Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower

By Christopher Bryan

Book Overview

At the end of the 20th century, "postcolonialism" described the effort to understand the experience of those who had lived under colonial rule. This kind of thinking has inevitably brought about a reexamination of the rise of Christianity, which took place under Roman colonial rule. How did Rome look from the viewpoint of an ordinary Galilean in the first century of the Christian era? What should this mean for our own understanding of and relationship to Jesus of Nazareth? In the past, Jesus was often "depoliticized," treated as a religious teacher imparting timeless truths for all people. Now, however, many scholars see Jesus as a political leader whose goal was independence from Roman rule so that the people could renew their traditional way of life under the rule of God. In Render to Caesar, Christopher Bryan reexamines the attitude of the early Church toward imperial Rome. Choosing a middle road, he asserts that Jesus and the early Christians did indeed have a critique of the Roman superpower -- a critique that was broadly in line with the entire biblical and prophetic tradition. One cannot worship the biblical God, the God of Israel, he argues, and not be concerned about justice in the here and now. On the other hand, the biblical tradition does not challenge human power structures by attempting to dismantle them or replace them with other power structures. Instead, Jesus' message consistently confronts such structures with the truth about their origin and purpose. Their origin is that God permits them. Their purpose is to promote God's peace and justice. Power is understood as a gift from God, a gift that it is to be used to serve God's will and a gift that can be taken away by God when misused. Render to Caesar transforms our understanding of early Christians and their relationship to Rome and demonstrates how Jesus' teaching continues to challenge those who live under structures of government quite different from those that would have been envisaged by the authors of the New Testament.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195183347
• ISBN13: 9780195183344
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Good Citizens as Gadflies

One popular picture of Jesus back in the Sixties was "Jesus the Revolutionary," a sort of a "preincarnation" of Che Guevara whose attempt to overthrow Roman rule ended on a Roman Cross. This is the thesis of the Sixties era Trial of Jesus of Nazareth by S.G.F. Brandon, and it resonated on the college campuses of the Vietnam Era. Bryan sets out to show the opposite: that Christ and Christians wanted for the most part to be good citizens of the Roman Empire, which they saw as ordained by God. But their stubborn refusal to participate in the rituals of state sponsored paganism and Caesar worship ran afoul of the law and repeatedly got them into hot water. Whereas Brandon's book rode the tide of Sixties sentiment, Bryan's goes against the modern flow. In this postmodern era it is first degree political incorrectness to fasten responsibility for Jesus crucifixion on the Jewish authorities, but Bryan in effect does just that. He points out that the earliest Jewish sources on the subject name the "leading men" of the Jews as Jesus' prosecutors. He then makes the case that the Sanhedrin was not evil--merely a group of ordinary men trying to achieve a workable solution to the thorny problem Jesus presented. Bryan makes a convincing case that Jesus and the early Christians were not revolutionaries in the mode of Che Guevara, seeking to replace bad government with misrule, but reformers in the mode of Martin Luther King, Jr., supportive of the government, but seeking to have it amend inequities in the way it ruled. He further makes two salient points that should inform all Bible study, and indeed all historical study. 1. We should be careful that we do not retroject Twenty First Century sensibilities into the First Century world, and 2. The authors of the Gospels and Epistles most likely meant what they said and quite probably knew what they were talking about.

"Our Citizenship is in Heaven."

Professor Christopher Bryan clearly, cogently, and concisely explains or amplifies this Pauline notion of citizenship (Phil 3:20) by pointing out that "the biblical tradition challenges human power structures not by attempting to dismantle them or replace them with other human power structures but by consistently confronting them with the truth about their origin and purpose." "The prophetic tradition," he insists, "subverts the `powers that be' by insisting at every point that they should do their job" (p. 9; his emphases; cf. Jer 29:7). Bryan's argument-which he corroborates by substantial and fair-minded scholarship-is, in many ways, a study of another Pauline text which instructs us that the state "is a servant of God for your good" (Rom 13:4). Carefully grounding his argument in ancient texts as well as refined biblical exegesis, Bryan is at pains to explain the roots of the enduring tension which exists between "Caesar" and "God," between Christians who live in an "already" but also in a "not yet" (see p. 128-meaning that we have been redeemed but we are still exiles meant to "work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling" [Phil 2:12]). If I were to choose a single passage which reflects the book's well-constructed thesis, this would be it: "Jesus does not question the authority of the pagan Caesar, within the spheres that God has allotted to him . . . , but still he sets that authority firmly within the sphere of God's overarching providence and power: `Render to God the things that are God's' (Mark 12:13-17; compare John 19:11). Caesar, like all who rule from Pharaoh onward, would ignore or oppose that providence at his peril" (p. 51). Political decision and debate are always squarely within, and necessarily informed by, moral tradition. Some of Bryan's readers, by the way, will be prompted to recall the best work of Eric Voegelin. This necessarily brief review would, if it could, defend Bryan against the slings and arrows which will come his way, for he will, at points and places, no doubt be misconstrued, perhaps even malevolently. For instance, he does not say that we have no king but Caesar (cf. John 19:15c); he does not say that Christ was uninterested in how power is used (p. 127); he does not say that Paul was absorbed in a fight to end Roman rule (pp. 93, 105); and he does not say that God's will can never be fulfilled by violence (128). These convictions are, of course, out of step with the procrustean view of certain tendentious theologians who insist, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that we owe nothing to the state, that Christ had only contempt for politics generally and for Rome particularly, that Paul was an insurrectionist, and that applied military power is always evil. In fact a key argument of his is that "Luke more than any other of the evangelists appears to be saying that Jesus' unjust condemnation comes about not because Pilate is Roman, but because of Pilate's failure to uphold