Tom Holland: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you know, there’s the Jacob Taubes view that Paul is more anti-Roman and, in some ways, more anti-status than Jesus, revising Jesus politically. What is your take on that debate? How is Paul revising Jesus politically? Well, I think that Jesus is very radically anti-state. By “state,” I mean specifically the notion that, both in Jerusalem and in Rome, power is interfused with those who claim a mandate to interpret the divine. This is clearly the case in the Jerusalem temple. The Gospel writers — and we don’t know that the sayings of Jesus are mediated through the Gospel writers, and the degree to which they correspond to what a historical Jesus might have said is obviously hugely contested — but insofar as we have a record of what the historical Jesus might have said in the Gospels, he seems hostile to the Jerusalem temple authorities. I think that what he is hostile to is summed up in the attack on the money changers and the idea that, in some way, what is God’s can be implicated in the churn of the earthly. I think he also feels that about Rome. It’s often cast today that the Jews are religious, and by Jesus going before Pontius Pilate, he’s somehow being handed over to the secular authorities. But the Romans are no less secular than the Judean authorities. The Romans, too, are absolutely implicated in a sense that their power is interfused with an understanding of the divine. Pontius Pilate’s main base is in the city of Caesarea, which is named after Caesar Augustus, and Augustus is a god. The Romans also, like the Jews, have a great temple in their city, the Capitoline temple, the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, which ironically will be incinerated a few months before the Jerusalem temple is incinerated by the Romans in AD 70. I think that Jesus, in that kind of incredibly potent episode where people come up to him and they say, “Should we be paying taxes to the Romans?” Jesus asks for a coin, and he is given a coin, and he says, “Whose head is on this?” The people who were talking to him say, “The head of Caesar.” Jesus famously says, “Well, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That is, again, another of these depth charges, another of these acorns from which mighty oaks will grow, because it’s there that you get the idea, actually, in the long run, of there being something that is secular. Jesus, I think, is all about separating the divine from the earthly, and that is an incredibly potent insight. It’s one that is as hostile to the claims of Caesar as to the claims of the temple authorities. I think Paul is completely the heir of that. I think Paul understands that. There’s a huge sense in which his letters, his understanding of Jesus, the way that he portrays that serves as a parody of the cult of Augustus. I mentioned the Letter to the Galatians. Galatia is one of the great centers of the cult of Augustus. So, when Paul is writing to the Galatians, he is very, very conscious that the God that he is talking about exists in the context of a world in which the fastest-growing cult is the cult of Caesar. How do you view the Christian foundations of African American liberalism as being different?…

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