Render Unto Caesar

The Struggle Over Christ and Culture in the New Testament

John Dominic Crossan

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780062964939
• eBook ISBN: 9780062964960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

The revered Bible scholar and author of The Historical Jesus explores the Christian culture wars—the debates over church and state—from a biblical perspective, exploring the earliest tensions evident in the New Testament, and offering a way forward for Christians today.

Leading Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan, the author of the pioneering work The Historical Jesus, provides new insight into the Christian culture wars which began in the New Testament and persist strongly today. 

For decades, Americans have been divided on how Christians should relate to government and lawmakers, a dispute that has impacted every area of society and grown more rancorous over the past forty years. But as Crossan makes clear, this debate isn’t new; it can be found in the New Testament itself, most notably in the tensions between Luke-Acts and Revelation.  

In the texts of Luke-Acts, Rome is considered favorably. In the book of Revelation, Rome is seen as the embodiment of evil in the world. Yet there is an alternative to these two extremes, Crossan explains. The historical Jesus and Paul, the earliest Christian teachers, were both strongly opposed to Rome, yet neither demonized the Empire. 

Crossan sees in Jesus and Paul’s approach a model for Christians today that can be used to cut through the acrimony and polarization roiling our society and dividing us. 

Part One

Culture Rejected and Demonized

To demonize others is to fail to learn the lessons of history.¹

—Phillip Cole, The Myth of Evil

1

God Shall Overcome Someday

THE LAST BOOK OF THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE ANNOUNCES ITSELF as: “The revelation (apokalypsis) of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John” (Rev. 1:1). The author then announces himself as: “I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the rule of God and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). Patmos is, today, a small Greek island off the southwestern coast of Turkey. John of Patmos likes to emphasize certain elements by repeating them at the start and finish of his text. Using that framing style, he identifies himself again later as: “I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me” (22:8).

The opening word, apokalypsis in the original Greek, or “revelation” in English translation, promises the unveiling or disclosing of a hidden or secret content, presumably one that is important, momentous, or even cataclysmic. But after that single inaugural use of apocalypse, the author prefers to describe the book as prophecy, a term that, once again, appears at the start and finish to frame the entire text. At the start, we get this promise: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near” (1:3). At the end, we get that same promise, but now tempered with a threat:

Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book. . . . Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book. . . . I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. (22:7, 10, 18–19)

Those framing promises are a forceful hint that, whatever external enemies exist, there are also internal forces to be praised and/or threatened. But, more to the point, by using the term “prophecy,” this book’s apocalyptic vision declares itself—defensively and polemically—as belonging to, depending on, and continuing forward the authoritative prophetic vision of ancient biblical tradition.

Furthermore, the author also specifies that prophetic content, again at the start and finish of his book, with these framing details on a coming what and a coming who. The what is described as “what must soon take place” in 1:1 at the beginning and then again in 22:6 at the end, and the who as “I will come to you soon” in 2:16 and 3:11 at the beginning and “I am coming soon” in 22:7, 12, 20 at the end. This book’s content is about a coming what and a coming who, both of which are specified as coming soon, as an imminent when.

How, then, does John’s announcement of a coming what and a coming who connect with previous prophetic announcements of a similar double advent?

Toward the conclusion of his book, John describes climactically what is coming as a new and transfigured world summed up within a vision of a new Jerusalem:

I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” . . .

Then one of the seven angels . . . carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. (21:2–5, 9–10)

That magnificent vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” (21:1) is both the soaring climax of John’s apocalyptic prophecy and the deliberate recall of another equally climactic prophecy from half a millennium earlier. That is also, of course, why—despite the redundancy—John labels his apocalypse precisely as prophecy and, indeed, as the climactic fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

First, the theme of a new creation and a new Jerusalem recalls the ecstatic chapters added to the book of Isaiah at the time of Israel’s Persian restoration from its Babylonian captivity in the late 500s BCE:

I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. (Isa. 65:17–19)

Next, John’s promise of tears wiped from every eye, of an end to death, and of a new Jerusalem recalls this promise of the Persian restoration as a great divine feast for all the nations on the mountain of Jerusalem:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. (Isa. 25:6–8)

For our first glimpse of what John sees as coming, we start by going back—as we just saw John himself doing—into Israel’s deepest hopes for a new and very different world here below. Why was a new world needed? What would make it new? Who would inaugurate it here below? When would it happen? How would it happen?

* * *

The Hebrew scriptures, and the Christian Old Testament derived from it, repeatedly describe Israel in idyllic fashion as “a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exod. 3:8) or “a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands” (Ezek. 20:6). Be that as it may, this promised land is located on the Mediterranean’s Levantine coast as the connecting link between the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. As such, Israel is permanently positioned on the highway of superpower conflict between Mesopotamia and Egypt, Persia and Greece, Parthia and Rome, and repeatedly struggled under the occupation and oppression that resulted from that location.

Furthermore, if your faith is in a God who rules the world by distributive justice (for example, Ps. 82), but your experience is one of repeated imperial injustice, how do you reconcile that discrepancy or resolve that profound cognitive dissonance? Israel’s answer was, in summary: God will overcome—someday!

There would be, there had to be, a Great Divine Cleanup of the World, an Extreme Makeover: Cosmic Edition. A just God could only temporarily tolerate an unjust world, a violent earth, and a vitiated creation. There would be, there had to be, a final, last, or eschatological transformation of our earth (“eschatological” simply comes from the Greek word for “last”). An unjust world would have to be justified—someday, would have to be transfigured from violent distributive injustice to nonviolent distributive justice—someday.

Then, in the late 500s BCE, came a miraculous moment, a euphoric instant, a rhapsodic reversal when it looked as if the world’s divine renovation, the earth’s eschatological transformation had finally begun. But it began tragically in the Babylonian captivity before it ended ecstatically in the Persian restoration.

In successive deportations between 597 and 581 BCE, the Babylonian Empire took the elite leadership of conquered Jerusalem into exile at Babylonia. But then, in 539 BCE, the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, whose imperial policy was support and tax rather than defeat and loot. Deported peoples must return home and restore country, religion, and law to become a fitting part of Persia, the greatest empire in the history of the world (Ezra 1:2–3). Think of Cyrus the Great as inventing the Marshall Plan a little ahead of its time!

At that incredible moment, when forced Babylonian exile had become funded Persian return, anything was possible and everything was imaginable. First, God declared Cyrus to be God’s “shepherd,” to be God’s “anointed,” or Messiah/Christ, for all the world (Isa. 44:24, 28; 45:1, 13).

Next, travel home was to be a dreamlike passage across the intervening desert. Indeed, that smooth transit was not just for the exiles, but for God returning to Jerusalem: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain’” (Isa. 40:3–4).

Finally, in this instant of extreme elation, Israel imagined not just a special renewal for itself, but a general one for all the earth. Maybe the exilic sufferings of personified Israel were not justified punishment for national sin—as in standard Deuteronomic theology—but rather vicarious atonement for imperial sin (Isa. 53). And Israel’s vicarious atonement had evidently succeeded, as imperialism itself had publicly been “converted” from Babylonian oppression to Persian support. So, if empire could change, might not the world change?

At this transformative moment, Israel imagined a world without war or violence, an earth without bloodshed or fear, a humanity living in safety and security, prosperity and peace. And, as it prepared to restore its country, rebuild its Temple, and remake its Bible, Israel retrojected this later vision into the earlier prophecies of Isaiah in that book’s final redaction:

In days to come . . . [God] shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (2:2, 4)

All of Isaiah 2:2–4 is repeated verbatim in Micah 4:1–3, but Micah adds this line: “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid” (4:4). It is violence, war, and the fear of both that supports the injustice of possessing another’s vines, fig trees, and lands. Thus, if war allows and establishes injustice, justice allows and establishes peace. What came next, however, for tiny Israel and its wider Euro-Asian world was not justice and peace, but greater war, greater violence, and greater fear.

In 331 BCE, the Persian Empire fell to the Greek empire of Alexander the Great, whose fearsome war machine with its phalanxes of double-pointed twenty-foot pikes allowed five rows in the killing zone at the same time. Then, after Alexander’s early death in 323, his generals turned on one another, and from 274 to 168 the successor empires of Seleucid Greco-Syria to the north and Ptolemaic Greco-Egypt to the south fought six wars using Israel as a convenient battlefield.

Still and all, despite that escalatory violence or maybe because of it, Israel held fast to its visionary hope in a coming world of distributive justice and universal peace. Prophecy about a nonviolent future held firm—at least for some—despite or because of the trajectory of a violent present.

In the middle of the second century BCE, in the Jewish homeland, the book of Daniel twice invoked heavenly judgment and divine condemnation on all prior and contemporary empires—Babylonian, Median, Persian (even Persian!), Greek, and Greco-Syrian (2:32–33, 37–43; 7:1–12). Those transient rules would be replaced by a permanent one, the rule of God (2:34–35, 44–45; 7:13–14, 18, 27). (In Appendix A, I explain why “kingdom of God” or “God’s kingdom” is always translated and italicized in this book as the rule of God or God’s rule.)

No description—beyond permanence (“forever”)—is given for the rule of God on earth in Daniel 2 or 7, but a contemporary prophecy from the Jewish diaspora in nearby Egypt furnishes these details about it:

There will be no sword on earth or din of battle, and the earth will no longer be shaken, groaning deeply. There will no longer be war or drought on earth, no famine or hail, damaging to fruit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Triumph Too Soon, Tragedy Too Fast
• Overture: The Things of Caesar and the Things of God
• Part One: Culture Rejected and Demonized
• Part Two: Culture Accepted and Canonized
• Part Three: Culture Confronted and Criticized
• Epilogue: The Things of God Against the Things of Caesar
• Appendix A: Intercultural Translation of “Kingdom of God/Heavens”
• Appendix B: Violent and Nonviolent Response to the Romanization of Israel
• Appendix C: Genesis 1:1–2:4a as Overture to the Bible
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher