Roman Self-Representation and the Lukan Kingdom of God

Michael Kochenash, Roman Self-Representation and the Lukan Kingdom of God (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020). 9781978707351.

Reviewed by Robert D. Heaton, Anderson University, rdheaton@anderson.edu.

Recent decades have witnessed no shortage of attempts to contextualize the two Lukan volumes that loom large over early Christian historiography. In particular, scholars have attempted to elucidate, among other worthy subjects, (1) the evangelist’s sources, (2) his proximity to the stories he narrates, and (3) his orientation with respect to the reigning power of his day, the Roman Empire. Michael Kochenash’s revised dissertation, originally completed at Claremont under the supervision of Dennis MacDonald, foregrounds the third of these topics while masterfully demonstrating the fruits of alternative approaches to the first. The result is a comparison of the narratives of sacred scripture with those circulating in the imperial/political or literary/cultural environments that Luke knew around the turn of the second century CE.

Such breadcrumbs are often difficult to trace because of the manifold difficulties inherent to the task. To state just a few: how does one know, much less prove, what our anonymous author—in this case, bearing little more than a name ascribed to him by later tradition—was ingesting and refracting in the process of writing his two volumes? While we have a glimmer of an idea where he inherited much of his traditional material when crafting the gospel, desperately little of the Acts of the Apostles can be found in a clearly pre-Lukan source. Can we maintain any hope of recovering sources for Luke’s unique narratives that were not preserved, if they even existed in the first place? Many scholars are content with recognizing instead how Luke fleshes out his apostolic hagiography stylistically by appealing to the sense of continuation or chiasm from his gospel, to mimicry of historical reports and themes as transmitted by the Septuagint, and, increasingly, to details remixed and repurposed from Josephus’s late-coming Antiquities and/or an incipient Pauline letter collection circulating around the end of the first century.

Kochenash pushes beyond this impasse with a method that calls the reader’s attention to artifacts—both literary and material—of Roman self-representation that celebrate the power of the state or the beneficence of its ruling elites which have often been overlooked or deemed unfit for analysis. Seven body chapters compare selected episodes from the deeds of Jesus, Peter, and Paul with these cultural and political analogues, providing solutions to individual exegetical quandaries while unfurling a broader portrait of their author as suspicious, if not outwardly critical, of Rome’s disregard for the overall welfare of provincials. In every respect, where the Roman “kingdom”1 runs roughshod over the livelihoods of people on the margins, the Lukan Kingdom of God is positioned as an alternative or rival dominion to that of Rome, one that instead provides for material and salvific needs even of marginalized peoples. The result is a monograph that deserves, even demands, the attention of classicists and biblical scholars alike, although the work will likely be of more proximate interest to practitioners within the latter group.

Curiously, Kochenash’s introduction lacks a clear thesis staking a position among the literature he summarizes. While the status quaestionis of Luke vis-à-vis the Roman Empire is adequately surveyed, no immediate hint presents itself about as to whether Luke is, for the author, truly critical, laudatory, or apolitical toward Rome, and thus anti-imperial, pro-imperial, agnostic—or some combination thereof. Instead, several statements of intent accrue along the way: Kochenash will “explore,” “analyze” (p. 5), and perform work that “compares” and “interprets” (p. 15) selections from the third gospel and Acts against the artifacts of Roman self-representation; much like Drew Billings,2 Kochenash sees Luke-Acts “interacting with antecedent texts in a number of different ways: through citations, allusions, reconfigurations, and imitations” (p. 16) that combine to reveal a predominant, though not universal, “disapproval of certain aspects of Roman rule” (p. 168) in the evangelist’s orientation. However, in lieu of a more distinctive macro-claim finding expression at the outset of his study, and in spite of the direction of travel that snowballs chapter by chapter, one wonders if the method itself—the evaluation of parallel narratives of Roman and Christian self-representation to reveal how Luke constructs his platform for his Kingdom/Empire of God—is the message Kochenash prefers to manifest.

Such a project of source criticism necessitates that Kochenash provide some nods to the accessibility of such “antecedent texts” for Luke, who is fashioned here as an extremely well-read and innovative author of early Christian narratives. For example, Kochenash entertains discussions about whether Luke and his audience would have known Virgil’s Aeneid in its Latin original, via an early Greek translation, or more organically as filtered through an active oral culture of repetition and retelling (pp. 94–98, 145–46). And while Kochenash does not particularly address the possibility that Luke’s earliest readers—“Theophilus” (Lk 1:3; Acts 1:1) or otherwise—might have been able to see through the mimesis only to accept this “self-representation” anyway, he does stress on several occasions that to detect the author’s literary feats would have required a significant repository of “cultural competence” (pp. 15, 103) possibly unavailable to the common, unlettered Christian adherent of the second century. After all, the first Christian author to mention and defend the scripturality of Luke-Acts by name, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons (fl. ca. 180 CE), apparently does not possess this capability. This enigma only heightens the degree of difficulty for Kochenash, for without any hints of reception history or reader-response criticism to which he can appeal, the analysis must overcome the appearance of novelty or the potential charge of “parallelomania” that has occasionally been lodged against modern interpreters who see things in old texts that the ancients seemingly did not.

Without undue strain on the complexity of the argument, Kochenash’s seven body chapters, which provide exegesis of pericopes from Luke-Acts alongside Greco-Roman comparanda, can be grouped into three characteristic groups illustrating aspects of the Lukan Kingdom of God. The first, covered over Chapters 2–4, demonstrates that unique elements from Luke’s portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth should be understood as intentional narrative parallels to foundational Roman figures like Octavian/Augustus and Romulus. Kochenash offers a compelling interpretation of Luke 3:38 (where Jesus’s ancestry is traced back to Adam, who is enigmatically depicted as the son “of God,” tou theou) by appeal to a double-divine ancestry also present in Roman texts about Octavian. Both Octavian and Jesus can claim more or less direct parentage by divinities—Apollo for Octavian, the Holy Spirit for Jesus. At the same time, via their implicit or explicit adoptions, Octavian inherits the divine matronage of Aphrodite/Venus through grafting onto the family of Julius, and Jesus, through Joseph, traces himself back to Adam tou theou. Genealogically, Luke invites his readers to “interpret Jesus’s significance as analogous to that of Augustus” (p. 41), and the comparison of these two charter figures does not end there. For the Golden Age of Rome inaugurated by the reign of Augustus—characterized by the “centripetal” (p. 52) extraction of wealth from the provinces and redistribution to Italian elites and commercial centers—finds reversal in Luke’s characterizations of the Kingdom of God, where “those who are marginalized are the primary recipients of kingdom beneficence, while those in the centers are sometimes excluded from it altogether” (p. 60). For example, Kochenash capably juxtaposes the Augustan Res gestae against the Lukan Jesus’s programmatic defense for his orientation toward non-Jews at the Nazareth synagogue (Lk 4:24-27), his miracles on behalf of a Roman centurion and the widow at Nain (Lk 7:1-17), and further teaching that reinforces this “Elijah-Elisha model” of directing the good news to the margins, such as in the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. This emphasis on ethnic and religious outsiders as recipients of Jesus’s benefactions also fittingly reflect the increasingly gentile movement that Christianity was becoming as it spread throughout the Roman Empire.

A second characteristic episode finds Kochenash explicating the meaning of two Petrine healings that precede the conversion of Cornelius in Acts. Around this midpoint of his monograph (Chapters 5–6), the author’s arguments noticeably begin to crystallize. While prior commentators have been keen to understand the names of Aeneas and Tabitha as traditionally received and dutifully repeated in Acts 9:32–43, Kochenash demonstrates how these are better interpreted as serving intentional metonymic functions—just as the gospel itself transitions to its ultimate purpose, that is, substantiating the gentile orientation of Lukan Christianity. Aeneas was well known as a cipher for Rome, given Virgil’s epic poem lauding the Trojan War hero’s journey to establish the city and the tendency, beginning with Julius, for Roman rulers to claim personal lineage from Aeneas. After a concluding statement in Acts 9:31 neatly completed the narrative of the gospel’s spread in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, the final movement teased in the commission of Jesus (Acts 1:8) required narration. Luke thus borrows from the significant “cultural freight” carried by the name Aeneas (p. 93), which was exceedingly uncommon as a personal name in Israel/Palestine, to set his sights geographically on a specific “end of the earth” to which the apostles would eventually transmit the Christian proclamation. By healing Aeneas, Peter targets the epicenter of the Roman Empire in a way that will only be fulfilled by the narrative’s true apostolic hero, but the Aeneid supplies Luke with comparative material beyond a titular character alone.

The subsequent resurrection of Tabitha/Dorcas (Aramaic and Greek for “Deer”) again illustrates how the Kingdom of God’s foundational figures circulate life and salvation, particularly when contrasted against the Roman self-representation of Aeneas as sacrificing the deer-like Dido en route to his own colonizing destiny. As Kochenash explains of this demonstrably popular episode from the Aeneid, “a Greek-speaking audience familiar with the Aeneas-Dido tragedy (an invention of Virgil) could readily interpret a story featuring a dead woman named ‘Deer’—immediately following a story about Aeneas—as an allusion to Dido” (p. 116). Co-opting culturally weighty narratives in such a way, Luke’s Kingdom of God unravels the collateral damage wrought on the Greco-Roman world and even teases the potential to heal “Aeneas”—read: Rome—itself.

Two remaining substantive chapters (Chapters 7–8) weigh other aspects from the inclusion of gentiles in Acts against various comparanda and coalesce in a third characteristic episode. The Roman centurion Cornelius, whose family Peter converts at Caesarea to formally initiate the gentile mission, receives significant attention for his visually suggestive act of prostration before Peter (Acts 10:25–26). Kochenash surveys scholarly opinions relating Cornelius as a stand-in for the imperial cult or asserting that he mistook Peter for an angel or divine being. The reader’s attention is redirected at first toward depictions of provincial subjects on Roman capta and restitutio coins from the first and second centuries and later toward accounts of triumphant processions of its emperors. By genuflecting before Peter, Cornelius assumes the logic of Roman domination, whereby outsiders must first be subjugated (often militarily) and then reconciled by an act of imperial clemency. But Peter immediately rejects the soldier’s deferential submission, for unlike the emperors, Peter knows he is “just a man” (pp. 135–36). The episode illustrates for Kochenash how ethnic outsiders are as equally welcome in the Lukan Kingdom of God as Judeans are, a point that carries over into a final analogy between Luke and Virgil. Both Acts and the Aeneid, he recognizes, “negotiate the inclusion of different ethnic groups within a superordinate identity” (p. 143), and thus gentiles become Christians and Trojans become Latins in a similar fashion. Moreover, both Paul, through a reiterated commission of Jesus (Acts 23:11), and Aeneas, through a vision of the defeated Hector, are literarily sent on a quest toward the Italian peninsula for the next stages of their divinely choreographed epic’s development, culminating on the Christian side in a summative statement that although Jews have rejected salvation, gentiles will listen (Acts 28:28).

One senses that these lines of analysis could continue indefinitely, or at least roughly as long as we have Lukan pericopes to evaluate alongside Homer, Virgil, and others. In such a light, when the charter history of early Christianity is so consistently built from reflections and “reconfiguration[s]” (p. 156) of existing political and cultural models—and is framed to paint a picture of apostolic harmony, divine interventions for the (pro-gentile) Christian cause, or the superiority of the Kingdom of God to the Empire of Rome—it would eventually become appropriate to opine on the possibility of retrieving any historically grounded data from Luke’s literary achievements. After all, classicists often have no problem attributing the ancient narratives they evaluate to the realm of fictive, yet value-laden, storyscapes. Perhaps this is a conversation for another time, but specialists in Luke-Acts would be wise to state their case clearly, as neglecting to do so permits non-specialists to receive the stories Luke transmits without the necessary “competence” to critique what seems, at the best of times, to be a countercultural house of cards reflected in a mirror its author holds up to his own world.

Occasional concerns of presentation also arise, particularly with an introduction and conclusion interested in bookending the study with comparisons to semi-contemporary events in American imperial history. While I do not intend to discourage important comparative work on world empires and their transgressions, the reader of this monograph on Roman self-representation might expect a discussion of any precedents or analogues for the project of counter-imperial propaganda in which Luke-Acts engages. Does Luke, furthermore—especially as he seems to be a highly creative author, intentionally structuring Christianity as a counter-culture that hybridizes and supersedes Roman self-conceptualization—corner the market on Christian self-representation against that of Rome? Is his portrait conventional, typical, or eclectic among fellow Christians, and what percentage of his co-religionists might have possessed the “cultural competence” to hear the healing of Tabitha/Dorcas, to take one example, as a critique of imperial values? Perhaps not all such questions could be adequately addressed in prefatory or concluding discussions, but they seem at least equally worthy of consideration as casting judgment on other empires (and religious practitioners) behaving badly.

Although there is much more to discover in Kochenash’s book than can be echoed in this review, a monograph is not an encyclopedia, and perhaps the best entrants in the genre of dissertation-turned-codex showcase the potential of fresh perspectives, leading the reader to ask new questions aligned with the novel insights gained along the way. Fortunately, it is possible to receive Kochenash’s comparisons profitably even if one does not share his estimations that Luke-Acts be regarded as “Jewish literature” (pp. 16–17, 119) dated after the dissemination of Josephus’s Antiquities, circa 93 CE (p. 18, n. 15). Thinking alongside the author, I found myself approaching familiar episodes from the two Lukan volumes in different ways, with new Greco-Roman comparative material in the arsenal, a framework for understanding how to discern Luke’s critiques of the regnant kingdom of men, and a profound sense of promise for further provocative work on how early Christians mimicked, appropriated, and evolved cultural and environmental influences to give voice to their own story. Luke undoubtedly dipped heavily into the potent reserves of mythological origin stories and governing ideology to shape the narratives that undergird his own pro-gentile Christian platform; Kochenash has plumbed beyond the efforts of prior commentators to reveal even more “sources” for Luke-Acts than have previously been appreciated. In this regard, one detects his fitness for the mantle of MacDonald, whether he is similarly willing to call this work mimetic criticism or not.

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction
1. Reading Luke and Acts within the Context of the Roman Empire (3–25)
Part II: Juxtaposing Foundational Figures
2. Imperial Genealogies and Adam as God’s Son (29–49)
3. Movement of Capital and Jesus’s Teachings (51–71)
4. Commissions for Violence and Jesus’s Ascension (73–87)
Part III: Juxtaposing Expressions of Inclusion
5. Aeneas: A Roman Way to Structure Luke’s Narrative (91–119)
6. Imperial Violence and the Resuscitation of Tabitha (111–24)
7. Status Inequality and Cornelius’s Obeisance (125–42)
8. Divine Duplicities and Luke’s Union of Jews and Gentiles (143–62)
Part IV: Epilogue
9. Summary and Reflections (165–78)

Notes

1. See p. 24, n. 76, where the author makes the point that basileia, while almost universally rendered as “kingdom” by Christians, is also used to translate the Latin imperium in Greek texts, perhaps shrouding a major point of early Christian imperial mimicry.

2. Billings focused on one “parallel” “text” in particular, the Column of Trajan commemorating the Dacian Wars (erected c. 113 CE), in his Acts of the Apostles and the Rhetoric of Roman Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Although his study diverged in focus from Kochenash’s here, both capably illuminate underappreciated aspects of the Lukan foundational epic/historiographical project. See the present author’s review of Billings in Ancient Jew Review.

Discussion

1. In your introduction (and elsewhere in the book), you state that you view Luke-Acts as “Jewish literature,” which is an assumption I am aware of from other scholars, but there seems to be an equally strong case for Luke-Acts having been produced by a gentile to “self-represent” as the supernaturally oriented destination for God’s salvation. Personally, I often detect the author’s effort to make Peter align with Paul, smoothing over the actual historical differences between their perspectives. What drives your preference or conclusion to see Luke-Acts as “Jewish literature,” and is this meant as an appraisal of the author’s identity or the narrative tradition he positions himself within (or both)? What from your analysis changes if Luke-Acts is viewed as a “gentile” work instead?

When I said that, I had in mind the Acts narrative’s treatment of Jews who reject Jesus. In my judgment, Acts reasons about them in ways that are reminiscent of how prophets in the Jewish Scriptures reason about Israelites/Jews who don’t respond positively to their message. Accordingly, it’s more about the narrative tradition within which the author situates Acts than it is about the author’s identity.

I don’t think anything in my analysis changes if the author was a non-Jew. If that were the case, the author was apparently so committed to the ancestral traditions and scriptures of the Jews as to be indistinguishable from someone committed to these from birth. That said, I haven’t seen a convincing argument in favor of the author being non-Jewish from birth, and so it strikes me as much more likely that the author was in fact Jewish. (It’s worth mentioning that there’s a forthcoming book by Joshua Smith, Luke Was Not a Christian, that specifically argues that the author was Jewish. I read an earlier version of it, and it was excellent.)

2. Given that many scholars continue to treat Acts as essentially historical material, I must ask about the relationship between the Lukan “reconfigurations” of existing environmental influences (Virgil’s Aeneid, governing Roman ideology, etc.) and our ability to assess what actually happened in the black hole of early Christian history, ca. 33–mid-60s CE. In the pile-up of parallel episodes that Luke constructs or concocts for his purposes of countering the Roman Empire with the Kingdom of God, what remains for you of the portrait of Acts as historical? Do parallel models pursued by Luke on any of the points you examine, or between Peter and Paul (e.g., the depiction of Peter’s dream sequence, his first gentile conversion preceding the missionary activity of Paul, etc.), discredit or preclude such historical readings?

The readings I advance are not helpful for the type of historical projects you mention, but they don’t close the door on them completely. To illustrate my point, the Gospel of Mark narrates the death of John the Baptist at the hands of “King Herod” (i.e., Herod Antipas the tetrarch). According to Mark, John is killed at the instigation of Antipas’s wife, Herodias, because of his opposition to their marriage, since she was previously married to Antipas’s half-brother (Mark 6:17–29). My Doktorvater, Dennis MacDonald, argues that this story is modeled, in part, on Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000], 77–82). Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he is correct, this reading does not mean that Mark’s account is bereft of historicity. We know that because Josephus also attests to Antipas’s responsibility for executing John (Ant. 18.116–119). (Interestingly, Josephus lacks the details in Mark that correspond to the death of Agamemnon.) All that is to say, yes, the fictionalized nature of Acts makes it a poor foundation for constructing history—but that’s not to say it doesn’t include anything historical. It’s just complicated.

3. Warren Carter once asked whether the “good news” was really just another form of coercion: the lordship of our lord, the dominance of our Dominus, the justification of our violence, and so on. At times, you stress the idealized nonviolence of the Christian movement while noting how Luke excuses Christian violence in several cases. Possibly expanding on the “addendum” or excursus of pp. 118–19, how might you respond to Carter’s prompt? Is there an essential “good news” to the Lukan Kingdom of God if one strips away its reliance on performative subversion of Roman values?

For these types of issues, we need to keep two things in mind: the world of the author (in this case, the ancient Mediterranean world under Roman rule) and the principles that guide our evaluations of what is good, bad, better, or worse. With respect to the first consideration, the authors of ancient texts were attempting to communicate meaning within particular social and cultural contexts (e.g., the Roman Empire). So it’s reasonable to evaluate a text’s claims in relation to such frames of reference. With respect to the second consideration, readers are under no obligation to assume the author’s positionality (if that were even possible). If your evaluation of any particular text is based on the principle of absolute equality, for example, then you are likely to regard the “good news” in Luke and Acts as falling short of that principle. So, is it possible to understand Luke’s version of the “good news” as good in its ancient contexts? Yes. Do frameworks exist within which this “good news” is understood as less than fully liberative? Again, yes.

4. Did early Christians commenting on Luke-Acts lack the “cultural competence” necessary to understand the author’s project? How might you respond to the potential charge of “parallelomania” that accompanies mimesis criticism—essentially, that if you look hard enough, of course you’ll find similar themes in a common culture, but that such similarities might not mean Luke intended them or was influenced by the sources you identify?

I don’t think it’s the case that the early Christians who commented on Luke and Acts necessarily lacked the cultural competences that are presupposed for the readings that I promote (or for those promoted by other scholars, for that matter). I do think it’s the case that those beyond the author’s innermost circles of literate friends probably lacked some of the cultural competences presupposed by the texts—and that those far removed from such circles probably lacked many of these competencies. But knowledge of Homer and Euripides, for example, was so diffuse in the ancient Mediterranean world that someone literate enough to write comments on the Lukan narratives surely possessed some of the cultural competences that it presupposes. Maybe the better question is whether those writers were predisposed to engage such competencies while reading and thinking about Luke and Acts. It seems they were not.

Having been accused of it in the past, I think “parallelomania” is little more than a rhetorical cudgel people use to defend themselves against undesirable interpretations. And it’s never a helpful thing to say. If you have thoughtful, evidence-based reasons for why one text should not be read in relation to another, then you should just state those reasons. In that case, an accusation of “parallelomania” adds nothing substantive. If you have no such reasons, however, then you should probably reconsider your objection. In any case, that’s how I’d like to respond to that charge.

In a situation where major critiques of your book’s methodology or of the minutiae of your chosen Lukan passages and associated comparanda were essentially lacking, it was an enlightening procedure to pick your brain on the sorts of questions arising from my reading of your project. One could compile, for example, a litany of non-Lukan scholarship marshaling Acts as clear evidence for x or y thing happening by z date in early Christian history—as if its author preserves a recent, omniscient account of the events he narrates. Acts may be the best narrative we’ll ever possess of this period, but your cautious approach is worth adopting broadly: “It’s just complicated.”

Hopefully this examination of sources, models, and mimesis does not lose sight of, or imply disinterest in, the admirable qualities of Lukan evangelism that you rightly explicate. Historically speaking, Luke’s was just one among a complex multitude of possible self-representations by early Christ-devotees who scrutinized Roman rule from their own contingent circumstances. From this study, however, I appreciate not only Luke’s perspective and literary achievement, but also his immense intake of Greek traditions and Roman values permitting the composition of such a substantive and culturally consequential diptych.