Pauline Solidarity: Assembling the Gospel of Treasonous Life: Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Vol. 3

By Daniel Oudshoorn, Ward Blanton and Dave Diewert

Building on the themes established in the first two volumes of Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Pauline Solidarity explores: (a) how the Pauline faction transforms relationships within the household unit in the new transnational family of God; (b) how dominant cultural conceptions of honor are rejected in the embrace of shame in the company of the crucified; (c) how vertical practices of patronage are replaced with a horizontal sibling-based political economy of grace; and (d) how the gospel of the Caesars is overcome by the lawlessness of the good news that is being assembled in an uprising of life among the left for dead. Along the way, many of the traditional themes associated with Paulinism (grace, justice, love, loyalty, sin, flesh, death, Jesus, spirit, life) are reexamined and understood as core components of a movement that was spreading among vanquished, colonized, oppressed, dispossessed, and enslaved peoples who were finding new (and treasonous) ways of organizing themselves in order to be life-giving and life-affirming, and in order to counter all the death-dealing structures of Roman imperialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532675294

Daniel Oudshoorn

Daniel Oudshoorn is a father, lover, fighter, friend, and failure. He has spent more than twenty years actively pursuing life and mutually liberating solidarity in the company of the oppressed, abandoned, dispossessed, colonized, and left for dead.

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Pauline Solidarity

Assembling the Gospel of Treasonous Life

Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Volume 3

Daniel Oudshoorn

Foreword by Ward Blanton

Postscript by Dave Diewert

PAULINE SOLIDARITY

Assembling the Gospel of Treasonous Life

Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Volume 3

Copyright © 2020 Daniel Oudshoorn. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-7527-0

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-7528-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-7529-4

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Oudshoorn, Daniel.

Title: Pauline solidarity : assembling the gospel of treasonous life. / Daniel Oudshoorn.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020. | Series: Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Volume 3. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-7527-0 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-7528-7 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-7529-4 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Paul, the Apostle, Saint—Political and social views | Bible. Epistles of Paul—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Christianity and politics | Church history—Primitive and early church, ca. 30–600. | Church—Biblical teaching

Classification: BS2655.C5 O93 2020 (print) | BS2655.C5 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. March 24, 2020

Unless otherwise specified, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword by Ward Blanton

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: So What and Who Cares?

2. The Transnational Family of God

Introduction: Deviating from Empire

Uprooting Imperial Cornerstones: The Household Unit

Summary and Conclusion

3. Embracing Shame in the Company of the Crucified

Introduction

Honor and Shame and Shame as Honor in the Household of God

Cruciformity: Re-Presenting the Crucifixion of the Anointed

Conclusion

4. Rejecting Patronage within a Sibling-Based Political Economy of Grace

Introduction: Paul the Economist

Laying the Foundation: Family, Marginality, and Eschatology

Struggling to Create an Alternative to Patronage within the Assemblies of Jesus Loyalists

The Collection as an Example of Sibling-Based Economic Mutualism

Sharing against Private Property

Other Economic Practices

Conclusion: The Spread of the Jesus Movement and the Failure of the Pauline Faction

Excursus: The Authority of Paul within the Early Assemblies of Jesus Loyalties

Introduction

Paul as an Authority Figure: Criticisms of the Apostle

Paul as a Non-Domineering Charismatic Authority

Subverting Authority and Equal Membership: Paul as Anti-Authority

Conclusion: An Anarchist Parallel

5. The Lawlessness of Good News in the Making: Justice, Jesus Loyalty, and Lovingly Organizing Treasonous Life

Introduction: What Do We Talk about When We Talk about the Pauline Gospel?

The Foundation of the Gospel: Jesus and Why He Matters

Implications Concerning Justice, the Law, Love, and Loyalty

Assembling the Gospel: The Uprising of the Dead

And, Finally, Romans 13:1–7

Conclusion: The Fire This Time

Postscript by Dave Diewert

Bibliography

FOREWORD

All of the living Pauline movements in existence today are known only by their miraculously energetic capacities to take up residence along the top of community fencing projects which were both manufactured and maintained in order to keep us out! To take a dictum like this seriously would itself be a Pauline event of some significance, one which would among other things afford a new canon for worthwhile interpretive labor on scriptural traditions.

Tell me, you who want to be Pauline interpreters—where are your evidently impossible friendships? Where is that awkwardly amorous or enthusiastic traffic between opposed camps? Where are the peculiarly shared agendas which should not be seeing eye to eye? When did you last engage that network of friends who nevertheless do not want to be seen together in public? And where then do you discover such furtive, almost unavowable meets, such that they yield new social space, a new public? Where, moreover, is the reaction, the righteous indignation, against your work because your interlocutors cringe and pull back in order not to be associated with them—those who are missing the point, those who are too intense, those who are too tied down (or not enough). Show me the Paulinist who simply belongs in her home institution, in her home community, in her own bibliographies even, and I will show you someone who is receding from the living energies of transformative un-fencing which constitute a Pauline taste for solidarity. Pauline scholarship is of value if you experience transgressive solidarity; otherwise your wordy commentary, however learned, is only the magician’s misdirection above a predictably empty hat.

Daniel Oudshoorn unveils here a Pauline taste, nothing less than a Pauline style, which Oudshoorn sometimes articulates as a deviant sense of kinship. This swerved kinship I understand as an intensive or singular solidarity which buzzes at, precisely, the borders it crosses. We must begin to take seriously something like this experience as a kind of spiritual test of Paulinist life, a life worth its salt of fidelity to this strange legacy. One cannot read Oudshoorn without feeling its call, its unique audacity, its vexing emancipations. If such a spiritual test should come, it would be a surprise to see who would endure it. Institutionally speaking, for example, in all seriousness I do not know whether many of our academic societies of Pauline interpreters would continue to stand. What a strange thought! But the judgment, or at least the wonder, would of course be here not merely theoretical or ideal. The question is whether these scholarly paradigms—and our paradigms are always strictly scripted by our social forms—are not themselves indices of a world order which is already beginning to pass away, just for the reason that they are no longer alive with that energetic form of living in emancipatory transgression. To change the paradigms, one must transform the social forms which produce them. Oudshoorn’s book is, for the perceptive reader, a cookbook for such transformations, so many experiments with Paulinist life. That is perhaps what moves me most of all in these pages, the simple and honest experimentation in historical reconstruction which resonates with that vibrancy from which Oudshoorn’s thinking is created and from which it finds its living form.

Diogenes Laertius tells us that the great Cynic philosophers would refuse to take on students who wanted wise and edifying words without a more awkward and demanding transformation of their social experiences. One does not live the life of the teaching unless words about truth become experiments in defacing the currency of the very cultural values which produced you. The Greco-Roman archive of spiritual exercises is worth remembering on these points. You want to learn philosophy? Here, take and eat—this is the food you will eat where you should not. This is your body which shall be excited where it must not. This is the loser who will be proud when she should hold her head in shame. And, above all, this is the divine work which happens where it must not, there where it is not owned or where it happens outside the proper systems of ownership that are (then as now) indistinguishable from religion or politics as such.

The short-cut to virtue on offer by these philosophical greats (where have they gone today!) was, immediately and directly, the scandalous refusal to be placed, to be made polite, by the inherited order of things. The Paulinist is perhaps sometimes more bookish than the Cynic, but she is nevertheless united with them in finding transformational energies in playing out truth where and how it should not happen. If we no longer buzz with the counterintuitive, countercultural energy of finding that we are not ashamed of our transgressive good news, then we have misunderstood our radical kinships, misrecognized our transformative solidarities, and failed to hold forth any truly Paulinist news at all. In that case, however, Oudshoorn’s cookbook, or perhaps his Paulinist style guide, will be more important than ever.

Ward Blanton

University of Kent

PREFACE

In Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, I attempt a comprehensive study of the Pauline epistles, paying especial attention to socioeconomic and theopolitical matters. I survey a broad range of positions, and note how presuppositions related to the socioeconomic status of the early Jesus loyalists as well as presuppositions about Pauline eschatology heavily influence the conclusions that diverse parties draw in relation to these themes. I begin by surveying four prominent positions taken in relation to Paul and politics, and then explore the socioeconomic and general eschatological arguments that are made to support these positions (volume 1: Pauline Politics). I then turn to examining Pauline apocalyptic eschatology in more detail and relate it to the realized eschatology of Rome, while studying the ideo-theology of Roman imperialism more generally (volume 2: Pauline Eschatology). This leads to a presentation of Paulinism that focuses especially upon the themes of living as members of the transnational family of God, embracing shame in solidarity with the crucified, engaging in sibling-based practices of economic mutuality, and loyally and lovingly gospeling the justice of God in treasonous, law-breaking, and law-fulfilling ways, within the newly assembled body of the Anointed (volume 3: Pauline Solidarity). This presentation is distinct, in many ways, from the most prominent conservative, liberal, and radical readings of the Pauline epistles. Ultimately, what is presented is an understanding of Paulinism as a faction within a movement that is actively working to organize the oppressed, abandoned, vanquished, and left-for-dead, into a body that experiences Life in all of its abundance and goodness. This body necessarily exists in conflict with dominant (imperial) death-dealing ways of organizing life in the service of Death. The Pauline faction, then, are those who help to organize this resistance to Death—and all the ways in which Death is structured into social, economic, political, and religious organizations—within assemblies where justice is understood to be that which is life-giving and life-affirming, especially for those who have been deprived of life and left for dead.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I begin by acknowledging the various sovereign Indigenous peoples who have allowed me to live and work and play and complete this project on the lands to which they belong—from the Wendat, Petun, and Mississaugas, to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, to the Attawandaron, Wendat, Lenape, Haudenosaune, and Anishinaabe—I lift my hands to them and thank them for the care that they have shown the land and for allowing me and my children and other loved ones to live, work, and struggle alongside of them. In many ways, my ability to complete this project is related to my own status as a white, cishet, male settler of Christian European descent. It is precisely people like me who have benefited most from the ongoing and genocidal process of Canadian colonialism. Thus, when I acknowledge various sovereign Indigenous peoples, as I am doing now, I do so with a sense of my own interconnectedness, liability, accountability, and responsibility. I hope that this work contributes to the ongoing process of decolonization and the uprising of those whom my people have left for dead in these territories. Were I to begin this project again, I would be more interested in writing about Paulinism as it relates to militant Indigenous movements pursuing solidarity, resistance, and liberation within the overarching context of colonialism. The parallels, to me, are striking and I believe that kind of study could be very enriching and, perhaps, help bring together two groups of people who are often at odds with each other.

I acknowledge my children, Charlie and Ruby, and my partner, Jessica Marlatt. You each played central roles in my own anastasis from the dead. Thank you for giving me the gifts of wonder, gratitude, gentleness, love, joy, kindness, fatherhood, companionship, and life—new creation life, abundant life, resurrection life. You are all marvels and wonders, and I love you with all of my everything.

I acknowledge those scholars who showed me that we have to figure these things out in the streets, on the barricades, in our homes, in squats, in physical altercations with riot police, and in the midst of the struggle. Thank you, Charles and Rita Ringma and Dave and Teresa Diewert. Nobody else whom I have known who bothers talking about Paul has ever come close to embodying Paulinism in the ways that you all have and do. Bob Eklad and Don Cowie also helped me a great deal in this regard. Thank you also to all those involved in the fight who may or may not have cared one bit about Paul but who helped teach me (personally or from a distance) what it means to serve Life and fight against Death—thank you, Jody Nichols, Nicky Dunlop, Andrea Earl, Jan Rothenburger, Anthony Schofield, Ivan Mulder, Stanislav Kupferschmidt, Alex Hundert, Ann Livingston, Harsha Walia, John Clarke, Mechele te Brake, Haley Broadbent, Richard Phillips, as well as all the people at Boy’R’Us (Vancouver) and SafeSpace London, everyone involved in creating overdose prevention sites across Canadian-occupied territories, and the old warrior from AIM who gave me his bandana late one night at a bar in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. Indeed, it is Indigenous peoples who have spent generations organizing against colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the devastation of Turtle Island—from the Wet’suwet’en camp, to Elsipogtog, to Amjiwnaang, to Kanehsatake, to Ts’peten, to Aazhoodena, to Esgenoopititj, to the Tiny House Warriors—who, to my mind, show us the closest example of what something akin to Paulinism might look like today. I lift my hands to them.

I acknowledge my brothers, Joshua, Judah, and Abram, who have shown me how wonderful, transformative, and good, sibling relationships can be. And my nephews and nieces—Evan and Wyatt, Emery and Selah, Ben and Chris and Daniella—who gave me life at a time when I was separated from my own children. Without their love, the joy they experienced playing silly games with me, and the ways that made me feel okay in the midst of a very not-okay time, this project would never have been completed.

I acknowledge all of those who encouraged me to complete this project at various times over these years. Apart from those already mentioned, thank you, Daniel Imburgia, Chris Graham, Nathan Colquhoun, Daniel Slade, Danielle Firholz, Chris Tilling, Nicole Luongo, Mark Van Steenwyk, John Stackhouse, Christian Amondson, Audrey Molina, Larry Welborn, Ward Blanton, Roland Boer, and my ever loving, ever gentle, ever patient, mother (I love you, mama!). Thank you, Neil Elliott, for agreeing to be the first reader of this project. It is a great joy to be able to work with you (it is like a dream come true for me after I first read Liberating Paul all those years ago). And thank you, Regent College (Vancouver), for allowing me to bring this project to completion after all this time and all these words. I appreciate the graciousness you have shown me. Thank you, also, to Steve Thomson (the Silver Fox) for making me read Paul in new and suddenly exciting ways when I was first an undergraduate student, and to Ms. Lane, my high school writing teacher, who believed I had a special gift for writing at a time when I had recently been deprived of housing (i.e., made homeless) by my parents and did not believe anything good about myself.

Finally, I also acknowledge the great multitude of those whom I have known who lost their homes, health, happiness, well-being, children, and, in many cases, their lives, because the Law of Sin and of Death continues to be enforced by the blind and corrupt rulers of this present evil age. I miss you and love you all. You are the song in my heart and the fire in my blood. And, since the system that killed you or left you for dead will not burn down by itself, I offer the following work as a spark.

1

Introduction: So What and Who Cares?

As I was concluding this project, I learned that a dear friend had died. Injecting opiates cut with fentanyl resulting in an accidental overdose is the suspected cause of death, but this is a dishonest conclusion. The actual cause of death was the law, which criminalizes certain kinds of drugs and certain ways of using drugs and then makes people who use those drugs or who use drugs in those ways the just targets of state-based violence. The so-called opioid crisis sweeping across the occupied territories of Turtle Island has killed several of my friends. Sometimes Death comes via an overdose. Sometimes it comes in other ways. For example, I recently had two other friends—two kind, gentle, loving men—die because they were discharged from the hospital even though they had very serious blood infections. The hospital would not provide them with pain relief because they were flagged as illicit drug users, and when they tried to find their own ways to medicate their pain, the hospital kicked them out—one to a rooming house, another to a homeless shelter. After these men died, the partner of one tried to sue the hospital for gross negligence, but once the hospital announced that the man was an intravenous drug user who was red flagged as a drug seeking frequent flyer and who was discharged from the hospital because he had been found injecting opiates into his PICC line (i.e., a peripherally inserted central catheter), she couldn’t get a lawyer who would take the case. The law and the law-abiding are killers but, it seems, they are never guilty.

Along similar lines, just to the south of me, across a border Europeans carved through lands they stole and transformed into private property, representatives of a dying empire are once again quoting Rom 13:1–7 and urging people to continue to obey the law, even if the cries of children torn from their parents and caged in kennels built in an old Wal-Mart make sensitive oppressors feel uneasy. Some of these children are dying. Some of them are being sexually abused. Many of them have simply vanished. But the state tells us not to be afraid or worried. The state proclaims, We have done nothing wrong. We are justified by the law. And you are too. Just keep paying your bills. Keep going to work. Keep shopping. Vote.

And I, too, am justified by the law, the world’s most famous pussy-grabber proclaims.

I sleep the sleep of the just, declares the founder of the world’s largest mercenary force.

We did nothing wrong, declare the hospital administrators and social workers who sent my friends to their deaths.

And on this side of the border, in territories colonized by my people, a prime minister weeps and apologizes to Indigenous peoples and talks a pretty talk about reconciliation, but he still forces pipelines down their throats until they choke on oil, he still refuses to recognize their sovereignty, he still refuses to stop discriminating against Indigenous children living on reserves, he still refuses to provide reserves with clean drinking water, he still refuses to address matters related to Indigenous peoples being massively over-represented in foster care and in prisons, he still refuses to address the matter of the staggering suicide rates among Indigenous teens, and, even as a self-proclaimed feminist, he seems to not care about the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canadian-occupied territories, or about the fact that his government is facilitating the sale of billions of dollars worth of military hardware to the Saudis to assist with a genocide in Yemen. Everywhere, it seems, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, those who are justified by the law continue to kill, and those who are not justified by the law continue to die or be left for dead. Even such sensitive colonizers as myself find ourselves in bondage to the law, and discover that we do not do the good we long to do but, instead, become complicit within and benefit from the very things that we hate. Wretched people that we are, how can we become liberated from this political economy, this body of Sin and of Death?

I have often asked myself these questions over the years. As a result, my interest in Paul and Paulinism (and this project) has waxed and waned. There was a time when it inspired me to wade into the struggle; there was a time when I viewed it like a ladder to be climbed and then kicked away; there was a time when I thought it was important; and there was a time when I viewed it as essentially meaningless. My friends are dying—my friends have always been dying ever since I joined the company of the abandoned and left for dead as a youth who was deprived of housing (i.e., made homeless) by his devout Christian parents—and here I am studying a few letters written by a self-proclaimed nobody almost two thousand years ago.

¹

Why bother? Indeed, for a long time I didn’t bother. I threw myself into the struggle—and when I was battered and broken and torn apart by conflicting allegiances (it took me some time to understand what loyalty to the crucified and left-for-dead looked like, and by then I was already enmeshed in various other commitments—which is precisely the kind of compromised and entangled situation imperialism tries to create in all its subjects), I threw myself into other things. I experienced the Spirit of Life and I experienced Death. I was filled with hope and I was filled with despair. All the while, Paulinism ebbed and flowed in and out of my life. Ultimately, it was only thanks to my children, Charlie and Ruby, my big love, Jessica, my brothers, nephews, and nieces, and the trees by the Deshkan Ziibiing that I found the strength, ability, and desire to return to this project and, after twelve long years, bring it to an end.

But why should anyone else care about this project? Well, I’m not sure that they should. In fact, the great majority of people whom I know who are gospeling in the ways I describe in this work have little or nothing to do with Paulinism or Jesus. In fact, a good many of them want nothing to do with anything associated with Christianity—which makes a lot of sense given the central role Christianity has played in the colonial history of genocide in these territories (a history that extends from the past up until the present day). I am not interested in converting these people to Paulinism, and I am also not interested in trying to redeem Paul (or Jesus) in their eyes. They do not need Paul or Jesus to do the amazing, difficult, inspiring, death-resisting, life-affirming, and life-giving work they are doing. The Spirit of Life is already their constant companion as they engage in an anastasis from the dead and assemble a body politic that is severed from and at war with the vampiric body of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Death.

However, for those who care about Paul and his legacy, for those invested in these texts, I hope to offer a reading that inspires engagement in the war for Life and against Death. I hope to take texts that have been put in the service of Death and show that they are better suited to serve Life. After all, up until our present moment, the Pauline Epistles continue to be deployed in death-dealing ways. This needs to be changed, and I hope to contribute to that change. This does not mean that I think that the rulers and those who lick their boots will subsequently change their minds and repent and begin to serve Life. I believe that most of these people have already charted their courses. Regardless of devout professions of faith and virtue, their concern is not so much with what the texts say as with their own appetites (and so, as the Pauline factions says, their glory is their shame and their end is destruction). But I do hope that this text will help others to see how self-serving, violent, and inappropriate the readings imposed by the rulers and their servants are.

Furthermore, although this is a scholarly text, my primary audience is not the academy or scholars (who are probably not going to change any more than the rulers—they, too, have discovered the comfort that comes from saying pretty things while remaining almost universally uninvolved in any contemporary project that resembles Pauline gospeling). Instead, I write for students or those on the street, those already involved in the struggle, those who may be trying to create change but who are frustrated by the limits of their efforts, and those who are looking for other models of action. If this study of Paulinism is a useful contribution to the struggle to find Life in a Death-dominated context, use it. If it is not, discard it. After all, I am not urging loyalty to Paulinism per se—I am urging loyalty to the Spirit of Life and the left for dead in whose company the Spirit of Life moves like an anastasis. This loyalty is found not in the study of texts or the discussion of theories or in the logos itself, but it is found on the street, in the struggle, where one discovers one’s siblings among the oppressed, where one pursues a mutually liberating solidarity with the humiliated and crucified, where one engages in concrete actions of mutual care, and where one breaks death-dealing laws in the service of Life. Anyone who gospels otherwise—regardless of how comforting or cautious or clever or radical their language may be—is betraying the body of the Anointed as understood by the Pauline faction. To imitate Paul and his coworkers today means this: start organizing yourselves in ways that the most oppressed, most vulnerable, most abandoned, and most betrayed experience as liberating, life-giving, and loving. Do this where you can, with what you can, however you can. If you have to lie, cheat, and steal to do this, then lie, cheat, and steal. There is no moral code, no law, no police force, no code of conduct, no security guard, no veneration of private property, and no policies or procedures that has authority to trump the service of Life. Not only this, but beware of the wisdom of the bosses, the rulers, and the academy. It is the wisdom of this age and it seeks to broker compromises with Death-dealers. If you do not compromise, you will be branded as a fool, but you should not be fooled—Death is uncompromising. To the best of your abilities and knowledge, do not compromise with it. Fight it. Fight foolishly, fight vigorously, fight collectively, fight laughingly, supporting one another and being united in love so that each can rest and heal and live to fight another day, but fight. Only do not always remain fixated upon that which you are fighting. Remember what you are fighting for. Create enclaves of new life now in one another’s company. Abolish hierarchies of power between people. Let each give according to their ability and receive according to their need. Laugh. Play. Create. Be kind and gentle and tender with one another, and most especially with children.

And when my children are grown, I’ll see you again on the barricades.

Xoxo

Dan

February 2019

1

. On homelessness understood as housing deprivation, see Willse, Value of Homelessness.

2

The Transnational Family of God

For freedom [the Anointed] has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

—Galatians 5:1

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the august ones and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the diplomatic envoys and prophets, with the Anointed Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

—Ephesians 2:19–20 (my translation)

Introduction: Deviating from Empire

In the next four chapters, I will examine the ways in which the Pauline faction handles the themes raised in the exploration of the ideo-theology of Rome that took place in volume 2. How do Paul, his coworkers, and the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists addressed in their letters go about sharing life together? How do they engage with the four cornerstones of Roman imperialism and how do they engage the ubiquitous themes spread by the imperial propaganda communicated through the imperial cult(s)? In this chapter, I will cover Pauline material regarding household relationships. Chapter 3 will examine honor and shame, and chapter 4 will look at the practice of patronage and the economic issues it raises. I will then offer an excursus re-examining Paul to see how his personal practice of authority adheres to the themes developed in the letters he co-authored. In chapter 5, I will turn to a more detailed examination of the ways in which the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists related to traditional Roman religiosity and the gospel of the divine Caesars.

In what follows it will be demonstrated that the early Jesus loyalists, especially the Pauline faction and those associated with it, created a way of structuring life together that was not only an alternative to the socioeconomic and theopolitical structures of the Roman Empire but also directly deconstructed and rejected those imperial structures. It is here we will most fully begin to see how the Pauline faction was a part of what I have termed the anastasis (or uprising) of the dead. These are the concrete ways in which those who were left-for-dead by the rulers of their day—the poor and the slightly less poor, the vanquished and displaced, the oppressed and enslaved—began to resist Death, in all of its manifestations, and instead chose to formulate a way of sharing Life together in new and powerful ways.

The revaluation of values that occurred within the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists not only differed from the imperial vision of Rome, it also challenged and contradicted values that were deeply entrenched in the cultures that existed in the regions familiar to Paul and his coworkers. This further contributed to the persecutions experienced by the Jesus loyalists, as any who espoused alternative values would be branded as deviant. David deSilva summarizes this well:

The early Christians [sic] proclaimed a message and stood for values that differed from, and indeed contradicted, core values within the dominant Greco-Roman culture as well as the Jewish subculture within which the church arose. Their non-Christian neighbors, therefore, subjected the early Christians to censure and shaming techniques, designed to bring these deviant people back in line with the values and behaviors held dear by the surrounding culture.

²

Therefore, there was constant pressure to abandon the values of the movement and return to the more acceptable and publicly approved ways of being in society—pressure that, as we have seen, carried heavy material, physical, and personal costs for any who persisted as deviant. This produced considerable tension and conflicts in the assemblies to which Paul and his coworkers wrote. This will become apparent in the following examination of the ways in which the early Jesus loyalists engaged with the cornerstones of Roman imperial society.

Uprooting Imperial Cornerstones: The Household Unit

Siblings Within the Transnational Family of God

Since at least the early 1990s, there has been a renewed popular and scholarly focus upon the role of the household unit within the communities associated with Paulinism. This focus upon house churches is well represented by Robert Banks’s book, Paul’s Idea of Community: The Early House Churches in Their Cultural Settings.

³

While trends in that direction may have faded in more recent years, the point remains well established that the household unit was fundamental to the rise, spread, and shape of the early Jesus movement. Unlike other cults, Judean religious groups, or Graeco-Roman political assemblies, those loyal to Jesus did not meet in spaces set apart for the purpose of those meetings. Rather, they were unique in choosing to meet and grow within homes and within the household unit.

⁴

However, given that the household unit was the basic unit of political and socioeconomic relationships, precisely how the early Jesus loyalists conceived of their relationships with one another within the household would have repercussions for all their social interactions.

Before examining the household unit as it is presented in the Pauline letters, it is worth recalling that the homes of those loyal to Jesus were nothing like the house churches or cell groups that are familiar to some North American Christians. The house churches the Pauline faction engaged were not groups of people meeting in a living room in somebody’s suburban middle-class home. Rather, given what we concluded in volume 1, the abject poverty of the movement’s members (with so-called wealthier members only being relatively less poor), it is worth remembering that the household unit in their communities is divorced from anything like home-ownership or houses. Rather, the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists would gather in tiny, shared apartments, which often doubled as workshops. They would be rooted in slums and packed, dilapidated tenement buildings.

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A better modern analogy would be to imagine a small group of people gathered together in a shanty in one of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro or a group of sweatshop laborers gathered together to meet in the cramped quarters assigned to them by the owners of the factory.

As I did in the examination of the importance of the household unit to the ideo-theology of Rome, I will explore the two primary elements of the household—kinship and slavery—and examine the ways in which the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists engaged these structures. I will begin by examining how the movement redefined kinship, radically altering the ways in which they were required to relate to one another—not only within their own household unit but also across the span of the Roman Empire. I will then turn to examining how this deviant sense of kinship impacted the biological family unit, paying special attention to gender issues. Finally, I will focus on how these altered relationships affected the status of slaves within the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists.

Kinship Redefined: The Family of God

One of the things that immediately becomes apparent when reading the Pauline letters is the abundant use of family language employed in order to refer to people who were not related by ties of blood, ethnicity, or nationality. By using this language, Paul and his coworkers reoriented the relationships (and therefore also the priorities and the activities) of those within the assemblies of Jesus loyalists in order to create a fictive kinship that superseded the bonds established by pre-existing kinship networks and obligations.

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One’s birth—along with the status and identity formed by that birth—was overruled and a new kinship was created through adoption (wherein one was born again), which completely reoriented one’s identity, status, and the boundaries in which one lived.

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This reorientation as a new family was important for the resocialization of the Jesus loyalists who were being persecuted and who risked further alienating themselves from their neighbors and the surrounding cultural values. It helped them develop strong and positive self- and corporate-identities.

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At the same time, it heightened the persecutions and marginalization experienced by the Jesus loyalists. Those embedded within Graeco-Roman culture, especially those who benefited the most from it, would not welcome any reorientation of established relational networks and patterns. Roman law was constructed in such a way as to carefully guard kinship relationships (which, as we have seen, acted as one of the foundations of Roman power).

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Therefore, by imagining the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists as a fictive kinship transcending other biological or racialized kinship groups, Paul and his coworkers were both assisting the Jesus loyalists in finding ways to support one another in a marginal space, while simultaneously increasing the marginalization experienced therein.

What shape does this fictive kinship take? Succinctly stated, the assemblies of Jesus loyalists became the new transnational family of God. This family was composed of God the Father, Jesus the firstborn Son, and all others as siblings who are now identified as (adopted) children of God. It is these members who compose the oikeious tes pisteos—the household or family of the loyal (see Gal 6:10).

The primary person in this family is the God who is referred to as father in the Pauline letters. The Pauline faction regularly opens their letters by wishing the assemblies grace and peace, not just from God the Father, but from God our Father (see Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2; Gal 1:3; Phil 1:2; Phlm 3—the greeting is slightly different in 1 Thessalonians, where the Thessalonians are referred to as those who are in God the father; 1 Thess 1:1). This Father God thus fulfills a similar role to that played by Jupiter in the Roman ideo-theology. And having God as our Father is a theme that then receives powerful expression elsewhere in Paul’s letters. Prominently, Rom 8:14–17 states the following:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with [the Anointed]—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

As we already learned with the selection of Caesar’s heirs, there is a close connection between adoption and inheritance, with adopted children also inheriting the family name, wealth, glory, and spirit of their adoptive father.

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This is also what we discover with the Jesus loyalists who enter into the household of God. As Gal 4:4–7 states:

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the Law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba! Father! So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

In a manner similar to coins, monuments, temples, and inscriptions all over the empire that proclaimed the divine sonship of the emperors adopted into heavenly kinship networks, the Jesus loyalists claimed to have been adopted as children of the most high God (an especially shocking claim given what we have learned about the socioeconomic and political status of the Jesus loyalists). Indeed, in the Pauline letters, father is the title employed for God more frequently than any other.

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In this way, God becomes the new paterfamilias, full of both affection for his children and authority over the household of those loyal to him.

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There are a few implications of understanding God as one’s father in this context. First of all, being children of God offered the early Jesus loyalists a way of renegotiating their status and their self-understanding, despite the humiliation, low status, and violent persecutions they experienced.

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Having been adopted by God, the movement’s members could claim a superior lineage to that of their neighbors. Within the Roman Empire, only the Caesars made equally audacious claims. Which leads to a second point. Announcing God as our father, within an empire wherein the Caesars claimed to be the universal fathers (and wherein Jupiter was most frequently called God the father), threw the assemblies of Jesus loyalists into conflict with Roman imperialism (we will see more of the significance of this conflict—and its inevitable seditious nature—momentarily).

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The third implication, which will be explored in more detail in the next chapter, is that members of the household of God would be expected to emulate the character of their father.

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However, it must also be emphasized that focusing upon God as the Father of the household removed any ultimate authority from all other members of the assemblies. For, just as we saw with Romans who adopted an heir, men who accepted a new father were required to give up their status of paterfamilias within their own families. God becomes the sole paterfamilias. Within gender-critical and feminist Pauline scholarship, the language of fatherhood has been sharply criticized for re/inscribing oppressive social arrangements into the early Jesus-movement and perhaps contributing to the stifling of the more egalitarian or radical impulses that the movement contained. While there is much that is important and appropriate about these criticisms, what is missed is that referring to God as the sole Father of the household of the faithful prevents any other person within the household from laying claim to that status. When God is the Father of the household, nobody else is. Within the Pauline ideology, the paterfamilias is made transcendent so that no human member of the assemblies of Jesus loyalists may claim this title or authority.

Yet, what of Paul himself? Does