Customer Reviews

John and Empire: Initial Explorations

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In this book Warren Carter presents a thorough and detailed study of those passages in John's Gospel that resonate with titles and concepts familiar in the Roman society of the day. He argues that these concepts were so common that a writer such as John could not ignore them or fail to respond to them when writing his Gospel.
Carter's characteristic term is "negotiation" to describe the relationship between the Ephesian Christians and their Roman overlords. Roman domination is a fact of life in Ephesus, and the Christians there have to negotiate a modus vivendi, a way of living under that domination without compromising their faith.
Unlike other studies (such as that of Thatcher) Carter's actually concludes that some Christians had been so successful in that negotiation that they were over-assimilated to their environment, so that John has to employ a "rhetoric of distance" to call them back from their over-comfortable position.
It is tempting to suggest that the Johannine Christians were "comfortable" in their relationship with the dominant Roman authorities because many of the issues that Carter alludes to were not in fact issues for them at all. Although the writer of the Fourth Gospel and his readers were undoubtedly well aware of contemporary political realities in the Roman world in which they lived, evidence is lacking that they felt oppressed or persecuted within that world at the time the Fourth Gospel was written and first read. Later, yes - at that time, no. The present reviewer feels that Carter, like many who follow the "political tract" interpretation of the New Testament seriously overstate the case and go beyond the available evidence when arguing that the New Testament writers felt the need to respond to serious ideological and political threats from the Roman authorities.
See for example the reviewer's article "My Kingdom is not of this world: reading John in Imperial Ephesus" set out in [...], a paper read at the Evangelical Theological Society AGM in New Orleans, November 2009.