proper meaning of the terminology in question, when used by one or
another early Christian, to be ultimately a higher (theological) or more
universal (religious) or more narrowly specific (historical) one. In this
regard, R.A. Horsley is neither fish nor fowl, since he aims on the one hand
to challenge such a scholarly tradition, only to replicate it on the other
hand by drawing a series of excessively facile oppositions (see, e.g., 1998,
164). Whatever transcendent truth the different writings of the New Tes-
tament might genuinely aim to project, the defining language of their
vision remains rooted in the conventional rhetoric of Roman hegemony.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY AS GOOD IMPERIAL CITIZEN
That early Christianity quickly accommodated itself to life within the
Roman Empire is hardly a novel insight; though, perhaps, a truth yet worth
repeating. Charting the different mechanisms by which Christianity became
progressively assimilated to the standard social structures of the Roman
Empire, such as the properly ordered patriarchal household, is what schol-
ars have been doing whenever they have discussed the business of its insti-
tutionalization. Again, more research certainly could be done to reveal all
the ways in which Christianity was and became ever more culturally con-
ventional. None of this, however, helps to explain why it not only survived
but soon proved to be so ably suited to take over as imperial underwriter,
once the Roman Empire ceased to function as a purely Roman venture
(except, of course, to underscore the degree to which much less actually
changed with Constantine than often has been supposed). Nonetheless,
before pursuing the question of Christianity’s aptness for empire, it may be
important to consider first the extent to which the New Testament, espe-
cially in its final canonical form, simply makes of this tradition a good
imperial citizen.^3
Exemplary, if not constitutive, of the canonical perspective is the work
of Luke-Acts. It is helpful to recall that whatever modern scholarship might
choose to say about Luke-Acts as originally a single two-volume work, in
the manuscript tradition of the New Testament not only is Acts always
Why Christianity Succeeded (in) the Roman Empire 2573 In part, this may be due to the fact that some writings in the New Testament are polit-
ically disinterested, being either imaginatively above and beyond or hermetically enclosed
within the reigning world order (see, e.g., the Gospel of John, Ephesians, 1–3 John; cf. 1
Thess. 4:12). Otherwise, it would be instructive to consider the degree to which the his-
torical creation not only of the New Testament but, with it, of the Christian Bible as a
whole was originally a Roman project: in other words, a book produced in Rome for a
Roman “catholic” audience out of the specifically Roman experience of early Christian-
ity. Cf. Trobisch 1996.