Christoph Heilig. The Apostle and the Empire

The latest contribution to the debate about counter-imperial rhetoric in Paul’s letters is Christoph Heilig’s The Apostle and the Empire: Paul’s Implicit and Explicit Criticism of Rome, which invites readers to see that Paul’s engagement with Roman ideology is not a simple binary proposition, summarizes and updates his first monograph, Hidden Criticism? (Mohr Siebeck, 2015). After a foreword from John M. G. Barclay, Heilig offers an inspiring preface about the importance of early career researchers (ECRs) within the guild, noting how this book is largely a response to Laura Robinson, an ECR whose article in New Testament Studies made a forceful case against the idea that Paul was subtly subversive of Rome.In the first few chapters, Heilig provides a helpful overview of the debate up to the present, especially the responses to the idea that Paul critiqued Rome hiddenly in the subtext of his letters. This “subtext-hypothesis,” which builds upon James C. Scott’s notion of “hidden transcripts” and applies it to Paul—as popularized by N. T. Wright—assumes that Paul’s circumspection was due to safety concerns. As both a critique of this enterprise and a step toward clarity, Barclay presented five criticisms that Heilig deems as necessary conditions that should be satisfied in order to uphold the hypothesis, which primarily concern the nature of public discourse in Rome and Paul’s personality—the last of which Heilig finds particularly compelling. Casting further doubt, Laura Robinson argued that Rome did not prohibit public criticism and there would not have been any laws that would make it unsafe to be a Christian. In response, however, Heilig points to the recent work of James Corke-Webster on Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan, which suggests that being a Christian was a threat because local governing officials could attempt to curtail a potentially “anti-social” group that might disrupt the status quo (pp. 17–34). Yet despite Heilig’s increased appreciation for the precarity of being Christian in the Empire, he aims to go “Beyond Hidden Criticism” and also to eschew the binary that either Paul critiqued Rome hiddenly/carefully or openly/carelessly. Instead, Heilig proposes that Paul’s discourse exists on a spectrum. Paul may have been incautious at times (cf. 1 Cor 2:6–8), and at others he may have had unexpressed criticism (p. 44). Heilig contends, though, that any alleged criticism is more probable if the criticism can be explained by a historical event, which he frames as an additional criterion to Barclay’s list (p. 42).This new criterion sets up chapters 3–4 on the imagery of the triumphal procession in 2 Cor 2:14 as an example of overlooked criticism of Rome, summarizing and updating his earlier monograph, Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). Heilig argues that referring to the triumphal procession reveals that “Paul was indeed an active observer of his Roman context” (p. 55), since the Greek term for a triumphal procession celebrates a Roman emperor’s victory abroad, θριαμβεύω “is always used in connection with persons who are presented to the watching crowd as prisoners of war” (p. 60). In 2 Cor 2, however, it is God who is the “triumphator” and “Paul and his coworkers appear as captives” (p. 60). So far, this reading is not entirely new since Scott Hafemann made a similar argument in Suffering and the Spirit (1986). Yet Heilig goes a step further, arguing that Paul had a specific triumph in mind, namely Claudius’s victory over Britannia in AD 44 (pp. 63–70). The reasons for this claim are that Paul was not alive for the next major triumph celebrating the end of the Jewish War in AD 71 (p. 64), and furthermore that within Corinth there is an inscription about Claudius’s militaristic victory and evidence of a cult associated with this victory (pp. 68–69). But not only was this triumph the most recent, it was also the most infamous. Claudius’s victory was viewed with public suspicion, and when another triumph was celebrated after the capture of the British chieftain, Caratacus, in AD 51 (pp. 73–74, 92), it made the initial triumph seem incomplete, and it was even ridiculed by Seneca in his Apocolocyntosis (pp. 74–75). Unlike Claudius, however, God is successful in all of his campaigns, and hence why he is leading a triumphal procession “everywhere” that Paul travels on his missionary journeys (p. 91). This sounds like a great example of imperial criticism, but for Heilig, Paul is rhetorically critiquing the Corinthians themselves rather than Claudius (p. 78, cf. 138–39), since Paul’s position as a prisoner of war “reflects the way that the Corinthians look down on [their] missionary movements” (p. 77). The point of the metaphor, for Heilig, is to help the Corinthians understand their new “alienated status” in society and to reorient their values (p. 98). By contending that Paul is not critiquing Claudius directly, Heilig seems to undermine his case somewhat that 2 Cor 2:14 contains an overlooked criticism of Rome, since the Claudian elements do not seem terribly relevant to Paul’s rhetorical strategy vis-à-vis the Corinthians. He argues, though, that there is a “potentially subversive” element to the triumphal language that reveals Paul’s passing unease with Rome’s claims to power (pp. 98–99). Yet there’s one other element that Heilig does not entirely integrate into this unease, which is the scent imagery in 2 Cor 2:14–16. Hafemann previously argued that the language derives from the cultic realm, which Paul then combined with the Roman triumph. Heilig, however, contends that the aroma is not rooted in the cult, largely because sacrifice and punishment were not combined in the triumph (p. 82), but this argument does not resolve whether Paul may have creatively made that combination. More suspiciously, Heilig admits that he does not know what to do with Paul’s emphasis on aroma, concluding that it “is pretty much unrelated to the Roman triumph” (p. 83). The aromatic imagery, however, receives far more attention in 2 Cor 2:14–16 than the triumph, which raises a further question about how much Paul intended to recall a particular triumph if he develops an image that is “pretty much unrelated” to it. Nevertheless, Heilig does make a compelling case that Paul’s reference to the triumph would cause the Corinthians to recall Claudius.In the fifth chapter, Heilig addresses ways that scholars can go about “Sharpening Our Exegetical Senses,” since, he claims, NT scholars have so often missed ways that Paul may engage his Roman context. Heilig prescribes that scholars engage postcolonial hermeneutics, get past simplistic readings of Rom 13, and recognize deficiencies in our commentaries and lexica. This is followed by a brief conclusion that reviews the book’s argument.Overall, The Apostle and the Empire is thought-provoking from beginning to end. Heilig’s methodological precision adds clarity and rigor to the debate about counter-imperial rhetoric in Paul, which makes it a must read for anyone interested in Paul’s imperial context, even if one is coming at it for the first time. Apart from its contribution to its subject matter, this book beautifully displays how scholarship is an ongoing dialogue, and how that scholarly discussion can generate refinement of one’s previously held positions, even those enshrined in print

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