL Annual Meeting. There are a number of special features that make this a special combination of articles on Paul in what is turning out to be a highly suggestive new perspective and context, the ancient Roman imperial order. First, these articles are all informed by and respond in some way to the ground-breaking work of Simon Price on the Roman imperial cult in Greek cities, some of the very cities in which Paul carried out his mission. Invited as a special guest of the SBL for the 2000 Annual Meeting, Price was the respondent to these papers and interaction with him has aided the authors in their revisions. The articles bring a rich variety of fresh perspectives to issues of the relation of Paul and the Roman imperial order, including postcolonial theory, political-anthropological theory (James C. Scott), postcolonial theory, and feminist theory, along with the new perspective on the imperial cult represented by Price. This collection of articles thus stands at the cutting edge of new scholarship on Paul's mission and letters in his political and cultural context. Contributors for this book include Robert Jewett, Abraham Smith, Neil Elliott, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Efrain Agosto, Erik Heen, Jennifer Wright Knust, and Simon R.F. Price. Richard A. Horsley is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation and Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society.
Winter (divinity, U. of Cambridge) is not concerned about where Paul went from there, but about what happened in Corinth after he was gone. He gathers all the extant material he can find from literary, nonliterary, and archaeological sources on what life was like in the first-century Roman colony, focusing particularly the important role culture played in the life of the Christians. c. Book News Inc.
"This book serves as an introduction to inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world that demonstrates sound methodological use of inscriptions in the study of the New Testament"--
Pauline Christianity sprang to life in a world of imperial imagery. In the streets and at the thoroughfares, in the market places and on its public buildings and monuments, and especially on its coins the Roman Empire's imperial iconographers displayed imagery that aimed to persuade the Empire's diverse and mostly illiterate inhabitants that Rome had a divinely appointed right to rule the world and to be honoured and celebrated for its dominion. Harry O. Maier places the later, often contested, letters and theology associated with Paul in the social and political context of the Roman Empire's visual culture of politics and persuasion to show how followers of the apostle visualized the reign of Christ in ways consistent with central themes of imperial iconography. They drew on the Empire's picture language to celebrate the dominion and victory of the divine Son, Jesus, to persuade their audiences to honour his dominion with praise and thanksgiving. Key to this imperial embrace were Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles. Yet these letters remain neglected territory in consideration of engagement with and reflection of imperial political ideals and goals amongst Paul and his followers. This book fills a gap in scholarly work on Paul and Empire by taking up each contested letter in turn to investigate how several of its main themes reflect motifs found in imperial images.
Given the dearth of non-messianic interpretations of Psalm 110:1 in non-Christian Second Temple Jewish texts, why did it become such a widely used messianic prooftext in the New Testament and early Christianity? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on why the earliest Christians first began to use Ps 110:1. The result is that these proposals do not provide an adequate explanation for why first century Christians living in the Greek East employed the verse and also applied it to Jesus’s exaltation. I contend that two Greco-Roman politico-religious practices, royal and imperial temple and throne sharing—which were cross-cultural rewards that Greco-Roman communities bestowed on beneficent, pious, and divinely approved rulers—contributed to the widespread use of Ps 110:1 in earliest Christianity. This means that the earliest Christians interpreted Jesus’s heavenly session as messianic and thus political, as well as religious, in nature.
John Dominic Crossan, the eminent historical Jesus scholar, and Jonathan L. Reed, an expert in biblical archaeology, reveal through archaeology and textual scholarship that Paul, like Jesus, focused on championing the Kingdom of God––a realm of justice and equality––against the dominant, worldly powers of the Roman empire. Many theories exist about who Paul was, what he believed, and what role he played in the origins of Christianity. Using archaeological and textual evidence, and taking advantage of recent major discoveries in Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Syria, Crossan and Reed show that Paul was a fallible but dedicated successor to Jesus, carrying on Jesus's mission of inaugurating the Kingdom of God on earth in opposition to the reign of Rome. Against the concrete backdrop of first–century Grego–Roman and Jewish life, In Search of Paul reveals the work of Paul as never before, showing how and why the liberating messages and practices of equality, caring for the poor, and a just society under God's rules, not Rome's, were so appealing. Readers interested in Paul as a historical figure and his place in the development of Christianity •Readers interested in archaeology and anthropology