to participate in projects of aid to total strangers. Paul’s broad generaliza-
tions about support from Achaia and Macedonia are just that: rhetorical
exaggerations.
In Philippians 3:20, Paul again speaks of “our politeumain the heavens,”
whence early Christians were to await a saviour (sôtêr), in accordance with
whoseeuaggelionPaul had exhorted the Philippians earlier in the epistle
“worthily...[to] behave as citizens” (axiôs...politeuesthe,1:27). The situa-
tion here recalls 1 Thessalonians. According to R.A. Horsley, Philippians
3:20 “sharply opposes Jesus Christ as Lord to the imperial saviour” (1997,
141). But, again, there is no indication that this “sharp” opposition finally
means anything other than a Christian candidate for imperial champion:
i.e., “Jesus Christ as Lord.” Similarly, the early Christian hymn in Philip-
pians 2:6–11, R.A. Horsley claims (citing Dieter Georgi), “must have sug-
gested the events surrounding the [death] of a princepsand his heavenly
assumption and apotheosis” (1997, 141). According to R.A. Horsley: “Paul’s
borrowing from and allusions to language central to the imperial cult and
ideology reveal and dramatize just how anti-Roman imperial his own gospel
was” (1997, 141). Yet again, however, the very same facts and line of rea-
soning explain just as easily why this discourse soon could authorize and
even require Christian imperial pretensions.
The preceding discussion of the letters of Paul and the Pauline Corpus,
together with the Book of Revelation and selected scenes from Luke-Acts,
obviously cannot and does not claim to be exhaustive or even fully repre-
sentative. My purpose here is merely suggestive: to propose an expressly
political reading of the New Testament and, on this basis, an assessment
of earliest Christianity as inherently imperial in its discursive formation. In
this section, I have tried to demonstrate the degree to which a recurring pat-
tern of reinscription of especially Roman codes of empire can be observed
in a broad range of New Testament texts, whose original intention likely was
precisely to resist this very thing. Indeed, it is exactly this curious combi-
nation of explicit antagonism and implicit imitation which made Christian-
ity, in my opinion, particularly suited to succeed (in) the Roman Empire.
CONCLUSION
My proposal is quite simple, if far-reaching: earliest Christianity was inher-
ently an imperial religion, which is to say, a social movement decisively
shaped by the political culture of the Roman Empire, under whose aegis it
first came into being (cf. R.A. Horsley 1997, 1: “Christianity was a product
of empire”). The imperial essence of Christianity, however, is manifest nei-
ther uniquely nor even most tellingly in evidence of its accommodation to
Why Christianity Succeeded (in) the Roman Empire 277