God of Empire
Meanwhile, building on Jesus as an elevated figure within the movement and the visions of Jesus in the period following his death, speculations about his person and his connection to divine forces took off. This included the belief that he was an emperor-like figure who would return soon to command the world, itself an outworking of the predictions of the kingdom/empire/dictatorship of God. As Paul put it, God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2.9-11).
One of the major shifts in the development of the Jesus movement is that by the end of the first century it had transformed from a purely or primarily Jewish movement into becoming a majority non-Jewish or gentile one, and in some cases, an anti-Jewish one. And we can push the notion of the Jesus movement's failed revolution further for a moment by detecting some of the chilling fascist-like tendencies that gestated toward the end of this early period. We need go no further than John's Gospel, written toward the end of the first century, to observe how in some strands of emerging Christian thought a proto-fascist ideology developed that replaced the initial revolutionary impulses that had failed to take root.
We mentioned in the opening chapter the Gospel of John's curious obsession with denigrating a character group known as the Jews.6 Not unlike the reactionary political ideology of twentieth-century Nazism, the Gospel of John similarly insisted Jesus followers must have a pure bloodline (i.e., be born of the correct Father, John 3.1-15). By prioritizing the spiritual purity of Jesus' followers, John's text relied on a peculiar kind of racial logic: Jewish ethnicity was replaced with a new form of divine ethnicity in which the elect must be born again of the same Father. Near the beginning of the Gospel this logic is clearly spelled out: to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God's children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God (John 1.12-13).
Amid the complex questions of identity and whether, how, or the extent to which this new movement was to be understood as Jewish (or anti-Jewish), was the idea that Jesus was to be equated with God, a point which was most evidently developed in John where elevated theological claims are tellingly framed in disputes with the Jews (e.g., John 5.17-18; 10.29-33). The Gospel of John's dramatic denigration and suspicion of opposing groups likely reflected sociological and possibly sectarian realities behind the text. High among the controversies was an intra-Jewish disagreement about whether Jesus and the Father are one (John 10.30), though now showing signs of the movement moving beyond Jewish self-identity.
As a reactionary text, the Gospel of John thus constructed uncompromising boundaries between true believers and outsiders. But whereas the revolutionary millenarianism of the early movement was focused on the reversal of the material hierarchies of Galilee and Judea at the end times, John's Gospel focused on the spiritual truth of the good news in the here and now. Those who would not consent to John's assessment of Jesus were to be left out in the dark, deprived of light and direction (John 12.35-36). They remained in the world below and would die in their sins (John 8.23-24). By contrast, members of the community were destined to move up spiritually. In the purest of totalitarian language, John's Jesus declared, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14.6).
But the other side of the coin to an overly exclusive worldview is an overly inclusive one. That Jesus was to be equated with the God of the universe meant that, in time, Christianity was seen to provide a theological system which was compatible with, and appropriate for, a Roman Empire covering a range of colonized peoples and unified by trade routes and communication networks. It is often thought the pre-Christian Roman Empire was polytheistic (many gods) in contrast to Christianity and Judaism which emphasized (not without controversy in the case of Christianity) monotheism (one God). These descriptions are not always helpful. For example, Jewish and Christian ideas about an overarching God sounded a lot like ideas about Zeus or Greek philosophical speculations while ideas about angels and elevated human figures sounded a lot like the lesser gods in other Greco-Roman ways of understanding the supernatural world.
Nevertheless, Christianity had a notion of an overarching and unifying divine rulership which did not necessarily prioritize one nation or ethnic grouping as Judaism did, so long as one was in Christ. Christianity was, over the second and third centuries, spreading through networks of friends of friends of friends until it was large enough and credible enough to become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. It is telling that when Julian the Emperor (or Apostate) tried to reinstate the old supernatural system during his time as Emperor (361-363 CE), he saw local gods as manifestations of the creator, Moses god of one people as too parochial and restricting for an empire, and Christian conceptions of the divine as not even matching Moses lower standard of an imperial god because Christians were understood to worship two or three gods.8 Julian may have wanted to show that Christianity was ideologically unsuitable for the scope and reach of the Roman Empire but to the historian it reveals the opposite: it did precisely this and would soon resume as the successful religion of empire.
Even though Christianity became the handmaiden of empire, it could still provide the language of resistance where needed. In Medieval Europe, Christianity came to justify the feudal system and monarchical social hierarchies, but just as equally justified those peasant millenarians and insurgents who attempted to usurp the existing order, as the Jesus movement had done before. The Protestant split from Catholicism, as well as the colonial drive to go out and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28.19), may have aided the transformation from feudalism to capitalism and the ongoing consolidation of the emerging middle class, but the old concerns of millenarians and insurrectionists were taken up in new ways, including their absorption into the agendas of socialist and communist parties, and new Protestant (and Catholic) oppositional thinking emerged too. The hardened masculinity of the early Jesus movement, inherited from its wider patriarchal context, never really left during these transitions from one mode of production to the next. Only since the latter half of the twentieth century did a sustained feminist investigation into Christianity's entanglement with the patriarchy begin. Yet the ways gender and power were negotiated by this socially deviant movement has provided sustenance and impetus for those on the margins in a variety of contexts and situations. Of course, any number of interests and ideological positions in between have been justified by multiple variations of Christianity because, in the West at least, it has formed the dominant ideology for well over a millennium.
Indeed, it is remarkable to behold that what began as the parochial ideologies of the disaffected peasantry in Galilee and Judea would in turn come to ground a dominant global ideology, one that continues to be embedded in subtle ways within the now capitalist mode of production of our own age. The historical Jesus is part of the deep ideological fabric that has simultaneously framed the world but has also generated forces to change it. For this reason, understanding the life of Jesus as a life in class conflict is inescapable to appreciating the class struggles of today. To paraphrase Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, however, the point is not simply to understand the world in various ways, rather the point is to change it. Perhaps agents of radical change are what we need after all.
