BEN: I find p. 164 very confusing. You say “The fundamental mission of kingdom citizens is to glorify God by living the life of ‘good deeds’. God is most glorified when kingdom citizens live under King Jesus as a faithful community.”

This would seem to making doing good deeds and kingdom mission one and the same thing especially in the context of the salt and light verses. No?

SCOT: We glorify God by good deeds — that’s straight from Jesus. And part of kingdom mission is for kingdom people to do good deeds.

BEN: O.K. but previously you had made a strong distinction between good deeds and kingdom mission which is why I asked.Chapter 10 gets a big Amen from me.. especially the way it finishes.

Your book is like the wedding feast at Cana…. you saved the best for last. I really enjoyed Chapter 11… it raised two questions for me: 1) are you an annihiliationist when it comes to the lost, ala Mr. Fudge? and 2) did you ever read my Jesus, Paul and the End of the World? There was a lot of cross over between this chapter and things in that book.

SCOT: Way back in the late 90s when I wrote A New Vision for Israel I was intensely concerned with how to deal with the Naherwartung sayings of Jesus and read — very carefully — three monographs by Martin Kunzi and that work, along with constantly dealing with stuff Jimmy Dunn and Don Hagner were saying at the time, drove my concerns. I recall your book coming out after I had made up my mind; I had a copy on my shelves for awhile but the guts of my ideas were all composed in my work at TEDS for my teachings of Jesus class — I had detailed references I drew up in the late 80s and early 90s. But this book on kingdom is one in which I chose to cite very little bibliography.

BEN: I agree with you about the ambiguity of the evidence about eternal torment. We even have the phrase eternal destruction which sounds for all the world like an oxymoron to me (kinda like Microsoft Works). I’m certainly open to the end of afterlife suffering, but not sure that’s what the balance of the NT witness says. Edward Fudge has tried to enlist me for his cause, not successfully.

Well maybe someday you could look at my Jesus, Paul, and the End of the World. It’s still used a lot especially in the U.K., interestingly enough.

On to your appendixes, which leads to the question did you read Defending Constantine, the IVP book. It’s an excellent read and corrective to some of the wrong things people tend to say about Constantine.

SCOT: Yes, I read that book but I think you mean Leithart’s book and it’s not good enough for me on the realities of that brutal emperor, Constantine. Stephenson’s portrait is far better and my friend, George Kalantzis, at Wheaton — a classics and patristics scholar — a Baptist who grew up in Greece — and I agree on Leithart. He’s out to get Yoder instead of out to understand Constantine. For all his tendencies, Yoder was not far off on the implication of Constantine. I use that term, however, for an umbrella category that includes Erastianism and stronger forms, including the holy Roman empire. My ecclesiology is so central I want to call out compromising our surrender to Jesus as our king in the many ways the church has learned to do. I may not get total agreement on this stuff but I hope to cast a strong enough image for folks to see the major thrust. The second appendix is more nuanced.

The eschatology of Jesus does not seem to matter to many today. Wright seems to have knocked this one off the map. He — maybe the best term here is — historicized it all and seemed to have taken the steam out of many confident claims that Jesus got it all wrong.

BEN: What P.C. Doherty says about Constantine, and I think he’s right is that: 1) we should not judge Constantine by modern notions of what a Christian would be like. For example, a Christian in Constantine’s day might well believe in magic and sacred relics etc. He thinks Constantine did not favor Christianity just because he saw a rising tide and leaped onto the wave, he did so because he believed he had received divine guidance from the Son of God; 2) his mother was more devout clearly enough. 3) Constantine clearly had a strong sense of his previous sins, which is why he delayed his baptism until near the end of his life. He seems to have accepted the idea of ‘no forgiveness for post-baptismal sins’; 4) he had nothing to do with forming the canon, he let the bishops sort that out, but he did want the issue settled, and he certainly did make possible the making of copies of the Bible when things seem to have been settled. 5) he took away the status of ‘superstitio’ for the church, which allowed it to be seen as a legitimate religion. 6) as Emperor however, he continued to provide some support for existing pagan temples and priests, while favoring Christianity. 7) for the most part, he put an end to the persecution of orthodox Christians.

I am aware there is definitely another side to this whole story, but I think those things above can be demonstrated.

SCOT: More or less I would agree… but his warrior approach; his volatility with power and authority … his inner life … I don’t remember it all, Ben, but I don’t completely discount the advantageousness of conversion for the guy. Vision? Possibly … maybe probably. He was a military machine.

BEN: Honestly I would really blame the bishops who wanted Christianity to be a religion of priests, temples, and sacrifices like the pagan religions. They lusted to have influence in high places, and Constantine gave them the opportunity, especially under the influence of his mother. Constantine was also, like most ancients, a superstitious man. In other words, I think what we might call Constantinianism, the attempt to influence public policy and politics in order to Christianize the world, we should really blame the church leaders for!

BEN: O.K. Scot, nearing the finish line here. Questions about Appendix 1, though perhaps they will be somewhat addressed in Appendix 2? 1) should Christians run for public office?; 2) should Christians attend public schools; 3) should churches and church related institutions get tax exemptions?; 4) should Christians accept Social Security benefits? 5) should Christians participate in Obamacare?

I ask all these questions not least because the ‘let’s do everything in and through the local church model’ has singularly failed to be salt and light in our world to any sufficient degree. You say you are all for good deeds done in the public square by Christians, but what are the limits or nature of these deeds? Does it matter if Christians are good citizens and what should be the limits of their participation in civil society and politics? In other words, I think there are some pluses to the Anabaptist approach to some of these matters (particularly when it comes to pacifism) but not across the board. Not if it means letting the world go to hell in a handbasket while we just focus on what we are doing in our holy huddle.

SCOT:However one discerns God’s calling/vocation in their “good deeds”. That’s the short of it.
1. Carefully
2. Yes.
3. Probably not, I’m rethinking this one.
4. Yes, they paid taxes.
5. Yes, they paid taxes.

In and through the local church, first, as an embodiment that spills into public life.

BEN: This line,
“In and through the local church, first, as an embodiment that spills into public life”
is precisely what I would say for sure, but we seem to mean slightly different things by it, which I put down to a difference in ecclesiology.

News Weak— “The Problems with Kurt Eichenwald’s screed entitled “The Bible: So Misunderstood it’s a Sin”

It is all too easy these days to bemoan Biblical illiteracy and castigate fundamentalists for their misuse of the Bible, and provide compelling evidence that in regard to both matters our culture is guilty as charged. Were that all that Kurt Eichenwald, (a writer for Vanity Fare with exactly no credentials or expertise to warrant his write an article on the Bible for a national news magazine), was ranting and raving about in his Christmas present to our nation, served up in the Dec. 23rd issue of Newsweek magazine, then one might pass over this article with benign neglect as an op-ed piece at best.

But in fact early in this lengthy article Eichenwald says the following: “This examination—based in large part on the works of scores of theologians and scholars, some of which dates back centuries—is a review of the Bible’s history and a recounting of its words.” The article goes on to cite exactly three scholars, Bart Ehrman, Jason David BeDuhn (a professor of religious studies, who has a terminal degree in ‘comparative religions’ not the Bible), and Richard Elliott Friedman (who does indeed have a terminal degree in the Hebrew Bible, rather than the New Testament) who can hardly be called representative of the spectrum of non-fundamentalist Biblical scholarship in general, even in America. There is, in short, no evidence whatsoever in this article that ‘scores’ of theologians and scholars’ have been consulted. There is also no evidence that there was any attempt to be fair and balanced in the scholars one would cite or draw on to base conclusions in this lengthy article.

In this regard, this article is light years away from some of the helpful pieces by Richard Ostling or David van Biema or other fair-minded journalists in past years who actually know the field about which they are writing, and the spectrum of views held by scholars and pastors in regard to the Bible. In regard to either of the issues of familiarity or fairness Eichenwald gets a failing grade as a journalist. Indeed, ironically he serves up the very same sort of biased interpretations and polemics that he accuses fundamentalists of, not without some justification. And here is where I say fundamentalism is basically a mindset, not a position on the theological spectrum. Believe it or not, there are fundamentalist liberals in our land as well as fundamentalist conservatives. In both cases, what characterizes them is rigidity of opinions and the failure to evaluate all views critically, including their own. In short it involves a bad mixture of arrogance and ignorance.

One of the typical missteps in arguing about the Bible, that Eichenwald falls prey to is the argument that all we have are bad translations of the Bible. Here’s what he claims— “At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times. About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament. (That’s the same amount of time between the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and today.)”

This is not merely misleading, it’s historically incorrect! It is not true that the original manuscripts are hopelessly remote from us and cannot hope to be recovered. Nor is it the case that the vast majority of modern preachers are oblivious to the actual state of the Biblical text that stands behind various modern translations. This is not only a caricature of the majority of America’s clergy, it is an even worse caricature of the state of play in regard to the text criticism of the Bible. As Dan Wallace, one of the real experts in text criticism of the NT, says in his own critique of Eichenwald’s article, “we have Greek manuscripts—thousands of them, some reaching as far back as the second century. And we have very ancient translations directly from the Greek that give us a good sense of the Greek text that would have been available in those regions where that early version was used. These include Latin, Syriac, and Coptic especially. Altogether, we have at least 20,000 handwritten manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other ancient languages that help us to determine the wording of the original. Almost 6000 of these manuscripts are in Greek alone. And we have more than one million quotations of the New Testament by church fathers. There is absolutely nothing in the Greco-Roman world that comes even remotely close to this wealth of data. The New Testament has more manuscripts that are within a century or two of the original than anything else from the Greco-Roman world too.” (http://danielbwallace.com/2014/12/28/predictable-christmas-fare-newsweeks-tirade-against-the-bible/).

Exactly. Rumors that we cannot recover the vast majority of the original substance of the Biblical text are false. Indeed, the doyen of all text criticism in the last 50 years, Bruce Metzger of Princeton (the teacher I might add, of both Bart Ehrman and myself) was willing to say that we can know with a high degree of certainty what about 90% of the NT originally said, and in regard to the rest which is textually dubious, no major doctrine or theological or ethical principle is at issue in these variant readings. Of course you might not know this from reading the sensationalistic fare that Eichenwald has read, for instance Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus (critiqued in detail on this blog a long time ago), but apparently Eichenwald has not gotten the memo that even Ehrman backs off from some of his more strident claims from time to time.

Is it true however that John 7.53-8.11 and the so-called long ending of Mark (Mark. 16.9-20) are likely not an original part of the New Testament? Eichenwald goes some lengths to point this out, and he is actually likely right about this, but sadly for him it simply refutes his own previous argument that ‘we can’t really know what was in the original text of the Bible’. If we can’t know that, then of course, we can’t know these two passages were not part of the original text of the Greek NT. So which is it Mr. Eichenwald, because you can’t have it both ways? Can we establish with a high degree of probability what the NT originally said, such that we could conclude that because these two passages are not part of our earliest and best Greek manuscripts, then they are likely later additions, or not? Or are we simply ‘lost in translation’ in regard to such matters? It is amazing to me that an article with so many self-contradictory statements and obvious errors of fact could even have been published in a major news periodical. This is not journalism, this is shoddy, yellow journalism, rightly so-called.

Then there are many further problems when Eichenwald tiptoes into the arena of actual exegesis. For example, talking about Phil. 2.5-11 he says “the Greek word for form could simply mean Jesus was in the image of God. But the publishers of some Bibles decided to insert their beliefs into translations that had nothing to do with the Greek. The Living Bible, for example, says Jesus “was God”—even though modern translators pretty much just invented the words.” Anyone who has studied the Greek text of Phil. 2.5-11 will know that the Greek word in question is morphe which is not the word for ‘image’ but rather for ‘form’. These are two different terms and two different concepts. What morphe means is the outward manifestation of the actual nature of something. It doesn’t refer to the mere appearance of something. This is why diverse translations, not just conservative ones have rendered the verse in question ‘being in very nature God, he did not consider the having of equality with God something to be taken advantage of”. In other words, here as elsewhere Paul is perfectly happy to include Jesus within the definition of deity. Indeed this very passage refers to how he pre-existed and took on human form.

It may be an old canard, but it still remains a falsehood that the idea of the deity of Christ was later imported into the NT text through dodgy translations like the KJV. This is wrong both historically and theologically. Furthermore, Jesus was prayed to and worshipped from the very beginnings of early Christianity, something Jews (and all the earliest Christ followers were Jews) would only do if they believed that person was part of the divine identity. As the great German scholar Martin Hengel demonstrated a long time ago, the earliest Christology was very high Christology, and it is found in the letters of Paul, our earliest Christian documents. This is not something foisted on the NT by later orthodox translators.

At times Mr. Eichenwald seems to lose his grasp on what could possibly count as a contradiction. He brings out that tired old argument that the Christmas story in Lk. 1-2 contradicts the Christmas story in Mt. 1-2. Indeed, he argues ‘contradictions abound’. Really? Just because one Gospel mentions shepherds and another mentions magi visiting Jesus after his birth does make these stories contradictory. Different yes, but contradictory no. A contradiction requires that one source claim ‘A is true’ and the other claim ‘A is not true’. It would have been better if he had started by noting that both Matthew and Luke affirm: 1) that Jesus was virginally conceived, and therefore Joseph was not his biological father; 2) that Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of Herod the Great, and 3) that the family lived not in Bethlehem, the birth place, but rather in Nazareth, which is why Jesus came to be called Jesus of Nazareth in all four Gospels.

A careful reading of the genealogy in Matthew 1 would have led to the conclusion that not even Matthew suggests that Jesus was the biological son of Joseph. This is why Mary suddenly appears at the end of Joseph’s genealogy! Jesus’ connection with her is the only way Jesus could get into that genealogy. In short Mr. Eichenwald should have listened to better scholars and a broader and fairer representation of scholarship instead of just the deconstructionists who would like us to believe what Paul Simon once said about another matter– it’s “all lies and jests, still a man believes what he wants to, and disregards the rest”.

In fact Christianity is an historical religion, based on a certain irreducible amount of historical substance. It is not a mere religious philosophy, nor a mere collection of religious opinions. It makes claims about history, again and again, and as such it must be evaluated on the basis of such historical claims. From a Christian point of view, nothing can be theologically true that is historically false, if claims are actually being made about history in this or that passage. Christian belief is not a mere ‘matter of opinion’. It is a set of beliefs based in facts and their interpretation. It is not mere ‘chicken soup for the soul’.

I could go on and on about the errors of method, fact, and interpretation of the Bible, its translation, and Christian history in this article which stretches to an amazing 24 pages ‘full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing’ but I will simply say this— Eichenwald’s article is opinion strong, and news (and facts) weak, precisely what he accuses fundamentalists of. And that is not ‘good news’ for a once proud magazine that once strove to be a presenter of fair and balanced journalism, even about the Bible and early Christianity.

BW3

There are all sorts of myths floating around about Christmas, and some of the worst come from the myth-makers supreme (e.g. the Zeitgeist sort of people). I am referring to those who: 1) deny that Jesus existed; 2) insist that all Christian celebrations are really adaptations of earlier pagan practices such as some Egyptian rites, or Roman rituals like Saturnalia and the like. It is surprising to me that this sort of nonsense has gained such a hearing in a skeptical age. If you doubt that it has gained a foothold even in religious America, check out the reaction to Bart Ehrman’s recent book Did Jesus Exist? (to which Bart quite rightly answer— yes, he surely did exist).

I suppose it is because the will to disbelieve the Gospel story is so strong in some quarters that the only way some people can exorcise those Gospel things from their brains is by creating an aetelogical myth that explains the origins of Christianity without the necessity of a real person named Jesus of Nazareth. It just shows that such people’s skepticism is only exercised in one direction— towards Christianity. Otherwise they are gullible enough to believe all sorts of things without the benefit of solid historical evidence. They have of course also forgotten that when it comes to ancient history, it is very difficult to prove a negative– prove that someone in the ancient records actually didn’t exist, or that something didn’t happen, even though there is positive testimony that it did.

The problem of course in dealing with the modern mythmakers is that there is occasionally a grain of truth in the midst of a beach full of pure sand, pure nonsense. For example, it has been argued that Christmas was a celebration cooked up to replace the pagan festival of Saturnalia, and this was why Christmas began to be celebrated on December 25th. If we are making the general point that the medieval church did sometimes try to replace pagan festivals with Christian ones, then there is a bit of truth to that.

But in regard to the specific point about Christmas and Saturnalia here are a few major points: 1) Saturnalia was celebrated during the Roman Empire on the basis of the Julian calendar, and occurred beginning on Dec. 17th, and ran through the 23rd of December. It was celebrated in conjunction with the winter solstice, which of course was on Dec 21. 2) Saturnalia’s rituals are not fully or adequately described in any ancient source, such that a comparison could actually be made with Christian celebrations of Christmas, ancient or modern. Macrobius’ treatment of the matter is from late antiquity, which is to say, after Christians were already celebrating ‘the Feast of the Nativity’.

However, when the church went to the practice of celebrating ‘the Twelve Days of Christmas’ there seems to be a few similarities with Saturnalia (e.g. a celebration of light coming into the world). Others have pointed to the gift-giving done on Dec. 22nd in the celebration of Saturnalia, or even the practice of reversal— slaves become masters for a day and vice versa. What we do not have at all in the celebration of Saturnalia is: 1) the celebration of the incarnation of a deity, never mind the Jewish messiah; 2) the celebration of a virginal conception (which despite disclaimers to the contrary has no clear parallel in pagan sources— stories of literal divine rape of a human female are nothing like the stories in Mt. 1-2 and Lk. 1-2). So where does this leave us?

Is the heart of the theology of Christmas derived from pagan notions? No, definitely not. Is the heart of Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus derived from pagan celebrations— no, for there is very little overlap, and the overlap does not include the date December 25th. If one wants to simply make the point that Christians sometimes adopted and adapted a few of the best aspects of their broader culture’s celebrations, this is true enough, but it does not at all demonstrate the notion that Christmas was simply derived from such practices. In short, the nonsense of non-Christmas deserves to be laid to rest for a long winter’s snooze.

Subject: Four worms in church

A minister decided that a visual demonstration would add emphasis to his Sunday sermon.

Four worms were placed into four separate jars

The first worm was put into a container of alcohol.

The second worm was put into a container of cigarette smoke.

The third worm was put into a container of chocolate syrup.

The fourth worm was put into a container of good clean soil.

At the conclusion of the sermon, the Minister reported the following results:

The first worm in alcohol . . . . . . Dead .

The second worm in cigarette smoke . . .Dead .

Third worm in chocolate syrup . …. . . Dead.

Fourth worm in good clean soil . …. .Alive.

So the Minister asked the congregation,

“What did you learn from this demonstration?”

Maxine was sitting in the back, quickly raised her hand and said . . …..

“As long as you drink, smoke and eat chocolate,

you won’t have worms!”

That pretty much ended the service!

(Kudos to Harold Black for this one)

In an age of uncertainty and extreme skepticism about the Bible and Christianity, it is inevitable that there would be books written like Craig Blomberg’s lucid and balanced recent offering— Can We Still Believe the Bible? Just for clarification the question that Craig is asking is not ‘Can we Still believe in the Bible?’ Sometimes Protestants talk that way, and frankly that borders on bibliolatry. The Bible itself does not ask that we believe ‘in’ it, rather it points beyond itself to belief in God. What Craig is asking and answering is, can we still trust the Bible in regard to the things it intends to teach us about history, theology, ethics, and Craig would add some other subjects as well, whereas I would not. Here in this first post we have an interview with Craig about his helpful book. It will be followed by several posts summarizing and critiquing crucial ideas and themes in the book. Enjoy!
—-

1) What was it that prompted you to write this particular book?

I had agreed to write a bigger book for a different publisher on the historical reliability of the New Testament overall but kept coming up against areas where the so-called “aggressive atheists” of our day, a liberal fringe of scholars in religious studies, and a lot of lay bloggers were claiming there were all kinds of reasons to reject traditional beliefs about the Bible. Yet in six particularly prominent areas of study where these claims were being made, a broad cross-section of biblical scholars over the past generation have been amassing evidence that points to greater rather than lesser confidence in the Scriptures. But their findings are not what are being most publicized. So I decided first to write a smaller book focusing on just those topics.

2) You speak frequently about a change, even among the laity, in what I will call the mood of the culture when it comes to Christianity. What are the telltale signs in your mind? How do you see a book like this addressing that change, especially if we are now moving into a post-Christian, post-Biblical era in America?

When I was working on my various educational degrees in the 1970s, we were still reeling as a culture from Vietnam, Watergate, Woodstock and a generation of young adults who were often very disenchanted with traditional authority, including religious authority. Yet they were truly open-minded. They were interested in exploring religious options other than Christianity but they were also very open to exploring the evidence for Christianity, especially when it was combined with an authentic, relevant Christian lifestyle. So mixed among other kinds of hippies were a large number of “Jesus people,” many of whom had come out of alternative lifestyles.

If you organized an event on a secular college or university campus with a winsome, compelling speaker and did a reasonably good job at publicizing it, there was a good chance you would draw a large crowd and that a significant minority of the non-Christians in the audience would take significant steps closer to becoming followers of Jesus if not make the commitment on that very day. And those who didn’t at least had some general knowledge, even before they came to the event, of the worldview they were for the time being, at least, choosing to reject.

Today we see the children of that generation as young adults on the same campuses with the same Christian organizations, with even more compelling speakers and evidence on which to draw, and yet in many instances it is extremely difficult to get a good crowd, if you do you are lucky if even a few unbelievers come, and luckier still if any of them are drawn toward the faith. But it is not as if any new evidence has emerged that we didn’t know about a generation ago to make the case for faith weaker. Instead, people have grown up with less awareness of biblical claims, with more prejudice against Christianity, with an eagerness to embrace the most outlandish charges against the Bible without even wanting to research them at all, which really shows that they are looking for reasons not to believe rather than engaging in serious inquiry.

Perhaps most tragically, there are ex-Christians who were burned by the ugliest side of what gets included in the category of “Christian,” tar all Christians with the same brush, and go on the warpath against them. Such people have always been around, but it seems they appear today in the Western world in record numbers. And with the internet making anyone’s opinion accessible to everyone in the world, something we didn’t have in the 1970s or even 1980s the way we have had it in more recent decades, truth has become democratized in ways that few of us consciously think about very much. Democracy seems so good in so many arenas of life. But if 100 people tell you they see a princess standing in the road and 15 people tell you that it’s really a truck bearing down on you, and you believe the majority when there really is a truck and not a princess, the results are pretty tragic.

I hope that my book will help spread the word about a significant trend within the academy toward a more positive view of the Bible, a trend that is well-founded and ought to be taken seriously and carefully evaluated by anyone who wants to be well-educated and/or wants to evaluate religious claims.

3) One of the regular laments in this book is that Evangelicals engage in way too much in-fighting which is a poor witness. Some of the stories of Evangelicals attacking Evangelicals involve you personally, and there seems to be a good deal of personal pain in this book. Apart from your responses in this book, how have you handled such situations when you were the object of unfair criticism? What would you suggest we do to stop alienating young people from the faith by such bad behavior?

There are multiple ironies here. The New Testament contains both good and bad examples of “infighting.” On the one hand, Jesus and the apostles are remarkably gracious when it comes to outsiders or those “more liberal” than they. Jesus fraternizes with the most sinful and ostracized of his Jewish world and is sharply criticized for it. Paul says he tries to be all things to all people so that by all means he might save some (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). On the other hand both Jesus and Paul unleash blistering invective against the ultraconservative religious insiders of their communities (for Jesus, the Pharisees; for Paul, the Judaizers) who draw lines of whom they include as fully orthodox much more narrowly than they should and know better.

Sadly the evangelical Christian movement has often been far too critical and nasty towards those they deem further to the “left” than themselves while treating with kid gloves those who have moved too far to the “right.” And then when a few do try to call those abusing their power on the far right to account for their behavior, others decry their judgmentalism.

When I have been the object of unfair criticism, I have always tried to start by replying graciously. Where there is openness to a serious, courteous conversation I have tried to have one behind the scenes out of the public limelight. When that has failed, I have tried to apply Titus 3:10—“Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them” (NIV). But when they have in return slandered or libeled me publicly and they fit into the camp of the ultraconservative religious insider who knows better, especially when they have made a career of behaving that way, I have tried to be obedient to Scripture and call them out in a similar public venue to warn others about them. This, of course, is very unpopular and countercultural in today’s world and so it is also often misunderstood. But I attend a church that is dominated by twenty- and thirty-somethings and I have found that, of all the generations, they more than any appreciate responding to the diversity of our world courteously and to the far-right-wingers of our movement with clear rejection.

4) A constant theme in your book is balance, and fairness, which seems to be in short supply in an age of rants on blogs, and smoke filled room politics in various Evangelical churches, organizations, academic conferences. How do you suggest we build in more accountability for words and actions that are unChristian in character, and yet exhibited by Evangelicals?

I wish I had a good answer for you. The biblical model is for every believer to be an active member of a local Christian community that exercises loving church discipline in a way that would monitor such behavior and help people grow out of it. But, in my experience, most of the worst offenders either go to churches whose leadership is like-minded and therefore will not call them to account or to churches that don’t exercise any healthy forms of accountability or don’t go to church regularly or simply don’t have anyone in their lives with that kind of balance to whom they submit for any accountability. I suppose all I can do is appeal to Matthew 7:12 (the famous Golden Rule) and remind them that Jesus taught them not to treat others in any way they would object to if they were so treated.

5) Your chapters on text criticism, the canon, and translations are very useful summaries of answers to usual objections by people looking for excuses to avoid any serious engagement with the claims of the Christian faith. Do you think that removing obstacles to faith set up by false dichotomies, and the hyperbolic rhetoric by more radical Biblical scholars and the like is essential these days considering the cultural climate?

Yes, absolutely. I had a professor in seminary years ago who was well-known for teaching his students about how many different exegetical and theological debates they could resolve by what he called “both-and” rather than “either-or.” Of course, this can’t always work, logically it is impossible to combine belief in Jesus’ sinfulness with belief in sinlessness and come up with something halfway in between. Even one sin would have made Jesus sinful. But the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism won’t ever be solved by affirming one side in a thoroughgoing way; there is just too much biblical support for both sides. Although purists in both camps lampoon what is sometimes called “Calminianism,” I am absolutely convinced that the only way forward lies in working on syntheses of the best of both systems.

I love the way you in many of your books deal with eternal security by saying there is no eternal security until we are securely in eternity. So, as a pretty committed Wesleyan yourself, you recognize that in the eternal state there is an infinity of time in which we are eternally secure. Howard Marshall, another Wesleyan stresses that as long as we believe we absolutely have security, but that doesn’t prevent someone from total apostasy (the only way to forfeit salvation). On the other hand, Calvin dealt with the seed that fell in the rocky soil and the seed that was choked out by thorns and thistles as referring to people who had what he called “temporary faith” but demonstrated over time that they were not truly believers at all, because they bore no fruit of belief. Unfortunately not all of Calvin’s and Wesley’s followers have been this careful about affirming the truth in the other “camp.”
Applying this both-and approach to one of the three issues you mentioned, I try in the chapter in my book on English translations of the Bible to stress the value of all non-sectarian translations of Scripture. Each was produced for distinctive purposes and must be used for those purposes. No one translation is best for all situations in which people use Bibles. But all of them are adequate. If we could only have one Bible on a desert island and someone else got to pick it for us, we shouldn’t be worried about which one we received (again, excepting those produced by certain Christian sects or cults), even if we didn’t get our first choice.

As for issues of text and canon, yes, we need to debunk and keep on debunking the wildly simplistic and vastly overgeneralized claims that there are so many textual variants that we cannot know with any confidence anywhere what the books of the Bible originally contained, and that the canon is just a collection of books chosen by the winners in a protracted and unfair debate!

6) Inerrancy is an issue that seems to be more of an issue among Reformed Evangelicals than Arminian ones. Why do you think that is?

The classic exponent of comparatively recent American inerrantism was B. B. Warfield, a Princeton theologian and Presbyterian and Reformed scholar of about a century ago. Mark Noll, a prolific American evangelical church historian, has pointed out that the more Calvinistic wing of Christianity valued higher education and theological education earlier and more widely in the settling of American than the more Wesleyan-Arminian wing. And these debates tend to go on among scholars much more so than among the average Christian, unless those Christians have been provoked by scholars they trust into making it a big issue. That doesn’t mean inerrancy isn’t a very important topic, but it is at least, I think, a partial answer to the question of why it is more of an issue among Reformed than among Arminian evangelicals.

7) It seems odd to me that in the post-modern environment, where there is so much curiosity about and interest in the paranormal, that the very people who are all too ready to believe all sorts of strange claims about odd phenomena, at the same time will not even walk across the street to learn about miracles in the Bible or in a Christian context. What do you make of this?

It seems very odd to me too. One all-too-common answer is that these are people who have been hurt, sometimes traumatically so, by the uglier side of ultraconservative Christianity. They are not inherently closed-minded people. They have just had their fill of being abused by people in Jesus’ name. The Evangelical movement, especially its most right-wing and/or heavy-handed segments have to shoulder some significant blame for this reaction. In other cases, though, it seems that it is just that people recognize how much is at stake with the Christian claims. If Buddhism turns out to have no spiritual reality to it, at least in its sanitized, highly selective Western forms of practicing it, little harm is done and nothing much is at stake. But if Christianity is true, it calls for people to absolutely surrender running their own lives by themselves and submitting to the God of the entire universe. Never mind that he knows best what is best for us, we find it very difficult in a modern, democratic society to countenance the submission of our lives to anyone else. Never mind that God has promised to give us what we want, including eternal separation from him and all of his people if we continue to reject him, we simply can’t fathom how much better off we would be if we followed him instead. It’s like C. S. Lewis’ famous example of the child who trades the offer of a holiday by the seaside for continuing to make mud pies in the slums!

8) Certainly one of the key themes of your book is that we must avoid anachronism in our reading of the Bible, and must not evaluate it on the basis of modern criteria and issues. For example, we must interpret the Bible in light of various ancient genre of literature and their conventions which were used in Biblical times. This of course requires study and the learning of ancient Biblical contexts and practices. What do you say to our more charismatic friends who respond to such exhortations by saying “I don’t know why I need to learn all this history (etc.). Why I can just get into the pulpit and the Spirit gives me utterance”.???

I’ve heard some of those utterances! It’s pretty sad to blame them on the Spirit. The only context in Scripture in which the Bible promises to give us words to speak that we haven’t thought about or prepared is when we are unexpectedly dragged before the hostile powers of our world (Luke 21:12-15). Of course, God is sovereign and can and does empower to speak better than they would otherwise have known how to in numerous situations, but there is no blanket promise that he will do this consistently. Over my lifetime I’ve heard of countless individuals who have left churches because their preachers were too often adopting the philosophy you’ve described but all the congregations were receiving was drivel.

The longest and most substantial essay in this volume is that of Michael Bird who analyzes Romans in terms of anti-imperial rhetoric. Point of view in such an analysis matters. For example, it’s one thing for a monotheist to say Jesus is the Son of God, which might well imply no one else truly is. But to a polytheist who overheard such a comment, it would hardly be heard as a directly negative comment on the living Emperor since: 1) they believed in multiple deities; 2) they believed multiple Emperors could claim to be a son of the gods and any way living ones didn’t tend to encourage such claims; and 3) there were other divine and quasi divine figures like Herakles/Hercules who could claim such a title as well; and finally 4) in the ANE and in the far eastern part of the empire numerous kings claimed all sorts of throne names, including being God’s son.

In the eastern part of the Empire there was a tendency to use the language of deity for rulers far more readily than in the Western part of the Empire. One good example is P. Oxy. 1021 which dates to the accession of Nero to the throne, and comes from Alexandria. In this rescript Nero is called “the good ‘daimonon’ of the inhabited world, and the beginning of all (sorts of) good things”. A. Deissmann long ago analyzed this imperial rescript and sees it as something the governor of Egypt drew up as an adaptation of this fact to the Alexandrian cult. It was in any case an attempt at curing favor, and sucking up to the new ruler. We should notice as well that the term theos was not used here. When Paul uses the term daimon he of course means something rather different in 1 Cor. 10. In any case, Alexandria was a very different and more Oriental context than Rome when it came to the using of divine titles.

On p. 159 Bird argues about Rom. 13: “Paul acquiesces to political submission for the sake of respecting God’s appointed servants who genuinely benefit the city, and he recognizes that respect for the authorities is a sensible way of staying under the radar of the imperial security apparatus. However he is certain that Rome is not Roma aeterna…because ‘the time is short’ (1 Cor. 7.29) ‘the day is near’ (Rom.13.12) and all will stand before the judgment seat of God (Rom. 14.10).” The first part of this sentence is right, the last part mostly wrong. Paul does not say the time is short. The Greek is clear enough… he says it has been shortened (by the past eschatological event of Christ’s res.). Paul was not a person convinced that Christ was definitely coming back next week. He does not give an interim ethic only suitable for a short interim before God judges Rome. If that was what he was doing he was wrong on both scores. Jesus did not come back soon, and historically speaking the Roman Empire did not expire due to the return of Christ. I would add Paul does more than acquiesce to the governing authorities. He says they have power and authority from the God of the Bible! And he is talking about Nero and other such authorities no less, but the reference to Nero would be certainly understood in a letter written to Rome itself.

Was Paul engaging in a hidden transcript of protest against Rome and its authorities? If all one means by this is that Paul would oppose idolatry and the abuse of legitimate power in any form, then Paul would have agreed, although that’s not his real interest or focus in writing Romans. There is however nothing hidden about what Paul says about Christ in Rom. 1 or elsewhere in this document and Paul did not lack the courage of his convictions. Anyone who publicly ran around proclaiming a crucified Jewish manual worker had been risen from the dead and was declared to be Son of the Biblical God in power and ‘our Lord’ didn’t lack courage or chutzpah. He didn’t need hidden transcripts, even when he wrote to a congregation in Rome that he did not convert. Rom. 13 could hardly be called either politically malicious or seditious contra Bird on p. 162. Indeed, many if not most have seen it as sending just the opposite message of governmental legitimacy in the form of a limited endorsement so long as there was no abuse of power, and no idolatry involved.

The only way that a clear implicit critique of the imperial cult could be heard in statement about Jesus in such a context is if that imperial cult was so pervasive, and so popular among the common people in society that it was regularly on their minds, and they had one near by. But clearly enough Rome itself was precisely the epi-center of such a cult, so a letter to the Romans at the very least would meet the context or provenance test for an resonance to be heard in Romans.

Bird begins with a fair and balanced assessment of the pros and cons of seeing Romans as anti-Roman, or at least anti-imperial cult. There are some flies in the ointment even here though, flies that we find in Tom Wrights argument as well. First of all, it is not logical in light of Rom. 13.1-7 to suggest that Paul thought that the Emperor was inherently one of the evils or demonic powers that Paul elsewhere tells us Christ conquered through his death (see e.g. Colossians 1-2). Either as Paul says in Rom. 13 the current governing authorities have their authority from God ultimately, and therefore are legitimate authorities who have the right to maintain justice, peace, order, and collect taxes to funds such operations….. or Paul is equivocating in that passage. The attempt to mush together human rulers, and in particular the Emperor with supernatural principalities and powers simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work not only because the ancients believed in real demons and angels. It doesn’t work because of what is said in texts like Rom. 13 and the parallel in 1 Pet. Obviously, if a legitimate authority goes beyond its brief and claims to be a deity, then this is a violation of what the Bible says about idolatry, just as the persecution of Christians would be an abuse of power. But here’s the deal— How many living Emperors, besides crazy Caligula, insisted on being worshipped— while they were alive. Seneca ridicules Claudius for such pretensions and ideas, and he was the adviser to Nero during the five good initial years of his reign. Romans was written precisely during that period, before either Nero insisted that deity suited him while alive and before Seneca gave up on Nero, and before the fire in A.D. 64 when Christians began to be scape-goated. I am not concerned here with what Nero allowed in the last two years of his scandalous reign. But it should be pointed out that even then, as late as after the fire, he opposed the building of a temple to himself as a god, because it was his belief that only dead emperors could achieve deity. This was in line with the fact that the imperial cult grew out of the practice of the worship of ones ancestors.

If one wants to check on this, I suggest Miriam Griffin’s standard bio of Nero entitled Nero. The End of a Dynasty (Yale 1984). When Paul wrote Romans, as the classics scholars say, Nero was still in his Golden Years under the tutelage of Seneca and under the control of Burrus of the Praetorian Guard. Not only was he not wanting a temple built to honor him as a god, he had also promised at his accession, and kept this promise for many years not to have sedition trials of those elites who may have disagreed with him. In other words, the Gentiles in Rome would not have heard the claim ‘Jesus is the son of God’ as a counter claim to anything the living Emperor Nero was saying about himself. Notably lacking in Griffin’s treatment of Nero is a discussion of the imperial cult as an important feature of Nero’s reign before the fire in 64. Apparently, it wasn’t before Seneca committed suicide and other bad things happened.

Now for the anti-imperial rhetoric to be read into Romans, one actually has to argue that the kingdom of Jesus is currently an attack on or inherently subversive of the kingdom of Caesar, and that in fact it is in the process of replacing that kingdom, especially because ‘Jesus is necessarily coming back soon and finishing off the Roman Empire’.

Rom. 1.3-4 is an important text in the discussion and states that Jesus has been declared to be or vindicated to be Son of God in power by means of resurrection, and also ‘our’ Lord. Notice the word ‘our’. One needs to ask the question— does this mean ‘as opposed to ‘theirs’?? Or does it simply denote the sphere on earth in which Jesus is particularly Lord, namely over his own people? The term Lord implies a relationship with some subjects, just as Son of God implies a relationship with God the Father. These terms are not generic in character— Jesus is not the Son of just any God, nor is he the Lord of just any people. He is the Lord of Jews and Gentiles who are ‘in Christ’. This is not to deny the general sovereignty of God over all kingdoms, but the point is the reign of Christ in his people has not yet, and is not really in the process of, displacing the existing kingdoms, which God empowered to exist in the first place.

One of the obvious growth areas in the study of the Gospels is the study of Matthew as a possible vehicle of anti-imperial rhetoric, largely due to the voluminous output on the subject by Warren Carter (20 articles and more). In the chapter by Joel Willits on Matthew he interacts with various of the major points Carter and others have been making about Matthew. On the surface of things, Matthew seems an unlikely candidate for anti-imperial rhetoric, being not only the Gospel that gives us ‘render unto Caesar’ but also the Gospel that seems to like Pilate better than the Herods. It is also in some ways the most obviously Jewish of the four Gospels, which may or may not favor Empire critique, depending on when Matthew was actually written. Willits reviews the history of this approach to Matthew, and interestingly it only goes back to 1995 or so, unlike Empire studies in relationship to Paul or Revelation for instance. The focus of Willits review is on the article of Carter’s which appears in the collected essays volume entitled Empire and the NT. Willits is prepared to agree with Carter that Matthew is anti-Rome, but his political vision is not reducible to that. Willits says that Carter is of course right that politics and religion were interwoven in antiquity, and he prefers a reading of Matthew that reflects such a reality to an overly spiritualized reading of Matthew.

One of Carter’s fundamental assumptions, undergirding his reading of Mathew, is that Jesus himself was crucified for being anti-Rome. Of course Matthew’s Gospel does not actually directly say anything like that, so Carter’s fall back position is to talk about hidden scripts in the text of Matthew. Are there then hidden scripts of resistance to Rome in Matthew? (p. 87).

Part of the problem with Carter’s analysis is it is based on a Schweitzerian reading of Matthew’s and behind that Jesus’ eschatology. So for example Carter (quoted by Willits) says: “Jesus exemplified the politics of disguise and anonymity, notably through his proclamation and demonstration of the rumor that God’s imminent removal of Rome’s world and the establishment of God’s empire.” (p. 87 is where the quote is). The problem is that Mathew’s Gospel, following Mk. 13.32, and behind that Jesus himself, flatly denies any sort of necessary imminence of the return of Christ, or of the replacement of Rome. Instead the Kingdom of God is already breaking into the midst of God’s people in Israel without displacing Herod or Rome or anybody else. This is not because the Gospel is purely spiritual, its because Jesus is interested in forming his own social community, not displacing another one. Furthermore, since this Gospel was not a public document or a tract tacked up on a synagogue wall, but rather insider literature, it is not at all clear that there was any need for ‘hidden transcripts’ between Matthew and his audience. It may be another matter when we are talking about the public discourse of Jesus, but Carter’s focus is on Matthew and his community. And where exactly was that community that supposedly was wrestling with the Empire question which was omnipresent in their world and minds? Most scholars think this Gospel was written in Antioch, and a second possibility in Capernaum or Galilee somewhere. Were either of these places hotbeds of Empire criticism and ferment among Jews and followers of Jesus? Further, if that was true, why is the clear tension in the Gospel between followers of Jesus and other Jews, and not with the representatives of Empire. Indeed, in Matthew’s Gospel THE representative of Empire’s wife declares Jesus innocent warns her husband against violent actions, and Pilate tries to release Jesus? If this was Empire critique, we would expect a very different portrayal of Pilate and his wife. Pilate washes his hands of the coming crucifixion of Jesus, and clearly is depicted as not wanting anything to do with this sordid affair. This sounds more like apologetics than Empire criticism! Jesus wasn’t guilty and Pilate didn’t think so either. As for the Jewish authorities representing Rome and its views— in this Gospel they don’t! Pilate doesn’t want to agree with the Jewish authorities The critique of the Jewish authorities is one thing, especially when they are at variance with the portrayal of the Roman authorities. A critique of Rome is another thing. In other words, you can’t portray the Jewish authorities and antagonists of Jesus as Rome’s puppets or partners. It just doesn’t work. If Jesus’ Gospel is counter-cultural, the question is— which culture is it countering and critiquing? On the one hand one could say it is all fallen human cultures, without the Roman Empire especially called out. Mt. 4.8 which speaks of the kingdoms plural of this world which are on offer not by Rome but by Satan favors such a view. On the other hand the specific evidence suggests an inter-Jewish debate with some forms of Judaism being mainly critiqued. The main empire being opposed is the Satanic one, all pervasive evil which involves all fallen human kingdoms. As Peter Oakes says, any Gospel which says render unto Caesar what is Caesar, not only can’t be for open revolt against Rome and its taxes, it would appear unlikely that Rome is the primary target of criticism in such a Gospel and for good reason. The author believes that ultimately God will judge the world, through Jesus, and that will happen at the return of Christ, not before, and that return is not said to be definitely imminent. What is said is that no one, not even Jesus knows when it is coming!! In the meantime, the way God’s saving reign is working in the world is by changing people by means of love, mercy, forgiveness and non-violence. If Pilate had heard that these were the weapons Jesus was using against Rome, he would have just laughed, and not seen it as anti-imperial at all. Stupid maybe, utopian maybe, but not inherently anti-imperial.

It was about as anti-imperial is when Americans like me were protesting not government in general but the abuse of power that sent us to Vietnam, and we protested by putting daisies in the gun barrels of the National Guard. They did not see it as a threat, or even as a critique of the basic role they played in society. One doubts that Matthew’s community would have seen this Gospel as specifically targeting Rome for criticism either. Willitts own conclusion deserves to be quoted verbatim: “Matthew was neither critiquing ’empire’ per se nor singling out Rome uniquely. To take this view would be inappropriately to diminish Matthew’s message. Jesus is not only or primarily God’s answer to Rome. Jesus is God’s answer to Israel’s unfulfilled story. A story, as it turns out, not only about Israel. It is a story that encompasses all the kingdoms and nations of the world (Mt. 4.8;28.19-20).”(p. 97).

Amen to that assessment.

The first two articles in this volume are of the nature of survey articles, which is a good thing for readers unfamiliar with the topic of ‘The NT and the Imperial Cult’. We will summarize a few of the major points made by David Nystrom and discuss them in this post and do the same for the second article by Judith Diehl in the next post. One of the nice features about this book is that the chapters do not go on forever (contrast Tom Wright’s recent tome) and the writing is clear and to the point.

As Nystrom points out, the Roman project from at least Augustus onwards was to “submit the whole world to the rule of law” by which they largely meant Roman law. Virgil Aeneid 6.851-53 puts it this way “You, Roman, be certain to rule the world…to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and crush the proud”. That pretty much sums up the modus operandi of Empire building by the Romans. Beneath the surface was the profound belief that ‘Romanitas'(i.e Romannness) was the most superior form of human culture, because, in part in contrast to those slippery immoral Greeks, Rome alone as the beacon of virtue imperial power and dignity (Cicero, de Oratione 1.196). Despite the cultural snobbery Augustus and his successors were smart to realize that they had to provide paths for upward mobility of the talented and skilled from other ethnic groups, and so Roman citizenship, and also manumission from slavery (after all sorts of people had been enslaved through the wars, including socially elite, well educated people) became the vehicles to keep the subdued from revolting. To a surprisingly great extent, this tactic, this form of social engineering worked. This should not be seen as an attempt at pure social leveling, as the Romans favored just as highly stratified society as other ancient male dominated cultures. Geography, gender, and generation (ancestry) mattered a lot, as did social status and of course wealth. Nystrom is right that the Romans were aggressive in their maintenance of stratification and status barriers. Patricians were one thing plebes were another.

I do have a bit of a problem however with Nystrom talking about classes. As E.A.Judge has pointed out time and again, there was nothing equivalent to the modern class structure in Roman society. There was for example nothing like our middle class. Basically there were only two groups— the 3-4% uber-wealthy patricians and their family and friends, and everybody else. It took a lot for someone like Cicero to break the glass ceiling above him as a ‘new man’ not from Rome. Even within the ethnic group of ethnic Roman there were distinctions between urbs and those, like Cicero who came from a farm or a small village. While the NT asks the question ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth’ in Rome it might have said ‘Can anything good come out of Arpinum’ and never mind foreign cities! Only the ‘better people’ should serve in the Senate, and so on. The remark of Aristides is telling “You have divided all of the men in your Empire [emphasis on men]…into two parts, and everywhere you have made citizens of all who are the more accomplished and noble and powerful of people, even if they maintain their own cultural proclivities, while those who are left you have made the subjects” (Orations, 26.59).

How did Rome go about Romanizing things without completely obliterating cultural differences? One way was the establishment of Roman colony cities like Philippi, where mustered out soldiers were give ’30 acres and mule’ so to speak, and the governmental structure and the law was modeled on Rome. The Romans were enormously talented at war, engineering feats (roads, aqueducts, forts… in short building anything), and enforcing the rule of law, but they did allow indigenous peoples to keep some of their culture and customs, for example, they allowed Jews to worship their own God, and did not require them to worship Greco-Roman deities, not even when the Emperor cult arose. Caligula of course was an exception, but Caligula was a madman, and even he did not prevail in the end in his attempt to have his statue set up in the temple in Jerusalem. Most practical Romans realized you needed to leave some religious things alone. And here is a crucial point—- as long as the followers of Jesus were seen to be some kind of Jewish cult, there would not be much attempt to force them to worship the Emperor. In other words, as Christianity was emerging in the first half of the first century, one would not expect much like this. After the fire in Rome in A.D. 64, and the scapegoating of Christiansby Nero, the situation began to change. The question is— How much did it change, and how quickly did it change vis a vis Christians and the rising tide of the Imperial cult? This question is especially pressing when we hear from Nystrom….

“paganism can be described as a collection of cult acts. There was no creed. Sacrifice of animals, grains, or the pouring of libations was common. Theatrical performances and processions accompanied festivals honoring the gods. There was no conversion in paganism. More room could always be made on the shelf for another god. There was no sense of sin in paganism. Difficulty or misfortune was the result of an offense against a god or a group of gods.” (p. 29). This is exactly right. It was mostly about orthopraxy, not some kind of orthodoxy of beliefs. The Romans did believe they had a covenant with the gods which is why they had the Empire. So the gods needs to be kept happy.

Nystrom is correct (p.30) that the Romans practiced sacrifice to the dead. D.M. (di manes) on an inscription stands for the spirits of the dead and more importantly di penates were the spirits of the family ancestors, and also they were associated with ‘genius’ or spirit of the paterfamilias, in this case, the Emperor. There was then already, before the Imperial cult proper developed, the national cult of the worship of the ancestors. Private worship entailed prayers (and perhaps incense or a libation) for the ‘genius’ or spirit of the person in question. So the example Nystrom cites of Ovid, from exile offering incense and prayers to his household images of Augustus, Livia, Tiberias, Julius Caesar, and other members of the gens Julian (ex Ponto 4.9.105.12). What is important about this is that the growing imperial cult does not just involve Caesar. It also involves Livia for example (see the later post on Lynn Cohick’s article). The notion then that the Christian cult fixated on Jesus would be seen as competing in particular with the Emperor, when he was just one figure in the imperial cult, and that the NT writers would indirectly play up the contrast between just these two individuals is something that cannot be assumed. It needs to be demonstrated. One of the problems with the whole Imperial cult argument is that NT scholars have not paid close enough attention to the whole nature of the imperial cult, as laid out by Price and Galinsky and others. It was not monolithic, and it did not focus solely on the Emperor. It varied from place to place, and its connections with pre-existing cults of other gods like Artemis need to be taken into account. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that both Augustus and Tiberias at least turned down pleas to allow them to be worshipped (Nystrom p. 31). “With the exception of [crazy] Caligula and Commodus, the Emperors were careful to avoid deification while alive.” (p. 32). Further, when worship of a sort of Augustus did happen during his lifetime under the title divi filius (son of the divine) we need to realize this was not a formal title of divinity or deity (p. 33).

Another dimension of the picture that one needs to be clear on, is that setting up imperial cults and temples by client states and cities was not done out of some vast religious devotion or new found faith. It was cities and rulers sucking up to the Emperor who wanted more patronage of course. So for example the city of Iconium which Paul visited set up such honors for Claudius, and renamed the town ‘Claudi-iconium’. This was not because they suddenly got religion. Indeed it may be doubted that many in the city actually thought of the Emperor as a genuine deity, but they knew which side their bread was buttered on. And they needed the benefactions from the true Sugar Daddy of the Empire. Early in the reign of Augustus and without imperial decree or even prompting cities began erecting temples dedicated to the worship not only of the Emperor, but also his family, including especially Momma Livia. There are a few examples or cases where the Emperor cult was imposed on a people, are instance after a revolt (e.g. the altar of the 3 Gauls in Lyon) but as Nystrom stresses, this was rare (p. 34).

Nystrom also rightly stresses that the strategy for unifying the Empire was to link the traditional Roman ideology of lawful rule and pax Romana with the imperial household, hence pictures of imperial family members on coins, statues etc. again including Livia!

“People worshipped Augustus as they worshipped their family ancestors, and they thought of him as lord and king…As lord he stood for more than himself. He stood for the entire compass of Roman civilization… While there are exceptions such as Caligula, Augustus and his successors employed the imperial cult not to fuel some megalomania but to instruct provincials on the patterns and benefits of Romanitas and so further the Roman project.” (p. 36).

This assessment is correct, and judicious as well. The question is, would NT writers have seen this phenomenon as somehow seductive to their audiences in ways that generally paganism wasn’t or as more dangerous than regular paganism? Would they have seen the imperial cult as a religious rival to the worship of Jesus, in some one on one contest between the two? These are the right kind of questions to ask about this issue.

In the past several decades, one of the major trends in the evaluation of the NT has been the study of its contents in relationship to the rising tide of the Emperor cult during the first century A.D. On the surface of things, such a comparison seems promising because Jesus and one or another of the Emperors were the only actual historical figures of the era who came to be worshiped only shortly after their deaths, or in the case of some of the Emperors, even before their deaths. As is true with a lot of trends in the study of the NT, they become popular, then some of the results are taken as givens, or almost so, then there is push back and critique of the trend. The book Jesus is Lord, Caesar is Not edited by Scot McKnight and Joseph Modica falls largely into the latter category, though with some telling admissions about Emperor and Empire crtique for example in the Book of Revelation. In the next several posts we will be critiquing the book, and Scot McKnight has agreed to respond to a few questions about the book and what prompted.

Our intent is to work through the essays in this book, mostly by younger scholars, some of them considerably younger than yours truly (but then I’m in my 60s and most scholars are now younger than me), and see what fresh light they shed on the subject. It does need to be said with some dismay that various of the conservative Christian scholars (I’m not referring to the ones who wrote this book!) who have just dismissed Empire criticism were mostly in no position to do so, because they were not experts in Roman history, did not study the classics, in some cases couldn’t even read Latin, and have not really interacted with classics scholars who do know lots about the growth and development of the Imperial Cult. Fortunately, this collection of essays avoids that sort of pitfall and too easy dismissal of the trend.

The book begins with a helpful Foreword, and assessment by Andy Crouch, the new head editor of CT, who himself has written an excellent recent book about power, including political power and its uses and abuses entitled Playing God, which I commend to you. I am going to save his overall assessment of the book in focus in these posts until the end of the discussion, as I think his assessment is correct, and a needed corrective in various ways. In this post, let me state a few things that ought to go without saying, but apparently need to be said.

1) the early Christians were monotheists, indeed the earliest ones were all Jewish monotheists and as such had always been opposed to polytheism, the worship of any supposed deity, mythological or human, that was not the Biblical God. This characterizes not just the NT, but the OT as well. This would of course obviously include the Emperor cult. The question then becomes did the writers of the NT single out the Emperor cult for special criticism as a form of idolatry and if so, in what ways?

2) the early Christians were also, of course opposed to the ‘abuse’ of power by any leader or ruler, and opposed to corruption in high places of various sorts. This critique can be found in either testament as well. The critique of abuse of power however is not the same thing as the critique of any use of power, any sort of hierarchy, any sort of government or governmental control. It just isn’t. The old Latin dictum applies— ‘abusus non tollit usum’– the abuse of a privilege does not rule out its proper use.

3) Though this may be a little more controversial, it ought not to be. Early Jews and early Christians believed in personal supernatural evil– both in the person of Satan and in the case of demons. This includes the writers of the NT. A critique of these principalities and powers is not necessarily the same thing as a critique of governments and rulers, though there are times and places where there seems to be demonic influence or control over a governing official or a particular fallen kind of governmental structure— for instance during the Third Reich. Did the writers of the NT think that all existing human governing structures, including the Roman ones were by their very nature always inherently demonic in character? The evidence does not support such a sweeping conclusion. Indeed, as we shall see, there is considerable evidence against such a view in the NT. What a modern scholar may believe about demons is in fact irrelevant if we are asking what the NT writers meant when they wrote about these things.

There will be more to say along these lines in due course, but this is a good start.