the dominant social structures and ideological expectations of the Roman
Empire. Rather, I suggest, earliest Christianity’s intrinsic will to rule is
most evident, albeit paradoxically, in its initial modes of resistance to this
regime. Hence, when R.A. Horsley writes: “Ironic as it may seem, precisely
where he is borrowing from or alluding to ‘imperial’ language, we can dis-
cern that Paul’s gospel stands counter primarily to the Roman imperial
order, ‘this world, which is passing away’” (1997, 7), Horsley is both right
and wrong. It may be—indeed, I do not doubt—that Paul himself meant
to oppose contemporary Roman rule. But precisely because his language of
opposition was derived from the discourse of empire, the long-term legacy
of such speech could hardly be anything other than a recurrence of the
same.
In a sense, earliest Christianity is a type of cargo cult—albeit, in this case,
the cargo in question was a certain political lexicon rather than a set of
commercial commodities, and mindful of Jonathan Z. Smith’s suggestion
that cargo cults are finally not a general type of religion but a specifically
Oceanic phenomenon, due to the regional mythology that defines the lost
ancestors as white (1982b). Nonetheless, in practice, both traditions would
be alike in worshipping the god that otherwise threatened to destroy them.
Early Christianity is distinctive as a cargo cult simply because it worked as
scripted, perhaps due primarily to the fact that its forms of utopian rewrit-
ing rehearsed with such resistance the language of succession.
nora
(Nora)
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