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In Search of Paul: How Jesus' Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom

5 star:		(9)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have heard Crossan lecture, seen him on TV and read two of his books Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, and his memoir, A Long Way from Tipperary. I logged onto Amazon.com in the hopes of getting a copy of his newest book In Search of Paul co-authored with the archaeologist Jonathan Reed and read the review from Publishers Weekly. That review said it was only for scholars so I decided to avoid it, but then I saw Crossan do an absolutely fascinating PowerPoint presentation on "Religion & Empire, Faith & Violence" with a "Case Study on Roman Imperial Theology," at a seminar in Jackson, MS. There were early copies of In Search of Paul for sale at the book-display, and bought it immediately. Most of the others buying the book were not scholars, but lay people, just like me. I am now about half-way through In Search of Paul and find absurd the Publishers Weekly reviewer's judgment that "this book is written for a sophisticated audience, and therefore will be inaccessible to many readers, but it will be a valuable addition to the scholar's library." The book gives a clear and concise picture of Paul in a historical context with added richness displayed in over 30 color pictures and over 130 black & white ones. This book is emphatically not just for scholars, but reaches the general educated audience on a most fascinating and accessible level. And, although I am only at the half-way point, I am finding it a most enjoyable read-and-look book. I think of it as The Da Vinci Code with pictures, but better researched and better written.

I judge the success of a book by the degree it challenges me, and opens up new perspectives, and this is what Cossan has achieved. I had not realised just how immersed Paul was in his Roman time and culture, how subversive he was to it, and how closely allied he was to Jesus' vision of Jewish justice. I feel that I am 'there' in Roman cultural life, and I feel the immediacy of the man, Paul, on the road, in prison and in the awful death. What the book also does is make me ask many more questions such as why was Paul's vision so quickly muted in the post-Pauline and anti-Pauline developments, how much influence has the classical Roman mind had on Augustine and later Roman Catholic moral attitudes. I want to know more. And, significantly, Crossan and Reed clearly indicate Paul's real positive attitude to women and sex, distinguishing it from the slander often attributed to him. Taken seriously this book is a time bomb for Christian denominations, individual Christians, and for me. But who will heed it? Who did heed the historical Paul? Even Luke in 'Acts' sanitised him. I shall read this book again as there is much to enjoy, much to learn.

There are alot of books about Paul and I've read my share. This book gave me more information about the world around Paul than about him directly. I feel like I know more about the Roman Empire, the Imperial Cult, the status of Jews and the synagogue in the first century, and the patronage system than I could have learned from a cache of historical books. Crossan and Reed bring it all together for a better understanding about Paul.
Crossan let a little of his own beliefs slip into the text. I used to think he was a scholar without "faith." I believe differently now.

I was a little pleased to see that John Dominic Crossan (the main author, I'd say) turns out to be something of a fan of Paul. I had been prejudiced, I suppose, to expect something of a desacralising of the apostle and perhaps some questioning of his state of mind, such as I'd read in books by Burton Mack and, perhaps, Jerome Murphy O'Connor. However, though Crossan sees Paul as a vulnerable human being like the rest of us, he presents him as a genius of politico-sociological analysis (sorry about the jargon) on the one hand and as a theologian with a very clear, very challenging understanding of Christ's purpose as saviour of the world and messenger of peace through justice.

Like an earlier reviewer, I too began skipping the detailed bits about archaeological finds and the material culture of the Roman Empire, though I stayed with any discussion of what these revealed about social stratification, the production and distribution of social influence, and the living arrangements of people in the "insula" (suburbs and blocks of dwellings) and residences of people at the time, because I thought that would tell me something about the structure and practices of the early "house churches" - Paul's audiences. Which it did.

I think the book is very helpful at revealing the political, social and physical context in which Paul worked. It also has a powerful political and theological message that the authors believe is crucial for America in her attempts to impose and defend Pax Americana throughout the world.

Crossan proposes that Paul understood the death and resurrection of Jesus as significant because Jesus was executed violently by imperialist forces. This was seen as necessary to defend the Pax Romana in Judea. Jesus' resurrection, therefore, in Paul's view was an act of triumph over violence and over the imperial belief that peace can be achieved through victory and conquest. It wouldn't have had the same significance had Jesus died peacefully at home and then rose from the dead. Paul confronted the Empire with a model based on faith (surrender to God's will), justice (carrying out God's laws) and equality (within the Christian community at least). This model opposed the Augustan one of piety (cultic devotional practices), victory (violence), consolidation and peace. The latter may be interchanged in sequence, but they rest on continued actual or threatened violence, foundation of the cult of the Emperor as divine and the establishment of patronage and hierarchy - also interchageable - where the pecking order and the privileges attending it were based on access to powerful patrons. There was not much place for women, slaves or minorities in this hierarchy until they had broken through the hierarchical barriers (ceilings?) by one means or another, but Paul's vision of the Christian community itself was egalitarian ("neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek", etc). (The Pauline texts cited in favour of sexism and the like are insertions or from the pseudo-Pauline letters written after his death.)

Something the Publishers' Weekly review seems to have not picked up, but which is a critical component of Crossan's thesis is that Paul was not in fact preaching primarily to the Jews, or to the gentiles. Rather he was trying to capture the constituency knows as "God-fearers" or "believers". They were the pagans attached to synagogues, converted to the monotheism and laws and ethics of the Jews in their towns, but the males were not circumcised, they may not have observed kosher and they probably joined in with other citizens in performance of the sacrifices that were built into much civic ritual. They were sometimes relatively wealthy and perhaps able to provide a degree of protection to the Jewish community. Paul saw them as potential and valuable converts and addressed them as such. As you could imagine, this aroused much hostility to the apostle from the Jews in the cities he targeted.

This review has gone on too long - perhaps an indication of how helpful the book might be. I found it worthwhile and reasonably easy to read. Crossan's message to America is Paul's, that peace through victory does not liberate. It doesn't work, at least in the long term. That philosophy brought us the Pax Romana for a while, but, after centuries of war and destruction, it culminated in 19th century imperialism, 20th century totalitarianism and 21st century terrorism.

Any book by Crossan has its own guaranteed readership, to which I admit I belong. This book, however, is a little different. It is really three books in one:

The first one is a travelogue through the lands where Christianity and its preceding pagan religions originated. Probably written by co-author Reed, it presents interesting glimpses of archaeological sites in Pompeii and Delos, Corinth and Ephesus, to name a few. It details the construction of pagan temples and Jewish synagogues, of the aqueducts and roads that crisscrossed the land. It is also one of the explanations given regarding the reason for writing "yet another book about Paul." We are told that it helps the reader "be there," that it places Paul in context to his time and environment and hence helps the reader understand him better. Frankly I am not much for travelogues, and I just flipped through the pages whenever I got to them.

The second booklet inside the main book, deals with the sociology of the time. The five story apartments where the poor Jews lived in Rome, the villas where the rich people lived, the combination rich house, rental apartments, and shops which would have allowed Paul the craftsman access to rich patrons. The patronage system through which everything got done in those days, moving downwards "from divinity, through royalty, priesthood, aristocracy, and citizens, to the freed, the servile, and the enslaved." This part of the book discusses in detail how Caesar, Augustus, and the other Roman emperors were awarded divinity, and what it meant to the average Roman subject to know that the emperor who governed him was god. And how the Roman government and army had only two purposes: to keep peace and collect taxes. I have to admit that although I was aware that Caesar was apotheosized after his death, I did not appreciate that Augustus and some others were turned into gods while they were still alive, and that the populace believed it. (Try to think of George Bush as a god instead of just a president.)

The third part of this book, and probably the main reason why most people buy it, deals with Paul and his ideas. Here we find Crossan's newest conjecture: Paul was a direct antagonist to the Roman Empire, and this was why he had been prosecuted, not because he had threatened the Hebrew or the nascent Christian system of his day. He justifies this by his definition of two Greek words: kyrios, and parousia. Crossan maintains that when Paul referred to Jesus Christ as kyrios he was directly attacking the Roman emperor, because kyrios meant lord, and only the Roman emperor was lord. So the kyrios Jesus Christ, meant the emperor Jesus Christ, a direct confrontation to the Romans. (One can point out, however, that throughout the Gospel of John the word kyrios has been translated variously as lord, master, sir.) Today, in modern Greek kyrios means sir or boss.

Crossan also defines the word parousia to mean the visit of the emperor to the provinces and cities, and only that. So when Paul talked about Jesus' pending parousia, he was referring to Jesus as an emperor. This nomenclature, kyrios and parousia, thus directly antagonized the Roman authorities and caused them to persecute Paul. It was the Romans, therefore, and not the Jews who were against Paul, and this is the subject of this book. (Crossan does not say why when Paul was arrested in Jerusalem for fomenting trouble, he was escorted out of the city by a force of two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen, and two hundred auxiliaries to protect him from the Jews he had antagonized. I suppose, however, that he could always respond that the army was there to make sure Paul's anti-imperial followers would not attempt to free him.)

To summarize, this is an enjoyable book, but I don't buy Crossan's argument that the Roman Empire felt threatened by Paul and persecuted him. I have a feeling that the book was written just in order to write and sell another book, and perhaps to expense the cost of the authors' trips through the area.

(The writer is the author of Christianity Without Fairy Tales: When Science and Religion Merge.)

Though the title of the book suggests that Paul is the subject of the book, this book is mostly about conditions and culture of the Roman Empire, and how the Caesars developed a "civic religion" in which the Emperor was regarded as divine, the "son of god," etc. Into this world, Paul adopted such concepts to express his understanding of Jesus' message.

The authors also suggest that Paul did not write all the epistles attributed to him, and that Luke's account in the book of Acts is not accurate when compared with details in Paul's "authentic" epistles. The suggestion is that Luke modified the account of Paul's life and times for his own purposes, and that some Pauline epistles were written by others and later attributed to Paul.

If you are willing to accept the hypothesis that the Gospel of Luke, Acts, and several Pauline epistles are not authentic or factual, you will find much to engross you in this book. If you do not accept that hypothesis, the book is nevertheless an interesting, well-illustrated read to gain a sense of what life was like in the Roman Empire and Paul's first-century AD world.

My review is not low because of a conservative anti-Crossan bias (not that I'm unbiased), but the book, for all its great length and detail about the cultural world of the 1c Roman empire, barely gets into the Apostles teachings and theology.

Perhaps more inexcusable, is the fact that the book interacts almost not at all with any dissenting scholarly opinions, and completely ignores the most significant Pauline scholars out there.

Useful perhaps to understand the culture of the time, but not helpful to understand Paul's thought. But still Wayne Meeks "The First Urban Christians" does a much more thorough job at this.

This book attempts to understand Paul in his urban milieu using some of the same techniques and approaches that have served Crossan in his analyses of Jesus and the earliest church. The argument is a bit weaker than in Crossan's earlier analyses, possibly because Crossan has a clearer understanding of the organization and social tensions in peasant communities than he and his coauthor, Jonathan Reed, have of late Hellenistic urban communities.

It's hard to give Crossan a 3 for one of his books. He's a great writer and scholar, and his previous collaboration with Reed (Excavating Jesus)was a great book and an interesting combination of viewpoints. Notwitstanding those factors, the current book is a good book, but simply does not really address "How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom" - the subtitle. As other reviewers have pointed out, the book does give us a detailed look at Roman life in the 1st century, and also some detail about Jewish life (though much less than the Roman counterpart). There is also lots of interesting information about Paul, some of which I found enlightening.

The book spends a lot (and I mean, a LOT) of time talking about the archeology of the current Middle East as well as the ancient Middle East, but, to tell you the truth from my perspective, these archeological tours, though interesting at times, add very little to the story of Paul. Indeed, our first 2 tours have nothing at all to do with Paul or his communities.

I'm also not sure that the book should be entitled "In Search of Paul" because there is very little about Paul per se. I think MacCoby's (1987) "The Mythmaker" is a much better book about Paul.

The bottom line is that this book does have some interesting and enlightening information about Paul, but you have to spend a lot of time digging through the archeological material to find it. I'm reminded of Akenson's (2000) book "Saint Saul" that also had good information that requires lots of effort to extract.

If you're a beginning student, this probably isn't the right book for you. And if your interest is Paul per se, you'll probably be disappointed. This book is best read by students of sociology interested in the time and place. But for those purposes, I think there are better books (e.g., Malina's "The New Testament World", Finegan's "Archeology of the NT", and even MacCoby's "The Mythmaker.").

"This entire book is about the clash between ... alternative visions of world peace. One is Augustus's vision ... The other is Paul's vision ..." So write Crossan and Reed (page 74) about the central theme of their book. Although nothing is known *archaeologically* of the communities of Paul, the archaeological heritage left by the Roman imperial theology of Augustus is immense.

The authors begin with a description of the city of Aphrodisias, a Roman city in what is now southwestern Turkey. 2000 years ago before Augustus became emporer, he declared Aphrodisias to be the one city is all of Asia (probably the province) selected to be his own. Aphrodite was the Greek version of the Roman goddess Venus from which the lineage of Augustus was allegedly descended. Mixed between the carved and engraved scenes of Zeus, Poseidon, and Aphrodite are scenes of Aeneas along with Romulus and Remus. Readers familiar with stories of the origen of Rome may recall that the classical sources for many of these stories wrote *for* Augustus.

Once I was chatting with a friend a of mine who was also an eminent scholar. We were at the annual AAR-SBL conference and he had just delivered a paper. "Aren't you ever going to write a paper with a thesis sentence?" I asked. "Never!" he responded. Crossan and Reed have filled their book with much archaeological detail, detail which at times reads like a travel book for a tourist. At times they write "you walk" or "you find." In this way the authors hope to demonstrate the pervasiveness of imperial theology. For Cross and Reed there is an "absolute conjunction between religion and politics." In the epilogue the authors propse that Jesus and Paul were not trapped in a negative view of the world but offered a positive alternative in its replacement.

Some too casual readers will think that Paul is being portrayed as a political revolutionary. In fact this was not the case. At the turn of the era Rome was very tolerant of diverse religions. Notice above that Rome adopted and adapted Greek mythology. Similarly Cross and Reed tell the story of the cult of Isis and how it was adopted and adapted into the imperial cult. Likewise there are some readers who will maintain that early Christianity was a political movement even though the New Testament tries to distance itself from such thinking and in non-canonical writings, the only possible connection between Christiainity and politics is a term used in a Greek graffiti, a term also used to describe an association of plumbers.

The blurb on the front cover of _In Search of Paul_ says that this is a "new vision" of the Apostle Paul. After thinking about the matter for a while, I would have to disagree. Has not the Gospel always maintained that the peace of God will always be at odds with the peace of the world? Perhaps another reader's faith would say it slightly different, but is this not the case?