John Dominic Crossan’s “God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now”

I’ve been reading the recent book by Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. In some ways it’s a very strange book. For one thing, it strikes me stylistically as having been written in great haste. And on most non-theological or Biblical topics Crossan appears to have read only one or two books (I know this is false, but he frequently bases his discussion on one or two other authors, especially for his discussion of the nature of “civilization.”) Nevertheless, I’ve slowly warmed up to the book while reading it, largely just because I have sympathy with Crossan’s political commitments, but also because I find his employment of otherwise controversial scholarship to be clever. I’ll give one example below, after a very quick overview of Crossan’s general position.

Crossan’s basic thesis is that the Gospel message, or more exactly the God who is revealed in Jesus, confronts the normalcy of civilization’s violence and retributive justice with the Kingdom of Heaven, which is present in the form of peace through nonviolence and distributive justice. In Crossan’s words, “[T] he Christian Bible presents the radicality of a just and nonviolent God repeatedly and relentlessly confronting the normalcy of an unjust and violent civilization” (94).  Before you ask, the reason why the plain and apparently ordained violence of Scripture does not cause a problem for Crossan is because of his christocentric principle, which is nicely put: “[Christ] is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel. That is how we Christians decide between a violent and nonviolent God in the Bible, New Testament, or Gospel. The person, not the book, and the life, not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us” (95). Crossan sees God and human civilization competing (often within the Bible itself) with dueling parallel programs:

Civilization: religion, war, victory, peace (or more succinctly, peace through victory)

God: religion, nonviolence, justice, peace (or more succinctly, peace through justice)

Now I will give one of the several instances where Crossan uses scholarship I don’t like to support political interpretations I do like. He takes the view common in scholarship that Paul’s letters can be divided into categories of authentic, probably not authentic, and inauthentic. The certainly authentic letters are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. The questionable letters are 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. The inauthentic letters are 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.^[1]

Crossan gives an additional political label to the three categories of Pauline letters: Radical Paul, Liberal Paul, and Reactionary/Conservative/Pseudo Paul. He analyzes this progression with respect to a few potent political issues, and I’ll just summarize his discussion of slavery. Crossan claims that Authentic Paul, the author of Philemon, clearly believes that a Christian master cannot have a Christian slave. Crossan reads Paul as thinking “No inner and spiritual equality would suffice – equality had to be external and physical as well” (164). Liberal Paul, the author of Colossians and Ephesians, gives seemingly egalitarian commandments (e.g. “Slaves obey your earthly masters” and “Masters treat your slaves justly and fairly.”) but stops short of radically undermining the institution. Conservative, or pseudo Paul, the author of Titus, “speaks only about slaves” and doesn’t even pay them the respect of direct address. “Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:9-10).

Crossan then discusses the issues of equality between elites and those of low stature, marriage, and issues of gender, with similar progressive results. I found Crossan’s analysis clever and compelling because his attributions of authorship are not ad hoc for the specific purpose of producing desirable political outcomes. Indeed, the case seems to be serious. Perhaps this kind of analysis is relatively common in discussions of Paul. But as I only dabble in this area, it was new to me.