Abstract
James R. Harrison contends that Paul's eschatological gospel in the Thessalonian correspondence and in Romans collided with the Julio-Claudian conception of rule. Chapter 1 offers a wide-ranging introduction to Harrison's study, one that surveys the contours of the debate concerning Paul and politics and ends with an important discussion of methodology when discerning the presence of imperial discourse in Paul and in the broader first-century context. Chapter 2 looks at the way Augustan providential and apotheosis traditions, expressed in the context of Paul's Roman opposition in Thessalonica, explains the eschatological discourse in 1 Thess 4:13–5:11. Chapter 3 investigates the possibility that 2 Thessalonians 2:1–10 refers to Caligula and his attempted desecration of the Jerusalem temple in 40
In Chapter 4, the focus shifts to Paul's letter to the Romans and the way the Roman cyclical view of time was used by the Julio-Claudians as a propaganda tool. Paul writes to the Christ-followers in Rome during Nero's quinquennium but provides an alternative eschatological scheme, one that is linear in its orientation. Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of the forum Augustum in Rome and its explicit conception of rule. Harrison analyses Romans 5:1–11, describing Jesus in a manner similar to other dishonored benefactors. This provides a basis for an alternative appraisal of the Augustan age and would likely encourage other disaffected critics to consider Paul's gospel. Chapter 6 provides a substantial study of glory discourse in both the Jewish and Roman contexts. This somewhat overlooked discourse was a major concern among noble Roman houses from the republican period on into the imperial era.
Chapter 7 addresses the crux interpretum with regard to Paul and the Roman Empire: Romans 13:1–7. Harrison contends that Paul was not providing a new theory of the state; rather, he was engaged in “coded diplomacy,” a type of hidden transcript that was for “the consumption of politically divided groups within the house churches” in Rome (p. 326). Chapter 8 concludes the monograph with a review of key methodological issues, a reminder of the different ways Paul's gospel collided with the Julio-Claudian propaganda in the Greek East and the Latin West (a distinction sometimes lost on New Testament scholars), and a few areas for further research, a section aspiring PhD researchers may find particularly probative.
Harrison's work is a methodologically sensitive presentation of social history that also provides numerous interpretive insights into the various ways Paul's gospel discourse could have been heard among his auditors, even if that information was often coded. Harrison has done an excellent job in providing an analysis of the social context and the way it contributed to the communication process as Paul's letters were heard among the Christ-movement.
In a review of this size there is room for only one critical remark. This work is explicitly one of social history, where comparative materials are given the most evidentiary weight. One wonders, however, if further use of social theory would have provided more insights with regard to social processes and change that resulted from the collision of these two competing gospel discourses (e.g., Paul's and Rome's). Harrison draws effectively from contemporary research on coded language and hidden transcripts; however, it would seem that drawing on one of the approaches associated with cultural translation would have provided a somewhat better analytical framework for determining the way Paul's discourse entered and transformed existing symbolic universes. See, for example, the forthcoming work by Kathy Ehrensperger, Paul at the Crossroads: Theologizing in the Space Between (London: T&T Clark, 2013) for a more theoretically-oriented approach to Paul, Roman imperial ideology, and cultural translation.
This one issue aside, and recognizing that Harrison allows for sociological analysis as long as it flows from sourcebased reconstructions (p. 29), I suspect the difference here may be one of degree. This book is written for specialists and provides a wealth of primary source material to draw from as these scholars continue to seek to understand the emergence of the Christ-movement and Paul's role as an intercultural communicator.