I am very excited to announce the release of Warren Carter's John and Empire: Initial Explorations! This comprehensive and thorough volume on the interrelation of the Johannine community and the SPQR is a wonderful and novel contribution to the field. I had the opportunity to hear Professor Carter give a sneak preview of his book at SWCRS earlier this year and I was unduly impressed with his cohesive rethinking on the matter. It's certainly an impressive follow-up to his earlier book with us, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations.
For our international readers, John and Empire will be the subject of a panel at the International Society of Biblical Literature conference in Auckland, New Zealand next month. The book will be available in the UK in July.
Professor Carter has graciously offered some words for our Author's Circle:
In this book, John and Empire: Initial Explorations, I explore John's Gospel as a work of imperial negotiation in the context of Ephesus, capital of the Roman province of Asia. I do not claim John was written in or necessarily for Ephesian Jesus-believers, but, if the traditions linking the Gospel and the city have any historical veracity, the Gospel was at least read/heard there. Hence I investigate likely interactions or intertextualities - as Julia Kristeva identifies them - between the Gospel and the imperial realities that pervaded the city.
This approach to John is a significant departure from the two standard approaches that dominate much contemporary discussion of the Gospel. Conventionally the Gospel is understood either in very individualistic and spiritualized terms for contemporary believers in Jesus, or is understood as a product of a bitter sectarian dispute with and separation from a synagogue community in the 80s-90s of the first century CE. I argue that both approaches are severely flawed, the first ignoring communal and material dimensions of the gospel, the second using a model that is difficult to sustain, particularly in its positing of a synagogue community as isolated from its larger societal context.
Employing multiple methods including studies of Ephesus, social-science models of empire, literary studies, James Scott's work, and insights from postcolonial approaches, and rejecting sectarian scenarios, I build on recent studies of diaspora synagogues to argue that synagogues typically negotiated the Roman imperial world with a hybridity comprising participationist lifestyles and observance of distinctive practices (Barclay, Gruen, Trebilco, Harland etc.). Employing other Christian writings from Asia, I argue that imperial negotiation was a contested issue for late first-century Jesus-believers. While a number of Jesus-believers probably lived societally-accommodated lives, John's Gospel employs a "rhetoric of distance" to try to disturb this accommodation, to urge much less accommodation, and to create an alternative "anti-society" for followers of Jesus crucified by the empire but vindicated by God. I thereby reject previous attempts to locate John in an imperial context of persecution by Domitian or Pliny. Chapters 1-3 establish this tensive historical setting.
In Part 2, I examine various arenas and strategies that comprise this "rhetoric of distance" as the Gospel's preferred means of imperial negotiation. The Gospel's opening claim, "In the beginning was the word," as well as its disputes involving Abraham and Moses, employ the common strategy of a turn to the past to put Rome in its place. (Swain; Gruen). The Gospel's genre of an ancient biography employs a form commonly associated with elite figures to offer an account of the life of Jesus, sent from God, crucified by Rome and raised by God. The gospel's plot elaborates the conflict between Jesus and the Rome-allied, Jerusalem-based leadership, depicting the latter as representatives of the world as a dangerous and rejecting place. Successive chapters examine the rhetoric of distance that exists in the intertextuality between various images used for Jesus that imitate imperial titles yet challenge imperial claims, between the Gospel's offer of "eternal life' and imperial claims of the Roman golden age and "Roma aeterna," and the pervasive referent for God as father and the emperor as "pater patriae." Three concluding chapters explore the identity of the community of Jesus' believers, Jesus' clash with Pilate, and his resurrection and ascension in relation to imperial traditions about apotheosis. An appendix offers the thesis that imperial negotiation did not take place only at the end of the Johannine tradition, exploring some significant intertextualities between accounts of Gaius Caligula's action against the Jerusalem temple c 40 CE and emphases in John's Gospel.
The book, thus presents central Johannine emphases - synagogue interactions, genre, plot, Christological titles, eternal life, theology, ecclesiology, Jesus' conflict with Pilate, and resurrection and ascension - as comprising the "rhetoric of distance" and as acts of imperial negotiation in the context of synagogal imperial interactions. The book continues my previous work in examining the interface between the emerging Christian movement and the Roman empire such as Matthew and the Margins (Orbis), Matthew and Empire (Trinity Press International/Continuum), Pontius Pilate: Portraits of a Roman Governor (Liturgical), and The Roman Empire and the New Testament (Abingdon).
The book will be reviewed in July 2008 at the International Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Auckland, New Zealand, by a panel comprising Professors Frank Moloney, Mary Coloe, and Derek Tovey, and chaired by Professor Paul Trebilco.
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