My understatement here was intended with some irony, given that views about the moral qualities of the Roman Empire vary rather spectacularly. Rome is often depicted as tolerant, as allowing diversity of religion as long as subjugated people acknowledge the suzerainty of the Empire.DWill wrote:The "rather bullying" example of Rome's destruction of Israel--I should say so!My view is that the Gnostic reading of Paul as explained by Professor Pagels is vastly more plausible than Orthodox literalism, as I explain in my review. What does this say about the motive for concealment of Gnostic cosmology? Essentially, the social context of the rise of Christianity was the building of a mass movement within the turmoil of the Roman Empire. As Christianity grew through the second and third centuries, this context included a very strong Roman ban on sedition, and the rather bullying context that Rome had completely obliterated Israel from the face of the earth as a demonstration of Rome’s might and intolerance. Now, if the Paul school had associations with a range of mystery religions, and wished to use ideas emerging from these sources to create a new mass movement based on the idea of the presence of the prophesied Jewish messiah in history, then we have a good explanation for the motive for Paul’s epistles to speak at two levels, for the initiates and for the public.
For some reason the unwillingness of the Jews to go along with this led to the most massive and bloody suppression imaginable, with the Roman War against the Jews in 67-70 AD chronicled in remorseless detail by Josephus, reportedly the biggest war the Empire ever fought. The expulsion of the Jews from Israel, the complete destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem except for the wailing wall, and the renaming of the city in honour of Jupiter were a frightening example of tyranny and intimidation by Rome.
But then we see a systematic effort to rehabilitate Roman reputation, through to Dante’s inclusion of a range of non-Roman conquerors such as Alexander among the tyrants of hell while exculpating Rome. It seems the virtues of stability, making a desert and calling it peace, were often seen to justify a lack of compassion. This is an imperial value system that remains influential today.
In considering the intimidatory nature of the Roman domination, we should accept that we look at ancient Israel through Roman eyes, and that a society that was physically in the East is often imagined through the distorted prism of the West.
The example of how Paul spoke at two levels about Christ, physical and spiritual, could be read as indicating that the physical Christ was depicted for the western dunderheads who could not understand symbols, while the spiritual Christ was for the Eastern Gnostics. But such a reading will infuriate Western readers who insist they are not stupid and can read the plain literal meaning that Paul intended.
When the Gnostics encountered this type of debate, their orthodox opponents said the Gnostics were so arrogant that they thought they alone had access to special spiritual knowledge. But maybe the reality was that the Western thinkers' minds were so corrupted by the empire that they simply could not see plain meaning. This is what Pagels implies with her comment that the church failed to engage with the mystical dimensions in Paul’s epistles.
Despite Paul’s instruction in Romans 13:1 to obey the state, there is a profoundly subversive core in Pauline Christianity with its assertion that Jesus is Lord. A secular king brooks no rivals, and yet Christianity finds a range of stratagems to insist that its rival king Jesus is compatible with imperial stability. Especially in Romans 8 we see the delay of the Parousia, with the pangs of childbirth experienced by the creation as mother deferred to the future while the church prepares the way.DWill wrote: But I see nothing in what Paul wanted to say according to you that would have increased the heat on Christian sects.
Paul did not use the Gospel method of displacing the possibly proscribed status of the Nazarene gnostics onto the newly invented place of Nazareth. However, he did present ideas that are in jarring conflict with political norms.
The centrality of compassion in Paul’s vision of politics emerges in texts such as Colossians 3:12 “Put on therefore, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, humility, and perseverance.” This moral framework may seem a recipe for angelic sacrifice, but it is also a denial of legitimacy to Rome, for its failure to apply these values.