already sufficiently composed and operative in the centuries before titular
domain was achieved.
That such dominance has never been entirely successful is, of course,
the other story to be told. Nonetheless, my focus here shall be on earliest
Christianity’s innate pretension to hegemonic power. Not that I think this
pretension was necessarily unique to Christianity. It may be that early
Judaism and other ancient religious traditions also possessed such ten-
dencies and aspirations. If so, why they failed to realize them in the face
of Christianity’s rise is a question that needs to be addressed by a more com-
prehensive explanation of events in late antiquity. Again, my purpose in this
chapter is merely to demonstrate why Christianity’s eventual emergence as
a religion of empire is an outcome thoroughly consistent with (much of)
earliest Christianity’s constitutive discourse and not so obviously a trans-
formation or deviation from its original nature.
Obviously, there are many and various ways in which earliest Christian-
ity can be seen, retrospectively, to have anticipated in its developing social
practices and defining mental habits an imperial destiny. Some of these are
briefly noted below. My main argument, however, will be that it was espe-
cially the manner in which earliest Christianity resistedRoman rule, which
made it such a probable successor to the eternal kingdom.
DISCOURSE AS A SOCIAL FACTOR
In his book The Rise of Christianity,Rodney Stark (1996; 1997) provides a
sociological explanation why the new religious movement of Christianity was
able to succeed as quickly as it did in the context of the Roman Empire. It
is not my purpose here to contradict Stark’s general thesis or its possible
improvements (see, e.g., chapters 9, 10, and 11). Nonetheless, in contrast to
Stark and his theoretical co-religionists, I want to suggest an essentially
discursive reason for Christianity’s eventual success as the chosen faith of
Roman rule. In my opinion, it was the expressly political tenor of earliest
Christianity’s various offers of salvation, which made its subsequent coro-
nation hardly a surprise.^1 I am aware that this proposal may seem to be a
statement of the obvious or, perhaps, an exaggerated emphasis of a few
features that certainly are true as far as they go, but which hardly tell the
whole story. Nonetheless, I think that Christianity’s cultural destiny was,
254 PART III •RISE?
1 Cf. the claim made by the Stoic philosopher M. Cornelius Fronto to the Roman emperor
Marcus Aurelius: “Now imperiumis a term that not only connotes power but also speech,
since the exercise of imperiumconsists essentially of ordering and prohibiting” (Ad verum
imp.2.1; LCL 2:139, trans. Haines).