inate any suggestion that Jesus’ ascension was a Roman imperial apothe-
osis. In this case, the “hereticalcorruption of Scripture” (Zwiep 1996, 244)
would be the more “progressive” ideological critique.
While the disciples’ question to Jesus in Acts 1:6, whether “at this
time you will re-establish Israel’s kingdom,” is immediately rebuffed in
Acts 1:7 with the disclaimer that “it is not yours to know the chronousor
kairous,which the father has determined by his own exousia,” the state-
ment also takes for granted that, in fact, it is this father—namely, God, to
whose right hand Jesus is about to ascend and whence he is scheduled to
return “just as you saw him go” (Acts 1:11)—who indeed determines by his
authority (exousia) the duration of every kingdom on earth. The effect is
equivalent to Jesus’ concluding pronouncement in the Gospel of Matthew,
where Jesus declares that now “all authority [exousia] has been given to me
in heaven and on earth” (28:18). Although Luke-Acts does displace the
concrete meaning of the imperative “to serve God rather than humans”
away from imperial politics into the realm of personal virtue, the narrative
of Jesus’ ascension nonetheless provides all the ideological elements nec-
essary to understand such service as ultimately realized within the ele-
vated one’s earthly empire.
The Book of Revelation (2:1–3:22)
One does not normally associate Luke-Acts with the Book of Revelation.
Accommodation to Roman rule is hardly the key in which the latter work
sings its hymn of diehard resistance. Even the revolutionary understatement
that some scholars have surmised for the birth narrative and other parts of
Luke-Acts stands in sharp contrast to the fierce polemic of Revelation,
which all too obviously opposes the Roman Empire as the quintessential
embodiment of everything that the visionary of the apocalypse considered
to be evil in the ancient world. In celebrating the impending fall of the
Great Whore, a.k.a. Babylon or Rome, and the concomitant marriage feast
of the Lamb in Revelation 17:1–19:10, it can hardly be ignored how utterly
the author of this work desired the Roman Empire’s full destruction. Indeed,
such an understanding has now become the standard interpretation.
Noteworthy, therefore, is the way in which this total opposition to the
Roman Empire nonetheless finds expression in Revelation through Rome’s
own language of empire. Take, for example, the repeated invocation of
God, viz. Lord God (kyrios ho theos) as pantokratôr.Except for 2 Corinthians
6:18, this way of referring to God (pantokratôr) only occurs in the New Tes-
tament in the Book of Revelation (1:8; 4:8; 11:17; 15:3; 16:7, 14; 19:6, 15;
21:22). Similarly, in Revelation 19:16, immediately after the fall of Babylon
and the marriage feast of the Lamb, the rider on the white horse, whose
Why Christianity Succeeded (in) the Roman Empire 265