The first of a series of three articles, this essay introduces current scholarship concerned with the use of anti-imperial rhetoric in the New Testament Gospels and the book of Acts. In the first century of the Common Era, if the powerful Roman Emperor was considered a god, what did that mean for the earliest Christians who committed loyalty to ‘another’ God? Was it necessary for the NT authors to employ subversive language, words and symbols, to conceal their true meanings from the imperial authorities in their communications to the first Christian communities? The answers to such key questions can give us a clearer picture of the culture, society and setting in which the NT was written. The purpose of this complex study is to observe how current biblical scholarship views anti-imperial rhetoric and anti-emperor implications found in the NT, assuming such rhetoric exists at all. This initial article reviews recent scholarship with respect to the background of the Roman Empire, current interpretive methods and research concerning anti-imperial rhetoric found in the NT Gospels and Acts.

This article is the third and final essay in a three-part series concerned with an analysis of current scholarship and anti-imperial rhetoric in the writings of the New Testament. The focus of this article is on the challenges and the inspiration of the book of Revelation. While Revelation may be considered to be the most unambiguous and blatant example of confrontation between the early Christians and the Roman Empire in the New Testament, a diversity of opinions survives as to how modern readers should understand and apply John’s apocalyptic literature. Does this book have something to say to readers today about the concepts of ‘empire’, colonialism and imperialism? We begin with a reflection on ancient interpretations of the text of Revelation, which are foundational to today’s interpretations, and lend support to the existence of anti-imperial rhetoric found in this cryptic document. Consideration is given to numerous current scholarly approaches, historical, theoretical and literary, with select examples from the book of Revelation for a greater understanding of the text.

Recent studies of the letters of the New Testament have uncovered intentional words, phrases, ideology and imagery that carry the weight of anti-imperial rhetoric. The second of three articles, this is an investigation of current scholarship concerned with the use of anti-imperial rhetoric in the New Testament epistles. While it is impossible to ignore the Jewish nature of many of the New Testament epistles, both mild and overt, anti-imperial rhetoric challenges the emperor worship and the propaganda of the Roman imperial authorities of the first century. The first part of this article, published in Currents 10.1, is a brief summation of the scholarly developments that have taken place in the discipline of the New Testament epistles. Over decades of research, scholarship has moved from the understanding of the intersection of the book of Acts and the Pauline letters, to the connection between the Apostle Paul and Judaism, to the realization of the junction between Paul and the Gentile world. The second part of the article focuses on a number of Pauline epistles and general epistles where we catch a glimpse of a newer scholarly development, which is a postcolonial approach to the context of the New Testament epistles and the Roman Empire. In a general sense, the response of the authors of the New Testament epistles to the dominating government seems to be, ‘Jesus is Lord, not Caesar!’