Imperial Acts

To her credit, Brigitte Kahl (in Horsley, ed., In the Shadow of Empire ) recognizes that Acts gives a fairly sympathetic portrait of Rome. In the various episodes where Paul is suspected of subverting the empire, “Acts makes every effort to draw as favorable a picture as possible,” not only of Paul’s ministry but of Roman officials: “Many times Roman officials testify that Paul is no threat to Roman rule.”

It is not to her credit, though, that Kahl then attempts to show that Luke reinvented the story of Paul in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple as a way of providing security for Christians who might be under suspicion:

“we should understand him to be rewriting the history of the early Jesus movement and of Paul within the parameters of the post-70 Roman imperial context of special concern about security, particularly with regard to movements deeply rooted in Judean history and heritage. In some ways he is not unlike his contemporary Flavius Josephus, who surrendered to the Romans during their reconquest of Galilee and Judea and subsequently rewrote the history of the Judean people and of their tragic revolt against Rome from a Flavian perspective.”

Luke bends facts “in a pro-imperial direction” an example of “re-presenting and redrafting the past under the censorship of the now-dominant order,” creating a “pro(t0)- imperial script of the events preceding and following the ddeath of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Still, Luke is at war with himself, subversive in spite of his intentions. He lists the peoples who receive the Spirit in a kind of parody of imperial conquest lists; he depicts Jesus’ apotheosis into heaven, an assault and a blasphemy against the imperial theology; Paul never praises the pax Romana in his appearances before Roman officials, as many were expected to do. Luke omits and adds to his portrayal of Paul in his zeal to make Paul appear “safe” and thus contributes, like the Pastorals, to a “canonical betrayal” of Paul (the phrase is Neil Elliott’s).

Some of Kahl’s Luke v. Luke is intriguing, but it is gratuitous that, faced with an account that has both pro- and anti-Roman features, she decides that the latter is the genuine evangel and the latter an accommodation to circumstance. The technique is familiar: Paul’s genuine theology of gender comes at the end of Galatians 3, but he is betrayed by his conservative imitators in Ephesians and the Pastorals.

Oughtn’t we instead acknowledge the complexity of Acts (and the rest of the Bible) in its portrayal of power, and work from there?