Matthew’s Negotiation with Roman Power in the Gospels

John E. Christianson’s The Gospel of Matthew and the Roman Military: How the Gospel Portrays and Negotiates Imperial Power attempts to re-narrate the traditional reading of the Gospel of Matthew. He explains, “I have contended here that a lack of attention to Roman military presence results in the Misinterpretation of Matthew’s context and narrative.” To this end, he attempts to rectify this mistake by accounting for the central role that Roman military and imperial power plays in the Gospel of Matthew, examining both the political context and the symbolism as central parts of the Gospel’s message. To achieve this, he recounts the various ways in which military power is represented both in establishing the culture of the period of Roman occupation of Judea, and the various ways in which these notions of power are either affirmed, resisted or subverted in the context of the message of the gospel as well as the martial implications of Christ as the eschatological son of man.

Christianson demonstrates the variety of ways in which military power is represented by demonstrating the scope in which marital logic is operative throughout the entirety of the gospel. This leads him through a series of tableus which he provides for reflection on this subject starting from the first chapter’s focus on the impact on local populations, the second chapter’s recollection of the role of Roman leadership and its opposition to Judaic culture and how it was resisted, a subsequent chapter on the various forms of abuse that the population of Judea faced, a scene of Christ speaking to the centurion in anticipating his own lordship, the eschatological vision of the destruction of Rome, and a final chapter which reflects on the crucifixion of Christ as a re-interpretation of the meaning of power.

In discussing the impact that the Roman army had on the local population, Christianson points out that the Gospel “was likely written (post-70 CE through the end of the first century) as an interval of “peace” […]” which was similar to the peace established by the United States after World War 2. This is a period in which the Roman military was attempting to solidify its power against larger political forces by preserving a colony in Judea. One can note that the geopolitical and geographic reality of the location of Israel plays a central role in the geo-drama that occurs in that region as a bottleneck between two larger landmasses. Being located in the middle of things, it remained a location which became key to the development of military power throughout the world. This led to multiple contending elements in the interest of preserving Roman power. Firstly, Christianson points out that local populations, whose farming methods were more geared towards subsistence, found the heavy taxation “difficult to bear” which often led to revolts in the ancient world. He expands stating besides the standard taxation, “additional supplies were demanded when the army prepared for campaigns and went to war” which was a recurrent practice while occupying the region. Contact with the Roman military was not sporadic but was a central, structuring part of the livelihood of the local population during that time period. While such taxation was resisted through menial gestures of defiance, the residents “had every reason to be cautious of openly provoking the soldiers” due to their superior training and weaponry. Christianson recounts the intensity with which the Romans threw themselves into their military training, inspiring a sense of “imperial invincibility.” He quotes Josephus who explains that the Romans “never have a truce from training, never wait for emergencies to arise… each soldier daily throws all his energy into his drill, as though he were in action.” While strongly opposed to the military power, the local population had no choice but to supplicate to their demands. This led to what Gerhard Lenski has called a “proprietary theory of state” which meant that the relationship was largely extractive and not to the benefit of the local population. As Michel Foucault recounts in his own history of Gallic-Rome in “Security, Territory and Population” such extreme extraction led to widespread resentment across the empire, and which led to constant revolts that also required more taxation to put down, leading to an unsustainable cycle. In regards to social relations with the military, Christianson recounts the brutality with which the Romans took what they needed, including sexual violence and the taking of wives with various claims of legitimacy and status which were difficult to negotiate. Christianson concludes that violence, taxes, the difficulty of social relations, and the imperial ideology all played a role in constituting the complex dynamic by which the tenuous hold on Judea was maintained, and how that violence and lack of administrative organization created the context for the gospel to be written. It is precisely this weak administrative role that becomes the subject of the subsequent chapter. Here, Christianson focuses on a few key scenes of Roman violence to describe the leadership and its paranoid reaction to the population. The key scenes here include the slaughtering of the first-born children of every household as described in Matthew 2:18, and the murder of John the Baptist in Matthew 14:11. These scenes further expand on the previous chapter by explaining how the central figures of imperial power in the gospel were a product of the historical context, which included the difficulty of maintaining a hold on the local population due to the economic precarity which occupation entailed.

In the subsequent chapter, discussing how the local populations coped with imperial abuse, he expands further on the notion of “non-violent resistance” as exemplified by Matthew 5:41. This passage which states “If anyone forces you to go a mile, give him two miles demonstrates a rather paradoxical and disturbing principle. Rather than active resistance, it is as if the Sermon on the Mount calls us to give active submission to our oppressors. We are told in the sermon on the mount “if struck, turn the other cheek” and “if sued for a tunic, give your cloak also” as well as “if someone begs and seeks to borrow, do not refuse to loan to them.” The use of military terms for these interpersonal situations is telling, as Christianson explains, since “the followers of Jesus are counseled to participate in heavenly warfare by making a stand against evil and resisting.” When asked about paying taxes, Christ similarly responds by stating “render to Caesar’s what is Caesar’s and to God’s what is God’s” implying that there is an affirmation, by divine mandate, for the established powers of the world, and that Christians are called not only to active submission, but support for the divine mandate of the established rulers, even if they are also called to active resistance precisely through their submission and pious citizenship. There is then a rather unconvincing reference to Homi Bhabha suggesting that the “cultural and ideological interchanges in which the colonizer and colonized act in mutual influence on each other” which Christianson attempts to use to explain the role of the “often-abused Roman practice of angaria.” He concludes this chapter by insinuating that “it is difficult to imagine how Jesus’s specific directions at 5:41 could be enacted easily by slaves and women who needed to avoid trouble with their masters and prevent the violence of sexual assault.” However, this perhaps demonstrates one of the recurring weaknesses throughout Christianson’s presentation of these arguments. While he states that the purpose of the book is to re-interpret traditional readings of Matthew which have focused on spiritual and theological concerns without demonstrating their martial underpinnings, throughout the book, Christianson merely demonstrates that there is a martial logic, but fails to establish what it is, how it differs from contemporary martial logic, or how there is a continuity or development from the geopolitical and martial circumstances of the time of Christ to the present day. This seems like a glaring weakness since, throughout the book, as in the example of the problem of colonization, the problem of sexual violence, the problem of inter-marriage between Roman officials and Judaean slaves, we see an astounding contemporaneity of the issues developed in the Bible, but not a useful heuristic or hermeneutic which would allow us to close the gap of these contexts in order to extol what our duty should be to established authorities, having developed a sufficient martial logic and hermeneutic which Christianson claims has been lacking before.

These problems compound in the final chapters of the book. In discussing the relationship between Jesus and the faithful centurion in Matthew 8:5-13. This passage features a centurion who, having a sick subordinate underneath him, asks Jesus to perform a miracle healing. When Jesus asks if he should come to heal the sick man, the centurion responds, “I, myself am a man of authority” and explains that he will simply accept the issuance of Christ’s authority as sufficient condition for the miracle to be performed. Christ, astounded at the martial logic on display from the centurion, praises him for his understanding of faithfulness. Christianson explains, “When Jesus encounters a centurion who expresses these values, he does not challenge him directly concerning his involvement in military action and slavery but agrees to heal the soldier’s slave who is suffering and afflicted.” Christianson fails here in fully articulating the logic that is on display; what the Centurion is praised for is recognizing, in the authority of Jesus as the Christ, a parallel structure to his own civic authority; one which demonstrates that the Messiah and son of God is also the son of man, and hence all earthly and heavenly authority is given to him. Instead, Christianson focuses on the difficulty of accepting this authority, given how offensive the moral insinuations of the principle are to our modern sensibilities. Again – a more consistent and thorough historiography which explains the gap in context and situates the martial reading of the Gospel of Matthew into a larger martial theory would go a long way in rectifying this oversight. It would have also gone a long way in connecting the authority that the centurion recognized with the argument of the following chapter, which describes the eschatological scene of the destruction of the roman eagles, which were emblematic of the imperial glory and triumph over the earth. In this eschatological image, as presented by Matthew 24:27-31, we are told through a passage from Isaiah, “The sun will be darkened/ the moon will not give its light/ the stars will fall from the sky,/ and the heavenly bodies will shaken”. Yet another opportunity is missed, since this particular passage not only connects the time period of Jesus with the coming time period of the eschaton, but even hails back to a prophecy form the Old Testament, demonstrating the trans-historical nature and authority of the son of Man. Such a recognition of the triple temporal character of the eschatological announcement would have gone a long way in establishing the missing temporal hermeneutic that Christianson seemed to have been aiming at in deciding to perform a martial reading of the Gospel of Matthew. After all, such a logic is clearly established in the opening of Augustine’s “City of God” with its beginning scene with the civil war in heaven leading to the rebellion and fall of Satan’s angels, which subsequently leads to the transformation of reality into early time as a consequence of the fall of their heavenly bodies, which locates the passage in Isaiah, the eschatological moment of the fall of Rome, and the coming, final eschaton which will end history. Such a recognition would have strengthened the argument, also, finally, in the last chapter, where Christianson recognizes that the meaning of the text is to bear witness to “the concurrent reality of God’s victorious, though not-yet-established empire.”

To conclude, Christianson’s text provides an astonishing amount of evidence and thorough reading of the text to arrive at a conclusion which, though praiseworthy, fails in its aim. While he demonstrates that there are indeed many references to marital themes throughout the Gospel of Matthew, Christianson fails to produce a convincing hermeneutic that would allow us to interpret the text differently than the tradition, which he claims has produced “a lack of attention to Roman military presence” resulting in “misinterpretation of Matthew’s context and narrative.” Perhaps the lack of attention has been given to the tradition, to figures like Augustine, who do indeed recognize the role of the military in the gospels, and do provide such a temporal hermeneutic.

The Gospel of Matthew and the Roman Military: How the Gospel Portrays and Negotiates Imperial Power
By John E. Christianson
Lanham, MD: Fortress Academic, 2022; 254pp

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