Abstract
This is a book with a thesis. How shall we state it? In Carter’s own words it “explores ways in which the New Testament writers interact with and negotiate the Roman imperial world “(p. ix). He is emboldened to assert that the Roman Empire does not comprise merely a background to the NT but a foreground, further that it is the pervasive context for New Testament writings. The empire is always there even when not mentioned. Carter in particular wants to know how various writers negotiate, a key word for him, the imperial world of the empire. Furthermore, like others in this school of thought, he claims that Jesus and the New Testament are willy nilly political. That this assertion will have modern implications for current empires, including the American one, is not held in coy abeyance.
Furthermore, this book should be set in the current socio-economic-political school of thought associated with other scholars such as Horsley, Herzog, Crossan, and many others by which we have been tutored. For those who think that the Jesus Seminar is the last big thing in NT studies, this juggernaut of a trend should be assessed with its virtual rejection of Jesus emerging from the seminar in favor of a highly relevant prophetic figure in the person of Jesus. Furthermore, the Pharisees are no longer treated with kid gloves (Sanders) but are seen as representatives from Jerusalem (also Sanders). This book belongs in the highly relevant Essential Guide Series of Abingdon Press. I have personally been aided by Carter’s What Are They Saying books which I recommend. Carter is a specialist in Matthew studies and has published monographs on Matthew and Empire and Matthew and the Margins. He has also published in disability studies. Obviously, he is also centered in postcolonial orientations. He was Pherigo professor of New Testament at St Paul School of Theology at the time of writing this monograph but is now located at Phillips Theological Seminary.
The title of this book will alert you that Carter has assigned himself a very broad topic indeed, but his near mastery of far-flung texts all over the NT is itself impressive. He can move from Paul to John to Jesus to Revelation with no little expertise. The reader may be overwhelmed by breadth but will be rewarded with the overarching orientation to this particular way of reading. While the perspective that the Roman Empire is at least background for the entire NT is by no means new, the implications Carter and others emphasize are; indeed, he seeks to apply his thesis with near abandon. In pursuing such a dramatic position, it is both acceptable and understandable that an advocate would try to put the interpretive key into many locks. This will not in all instances convince, but that is OK.
The organization of the book reflects a balanced and knowledgeable assessment of the empire and the negotiations with it by the NT people, heightening awareness of the particular challenges and threats of such existence that modern countries like Poland overrun and occupied by empires have had to negotiate. After describing and evaluating the Roman imperial world, Carter introduces ruling faces, urban and rural life, temples, imperial theology, and economics, the latter least surprising given the socio-economic orientation. While each chapter could be expanded into a monograph, these introductions are invaluable and evocative. At times insights into particular texts sparkle.
Carter does not force a single view among NT writers but indeed rightly recognizes a variety of voices and strategies as Brueggemann hears several voices in the OT. That the people in the first century must resist the empire Carter assumes, but he lays out a plethora of patterns. He responds for example to Matthew 5:39 as follows: “The question is not whether one should resist or not. It is not a choice between flight or fight, violence or passivity. The issue is how to resist” (p. 132). Coming from socio-economic patterns of peasant resistance when dominated (as James Scott), he displays a gamut in the NT from imagining Rome’s violent overthrow, to disguised and ambiguous protest usually in code, and flattery and submission to Rome toward which he evinces the least sympathy. Carter and this school of thought portray the empire as profoundly evil, a malignant force that tramples the vast majority (the non-elites) and greatly favors the elites (2%–3%). Harsh taxation and exploitation of the poor are highly characteristic. That the empire was often villainous using its legions to intimidate and destroy any groups that dared to exert independence convinces me also to question naïve images of the Pax Romana. Actions of the army of Titus in the siege of Jerusalem, for example, are despicable.
Furthermore, this view of Rome is brought home by the realistic awareness of the death of Jesus, Paul, probably Peter at the hands of the empire! The Baptizer was executed by a Herodian empowered by the empire. This reality currently is taken with far more seriousness.
I pose here, only in passing, what I see as the highly questionable reading of the tribute text (Mark 12:13–17 and parallels) characteristic of this school of thought, though championed in a more sophisticated manner by Carter. One can surmise, given this assessment of Rome and the Christians, that this particular text poses a major problem as indeed it does. Carter rightly points out that those who question Jesus “are powerful elite allies of the Jerusalem leadership allied with Rome” (p. 28). They are angered at Jesus for his attack on the Temple. He puts the dilemma that “Paying taxes expressed submission to Rome’s and the elite sovereignty while nonpayment was regarded as rebellion.” The question is not whether Jesus liked the tax or even the Roman Empire. He apparently considered the empire an enemy himself (Luke 19:43–44) and did offer guidelines about how to negotiate it (Matt 5:38–42) but love its adherents. The narrow question of the tribute text is whether to pay it or not, however. Carter makes numerous insightful observations. He explains the dictum of Jesus as giving back to Caesar a blasphemous coin, a way of removing an illicit coin from Judea. This exegesis does provide a way to handle the problematic of the denarius with its inscription. This is clever and better than Horsley’s suggestion that Jesus really said not to pay it, the seeming logic of Horsley being because Jesus could not have said it he did not. In my view, Horsley arrives perilously close to the fateful previous position of Judas of Gamala in 6 CE. In my view, Jesus answered the question forthrightly to keep his people from igniting an incendiary revolution. The Sitz included the dangerous moment of the Passover festival and ignited a firestorm of latent zealotic hostility. Jesus appears to me to engage in realpolitik. He also foiled the intent of entrapment, though his interrogators would falsify his words in their accusation of Pilate (so Luke 23:2).
Further studies of this kind should delineate often as to emperors (Caligula, Nero, Domitian being the worst in the first century, perhaps) and their attendant eras being different, also that various locations in the empire and local situations would alter attitudes toward the empire by the Christian community. Of course, Carter knows this well, but the tendency of these studies is to portray a rather static situation, rather like generalizing about Mediterranean peasants as though they were a homogeneous group. The construct in its full array fits best the book of Revelation. Carter perceptively calls attention to the empire’s economic oppression in Revelation 18, its illicit economic activity made possible by its military, the parallel to Jeremiah 50–51, and the vicious military conquest upon which the empire is founded (pp. 105–107). Would that indeed be the case for all empires?
Relatively recent empires are not immune from similar critiques. Consider the German Reich, the Russian empire after WW2, and the British Empire that might have been somewhat enlightened, eventually letting India go without war, but was still imperial and racist (?) and could be drastic. Should we not also be awakened by this study to the American empire, of bases if not of colonies, and its military invasions in the twentieth century? Did the United States embark on being a colonial power after the Spanish-American war by taking possession of the Philippines, tempting the would-be Empire of Japan into the tragic bombing of Pearl Harbor? Is there not some hubris in the very idea of empire, some inherent necessity to conquer other countries and subsume them for selfish benefit? Carter is acutely aware of such potentialities.
Were I to say that I am impressed with this book and recommend it would be to engage in understatement. It is invaluable for its overview, academically of high standard yet readable, informative for those needing an update about the socio-economic application to an NT set in the Roman Empire. It is actually rather exhilarating to read this essential guide. It could serve well as a primer in a college or seminary class for orientation and would function exceptionally well as a catalyst for lively discussion in a bible study group.