Paul Elie, The New York Times; How the Roman Empire Made Christianity What It Is Today
In “Rome’s Age of Revolution,” Tim Whitmarsh argues that movements advanced by Augustus and Paul the Apostle, far from being at odds, were two sides of the same imperial coin.
"Here, as in so many accounts of Christianity’s origins, the role of Paul is decisive, and, for Whitmarsh, Paul is a creature of the Roman Empire through and through. Unlike most Jews, Paul spoke Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part of the empire, and he held imperial citizenship. His “universalist” effort to separate Christianity from Jewish law and practice — he insisted you didn’t need to be circumcised to take part in the “new covenant,” for instance — perfectly suited the empire’s ambition to expand. His use of personal letters to spread his message took advantage of the empire’s pioneering mail system, which operated along the dense “meshwork” of freshly laid bits of Roman infrastructure that eased travel. In other words, “Paul was a product of a new age, the age of the road,” Whitmarsh observes, and his accounts of his missionary journeys were basically “road trip” narratives...
Each of these successors to Paul, Whitmarsh argues, had a decidedly Roman flavor. One group, the “experts” — the bishops, priests and deacons who made up the hierarchy of the early church — mirrored “religious hierarchies in the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds,” and they soon got busy with the “rebranding of Christianity as a form of intellectual expertise” in the manner of Roman philosophers. Another related group, the “bibliophiles,” established a canon of Christian texts and gave those texts the prestige Romans attached to books, the “luxury items” of “antiquity.” Finally, there were the “zealots” — the word, in Greek, means imitators — who underwent violent deaths in imitation of Christ’s, a practice apparently natural to a culture that found meaning in other heroic lives cut short, like those of Achilles and Alexander the Great...
Whitmarsh gives most of his attention to the Christian revolution, but he also notes the role that Christianity played in the other revolution he has in mind — the one begun by Augustus to reform and expand the Roman Empire. As the monotheism that Christians adopted from Judaism displaced Roman polytheism, he argues, it fit neatly with “the transition of the Mediterranean basin into a politically unified and culturally interconnected entity.” Whitmarsh sees religion and empire as being in a “paradoxical” relationship: The Messiah whom Christians worship is a “doppelgänger” for the emperor whom Roman citizens exalt and obey. This doubling echoes Hobsbawm, who saw Europe’s annus mirabilis of 1848 as a result of a “dual revolution” involving democracy in France and industry in Britain."
