the promise of peace in this name (Luke 2:14, 29; John 14:27; 16:33; 20:19,
21, 26; Acts 10:36, etc.); the recollection of the same person’s erstwhile
fateful appearance (epiphaneia:1 Tim. 6:14; 2 Tim. 1:10; 4:1, 8; Tit. 2:13; also
2 Thess. 2:8); and, of course, the prospect of his proximate parousia(Matt.
24:3, 27, 37, 39; 1 Thess. 2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23; 1 Cor. 15:23; Jas. 5:7, 8; 2
Pet. 1:16; 3:4, 12; 1 John 2:28; also 2 Thess. 2:1, 8; though parousiacould also
be used more literally to refer to someone’s physical presence: see, e.g.,
1 Cor. 16:17; 2 Cor. 7:6, 7; 10:10; Phil. 1:26; 2:12; also 2 Thess. 2:9). To this
list Dieter Georgi (1991) and R.A. Horsley (1998, 162) would add pistisand
dikaiosyne.In fact, these are not the only other early Christian terms char-
acteristic of ancient imperial speech. One could also include, for example,
the discourse of patronage-clientism and of the well-ordered household. My
point is merely to underscore the patently political nature of key aspects of
early Christian speech.
With these observations, I mean to note the same sort of ideological
complicity for early Christianity in the context of the Roman Empire, which
Edward Said has demonstrated for nineteenth-century English literature
and related works of art in the context of the modern British and other con-
temporary empires. Said does not deny or even question that such cultural
products might also be instruments of aesthetic pleasure and refined reflec-
tion. Nonetheless, he writes:
Now the trouble with this idea of culture [as essentially aesthetic pleas-
ure or refined reflection] is that it entails...thinking of [one’s own cul-
ture] as somehow divorced from, because transcending, the everyday
world. Most professional humanists as a result are unable to make the
connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such
as slavery, colonialist and racist oppression, and imperial subjugation on
the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that
engages in these practices on the other....Culture conceived in this way
can become a protective enclosure: check your politics at the door before
you enter it. (Said 1994, xiii-xiv)
According to Said, the “facts” of the British and other modern Euro-
pean empires belong, intrinsically and significantly, to the otherwise decid-
edly literary and imaginary world of the Victorian novel (see, e.g., the
writings of Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad) and other aes-
thetic works (e.g., Verdi’s Aida). Likewise, in my opinion, earliest Chris-
tianity’s core religious vocabulary frankly betrays its own imperial matrix
of origin. Telling, too, is how thoroughly the interpretation of this language
by modern biblical scholarship has served primarily to obscure such a fact.
Typically, this has been accomplished by declaring the so-called true or