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Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse

University of California Press

In the beginning was the Word . . .

It is no longer a novelty to hold that societies have characteristic discourses or "plots," or that the development and control of a given discourse may provide a key to social power, or even that an inquiry into the dissemination of knowledge by oral or written means ought to be high on the agenda for historians. A religion that succeeded (if slowly) in establishing itself as the prevailing religious system of the wider society to which it was at first only marginal, and laid a quite exceptional emphasis throughout this process on the verbal articulation of the faith, must cry out for analysis in these terms.

There is an enormous and ever-growing bibliography on the "rise" of Christianity. Its progress from marginal cult to world religion has, it would seem, been studied from every angle—theological, sociological, historical. Naturally, a great deal of attention has already been paid to early Christian literature of all kinds, and to its manner of expression, whether rhetorical, linguistic, or conceptual. One of the central themes studied has been the relation of Christianity to a supposed Greco-Roman background, and specifically to Greek terminology and literary forms. It will be seen that I start from the position that this attempt to separate the Greek "elements" in early Christianity is fundamentally misleading. Although it is not the subject of this

book, scholars have also been concerned to relate Christian texts and modes of expression to Jewish ones. Current research into the history of Judaism in the imperial period suggests that the older notion of separability is as difficult to sustain here as it is in relation to Greek culture.

At the moment there is indeed a particular emphasis in works by theologians and students of the New Testament on the application of literary analysis to Christian texts. But on the whole, histories of the development of Christianity in the Roman Empire written by historians and from the historical point of view have focused more on its social and institutional dimensions than on its modes of expression. There are two reasons for this: first, it is part of the wider indifference among historians to the use of literature (as distinct from "literary sources") as evidence,1 and second, it stems from the well-established practice of leaving Christian texts aside except where they seem to provide factual evidence.

But most of us now are more conscious of the sheer power of discourse, even in societies like the Roman Empire where communication was as a rule extremely poor. The very fact that Christianity was able to spread and become established as it did in such unpromising conditions asks for analysis in these terms. It is clear that Michel Foucault, who has been more than anyone responsible for this changed awareness of the importance of discourse in history, was thinking a great deal at the end of his life about the question of how Christianity was able to develop what we can call in his terms a totalizing discourse.2 Foucault's interest was directed in the first place toward the sphere of morals and especially toward the history of the individual; but there

F. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. S. Fischer, D. Forgacs, and D. Miller (London: Verso, 1988), 18, refers to "the adamantine lack of interest that historians 'proper' have always displayed towards literary (and more generally, artistic) historiography."

See M. Foucault, Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

are many other points of view from which Christian discourse needs to be investigated if we are to understand its general evolution in the early period. While these lectures were being revised there appeared the first volume of Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), which uses a more political approach to the analysis of early Christianity while still stressing the importance of discourse. One might quarrel with some of the positions taken (the author is a sociologist, not a Roman historian), but it is nevertheless striking to find the degree of emphasis laid here on the "systematic moral life plan" and "transcendent ideological power in human history" offered by early Christianity in relation to its growth in the context of the Roman Empire. What is different, then, in these approaches from the familiar strategy in which Christian ideology plays a secondary role in relation to economic and institutional factors is the stress laid on articulation and ideology as dynamic factors in themselves.

Quite apart from these considerations, the post-structuralist analysis being applied to New Testament texts cries out to be carried over into other early Christian literature, in particular theological writings. Why not ask what kind of texts these are, or how they seek to represent Christian truth, and in what ways they can be related to the general culture of the Roman Empire? At the same time, when even history itself has been feeling the effects of the heightened awareness of rhetoric, it ought to be obvious that the older style of empiricist analysis of early Christianity is due for revision. At the very least, we might expect to see a greater stress on its rhetorical strategies and—in view of recent work on orality and the significance of writing—on the role of communication, written and oral, in its spread. It has barely been noticed as yet what an extraordinarily suitable field early Christianity provides for this kind of inquiry.

That the nature of early Christianity was in fact multiform,

especially in the earlier stages, is less an argument against seeing its eventual success in the Roman Empire in terms of the sociology of knowledge than part of the answer to the question of how it succeeded. For the study of Christian discourse in the Roman world is the study of reception, and this is a two-way process—not merely how Christian discourse made its impact on society at large, but how it was itself transformed and shaped in the endeavor. Christian discourse would have been different without the environment of the Roman world; and that environment itself was subject to geographical and diachronic variance. What we study is a dynamic process in which both sides are changing.3

It is not my aim here to try yet again to explain the rise of Christianity. A call has been made for a greater use of archeological evidence in studying ancient religion.4 But no one explanation can be adequate. A whole battery of concurrent or converging explanations is needed, which will only in part be related to the nature of Christianity and the particular characteristics of Christian communities. It is equally necessary to consider the changing nature of the Roman Empire itself. We should not forget that, just as one would expect in so traditional a social structure, Christianity was extremely slow to achieve a dominant position. Some modern books give the impression that the conversion of Constantine brought an immediate transformation of society, but the truth was far otherwise.5 So these lectures take a broad chronological sweep. I have chosen to...