The following is a transcript of his very insightful 7-minute talk.
Justin Martyr will say quite rightly, well, you guys believe that your emperors can descend into heaven, what’s wrong with us believing Jesus could ascend into heaven? We’re doing the same thing. What Luke-Acts did was come up with a counter-narrative. In the entire New Testament, Luke-Acts is the only one that got it right, whether you like it or not.
The only one that said the future is not Jewish Christianity, it’s Roman Christianity. Now, if you want my own opinion, I speak as a historian and a Christian, I think it would be much better if it had been Jewish Christianity, because, quite frankly, the Jewish people had been living under the empire for 500 years and they knew what it was like. When Christians finally in the fourth century under Constantine, when Constantine opened his arms for effect and embraced the Roman Empire, nobody ever seemed to say, ” Well, who converted whom here? Is there a price tag for having the Roman Empire on our side? Is there kind of a deal being made that we take care of heaven and they take care of earth? And is this the split between Caesar and God? What happens when Caesar has a halo on his head, which Constantine did, and is a Christian emperor? Maybe it’s all right to be a Christian empire.
Or maybe the whole problem is that the Roman Empire was pagan. Now we have a Christian empire, so empire is lovely. You’re reading your New Testament, you know that Luke is the third book in there, and you know that the Acts of the Apostles is the fifth book, and those titles scholars know were put on afterwards, so that’s not a problem.
But here’s the question, did this author Luke conceive, imagine, project, write, publish, if you will, a two-volume work from the very beginning? So, along comes Luke, the Gospel according to Luke, say around 40,000 words plus, he’s going to need two volumes. Volumen is the Latin word for a scroll, he’s going to need two scrolls, we say two volumes. So, if you read the first volume by itself, or the second volume by itself, you get both wrong.
The first volume ends up, for example, with Jesus’ followers all in the temple. Well, if you end there, they’re totally within Judaism, worshipping in the temple, and one great Jewish scholar said that was the most Jewish book ever written in the New Testament. But they’re in the temple waiting to leave. It’s like being in a railway station.
The second volume starts and goes to Rome. So, the first volume, Jesus goes from Galilee to Jerusalem, the second volume, Peter and Paul, the Apostles, the Acts of the Apostles, go from Jerusalem to Rome, and when they get to Rome, end of story, Roman Christianity has arrived.
That’s the manifesto of Luke’s Acts. In other words, the future is Roman Christianity, and he was right. That was the future.
Eventually, under Constantine, who wanted one empire with one ruler himself, of course, one new capital, Constantinople, and one religion. He looked around and figured all these pagans can’t unite my empire; I need a religion. Well, he looks at Christianity; they have bishops, and they’re organized just like us. No, of course, they’re organized like you [Rome], they’re modeled on you. Constantine said, I don’t see any problem. So, of course, he supported.
I mean, completely sincerely, I’m not trying to make out he’s a hypocrite. It made absolute sense to him, Christianity would be the glue for the Roman Empire. So, of course, he would support it, give large donations to the churches, build cathedrals, and everything.
But that’s Roman Christianity. And you don’t get away from Roman Christianity, by the way, simply by getting away from Roman Catholicism. The same type of a mindset that gave us an infallible Pope gave us an infallible Bible.
So, I’m not talking about Roman Catholicism, I’m talking about Roman Christianity as it lasted at least until, if you want to say, first the split between Eastern and Western Christianity, and then later between Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and all the other splits ever since.
Think of the death of Jesus in the first volume, and the death of Paul in the second volume. The death of Jesus, a centurion says he’s innocent, a client king, Herod Antipas, who was in Jerusalem, says he’s innocent, and, of course, Pilate says he’s innocent before he executes him. I mean, that’s the three great points of the Roman Empire. The military, client rulers, or puppet rulers, we might call them, and the governors.
Now, go to the end of Paul’s life in Jerusalem, you have now not just a centurion, but a Tribute, writing a letter saying he’s innocent, and Herod Agrippa II, who is a king, not just a governor, not just a client king or a client prince for the king, says he’s innocent, and so does the governor.
There’s a perfect storm of Christian innocence rolling through Luke/Acts. You’ve never seen so many people so innocent ending up so dead, and really, you have to say, well, wait a minute, what’s going on? Were the Romans kind of savage? Did they just kill people all the time? No, from the Roman point of view, these people were what we call activists, non-violent, but Rome would have called them troublemakers. Rome would have said they create tumult.
Now, it could be, say, a local synagogue; if a huge argument about anti-messianic Jews and pro-messianic Jews spilled out into the street, that would disturb the peace of a Roman city. They wouldn’t worry too much about theology at all. They’d say, well, everything was peaceful until this guy, Paul, arrived, and then we had a riot. Paul’s the problem. Well, Paul didn’t start it. Well, Paul’s arrival started it. If he wasn’t here, you know, we’ve had peace in the Jewish synagogue here for hundreds of years. Paul arrives, we have a riot. Paul’s the problem.
Of course, from the Roman point of view. That’s why, after all these innocent declarations, Paul or Jesus ends up dead. So, this is a magnificent manifesto for Christian innocence.
It’s kind of Apologia Pro Vita Christiana, written at the beginning of the second century.
