Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How God Became King (2012)

  But it makes enormous sense of the gospels themselves. The way they tell the story of Jesus going to the cross makes this abundantly clear. The greatest religion the world had ever known and the finest system of justice the world had ever known came together to put Jesus on the cross. The misunderstanding, betrayal, and denial of close friends adds another dimension. The mocking of the soldiers and the crowds deepens both the agony and the irony. Finally, the nations rage, as Psalm 2 said they would, rising up against the Lord and against his anointed, and God’s response is, “Yet I have set my king, my son, upon my holy hill”—no longer Zion, the ancient Temple mountain, but Golgotha, the ugly little hill a bit to the west. The cross constitutes Golgotha as the new holy mountain. This is where the nations will now come to pay homage to the world’s true Lord. The one enthroned there, with “King of the Jews” above his head, is to have the nations as his inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth as his possession. His victory over them will not be the victory of swords and guns and bombs, but the victory of his people and of their derivative suffering and testimony. That is how, for the four evangelists, the kingdom and the cross come together at last. That is how the darkest of the “powers” are to be overthrown. For God to become king, the usurping rulers must be ousted. Throughout his public career, Jesus was engaged in launching that project. But it was on the cross that it came to its triumphant conclusion. That is why, when Peter tried to turn Jesus away from his vocation to suffer, Jesus called him “satan.” That is why the mocking voices urging Jesus to come down from the cross echo so disconcertingly the mocking voices in the temptation narratives (cf. Matt. 27:39–43; 4:1–10). Without the cross, the satanic rule remains in place. That is why the cross is, for all four gospels (and, as I have argued elsewhere, for Jesus himself) the ultimate messianic task, the last battle. The evangelists do not suppose that the cross is a defeat, with the resurrection as the surprising overtime victory. The point of the resurrection is that it is the immediate result of the fact that the victory has already been won. Sin has been dealt with. The “accuser” has nothing more to say. The creator can now launch his new creation. All four dimensions—all four speakers, to continue our image—thus contribute to a richly layered narrative that we find, in different ways, in all four canonical gospels (though, noticeably, not in the so-called Gnostic gospels). Getting to this point requires considerable mental effort in today’s world and church.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The Temple in Jerusalem was not simply a “religious” building in our modern sense or even in the sense of “religion” that some ancient writers would have recognized. As is now widely acknowledged, our modern distinctions between “religion” and all sort of other things—“politics,” “aesthetics,” “culture,” “economics,” and much besides—would have made little sense in the ancient world in general. It would have made no sense in Judaism in particular. Not only was the Temple the center of the whole national life. It was, Jews believed (as many ancient peoples believed about their temples) the place where heaven and earth themselves interconnected and overlapped. It was therefore the place to which one might go for healing, forgiveness, and the renewal of fellowship with Israel’s God. It was also—and a glance through the Old Testament will show what this means—the place in which God established his power base. “Heaven,” after all, was seen as the throne room, the place from which “earth” would be ruled. But if “heaven” came to be linked with a particular point on “earth,” then that point was where power was concentrated. Divine power. Theocracy. The kingdom of God. Long before anyone thought of linking kingdom and cross, the far more obvious link was kingdom and Temple. And the gospels tell the story of Jesus as the story of a one-man walking temple. Early on in the story we find the hints. “Who then is this?” people ask as Jesus does remarkable things, speaks and acts with authority, behaving as if he is the one who’s now in charge. Jesus is portrayed by the gospels as a one-man apocalypse, the place where heaven and earth meet, the place where and the means by which people come and find themselves renewed and restored as the people of the one God, the place where power is redefined, turned upside down or perhaps the right way up. Jesus calls twelve close associates, as though to make exactly that point about the people of God in a more formal and indeed powerful way, even though the twelve themselves remain muddled, dangerously so, as to what he is actually doing. All these are the signs, granted the world of thought in which he lived (so very unlike ours!), that he was indeed launching a new kind of theocracy, and that he really did believe he was the new kind of king. But just at the moment where we in today’s world might be getting worried about this new theocracy, we find the ultimate redefinition. To recapitulate for a moment. Mark, as we saw, gives his story a simple structure, moving in two great loops from the voice at the baptism to Peter’s confession and the voice at the transfiguration, and then to the high priest’s question (which in the original is in the form of a statement) and the centurion’s statement of faith: “You are my son!

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Luke’s Jesus declares that he saw the satan fall like lightning from heaven, though this is clearly not the end of the matter; he also says, with a wry solemnity, that the moment of his arrest is the moment when darkness does its worst (10:18; 22:53). Mark’s Jesus explains that the rulers of the nations use ordinary power, but that he will use servant power instead (10:35–45). John’s Jesus explains to Pilate that his kingdom is of a different sort and so does not use violence (18:36). Matthew’s Jesus explains that he is casting out demons by the power of God’s Spirit, so that God’s kingdom has arrived on their doorstep (12:28); and he then warns that, like an unclean spirit returning with seven worse ones after a temporary exorcism, Israel itself (“this wicked generation”) will find that it will end up worse off than it was to start with (12:43–45). All the evangelists see Jesus going to his death in order to win the deeply paradoxical victory over the forces of evil that, throughout Israel’s long story, have gathered themselves together to do their worst to the people of God. This enables us (looking back from the fourth speaker to the first) to understand more fully the reason why it is that Israel’s story itself comes to its climax on the cross. The story of Israel, in its own terms within the ancient Hebrew scriptures, was all along the story of the way in which the creator God was going to deal with the problem of evil. Genesis 12 was always designed as the answer to Genesis 3–11. How was this to be done? Not by making Israel a “safe place,” a community in which the evil of the world could find no place. Had that been the aim, Abraham would not have been the best person to begin with, as the stories somewhat embarrassingly reveal. Nor was Israel created as a kind of worldly superpower (though it may have looked like that in the time of David and Solomon), a new nation that would beat the world at its own game. Rather—and this is something the early Christians come to with hindsight, only at that stage tracing its earlier stages in the Psalms and prophets—the point is that the story of Israel was to be the story of how God was going to deal with evil. He would draw it onto one place, allowing it to do its worst at that point. And he himself (as we heard through the second speaker) would go to that place, would become Israel-in-person, in order that evil might do its worst to him and so spend its force once and for all.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Now we are in a position to “festoon” around these great affirmations of incarnation and cross something more like what the canon of scripture is trying to tell us. The “incarnation” of the second person of the Trinity, in the strange and mysterious birth reported in Matthew and Luke, is, as we saw earlier, a highly political moment when Herod (in Matthew) and Caesar (in Luke) are both caught napping. Both even collude unwittingly with the event, Herod by sending the wise men to Bethlehem, Augustus Caesar by sending Joseph and Mary there. The virginal conception of Jesus thus speaks of the living God coming precisely to establish his sovereignty, dependent on no human agency; the attempt to make Mary’s “Fiat” (“Let it be”) into a kind of equal and opposite contribution to that of God misses the point entirely and makes another that leads us a long way off track. Wise readers of the creed already know at this point, then, that the one who is thus born to Mary is the one who has come to establish the kingdom of the one true God. To make “virgin birth” mean “miraculous divinity” and thereby to screen out “inaugurating God’s kingdom” is to falsify it—however “orthodox” it may sound. What it means is the launching of God’s kingdom purposes by the one who is, precisely, the sovereign of all. This means that we must now read the statement of Jesus’s suffering, death, and burial as the climax of this project, rather than some other. “For us men, and for our salvation,” says the Nicene Creed at this point. Yes, indeed, but that “salvation” is not a rescue from the earth, from God’s creation, but in and for the earth, and for us as creatures of earth. The mention of Pilate in the creed (a remarkable enough point at the best of times, scarcely to be explained by some early Christians thinking, in their misguided enthusiasm, that Pilate was actually a hero, perhaps even a saint, for facilitating Jesus’s saving death!) is no mere historical marker, though it is important in that respect as well. The mention of Pilate and of Jesus’s suffering at his command speaks loudly and clearly into the world of early Christianity, after those three initial centuries of persecution, of Jesus as the one who won the great initial victory over the dark powers of which Caesar’s rule (and Pilate’s subrule) were the immediate instrument. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Yes, we think, because that is how the great scene in John 18–19 comes to its close, with Jesus speaking of kingdom, truth, and power and going to the cross to make them all happen! He descended into hell.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And the centurion confesses Jesus as God’s son at the very moment when, as he dies, he seems anything but. Goodness knows what Mark thought the centurion meant. The irony is acute. Jesus will come to this global sovereignty, it seems, only through suffering; and by “through” suffering Mark seems to mean not just that he must pass through it to his goal, as a necessary dark tunnel before coming out into the light, but also that the suffering will somehow be effective in accomplishing his task and establishing his sovereignty. And it is Caiaphas—the high priest, in charge of the Temple itself—who utters the fullest and the most fully ironic “confession of faith”: “Messiah, Son of the Blessed One!” It cannot be that both Jesus and Caiaphas are correct. Either Caiaphas is right, and Jesus is a dangerous blasphemer. Or Jesus is right, and Caiaphas is central to the problem that had gripped the Jewish leadership of the time: they did not recognize the moment of divine visitation (Luke 19:44). The evangelists are in no doubt: Jesus is the reality, the place where Israel’s God now dwells, the human being in and through whom the one who called Abraham and uttered his voice from Sinai had now returned to judge and to save. Jesus is the reality, and the present Temple and its official spokesmen must give way before him. It is no accident, from the evangelists’ point of view, that when Jesus finally breathes his last, the veil of the Temple is torn in two from top to bottom (Mark 15:38). In fact, all four evangelists make it abundantly clear that we are to understand both Jesus’s kingdom and his death in relation to the Temple—or rather, in relation to the fulfillment of the Temple’s role in Jesus himself (this is a major theme throughout John) and his upstaging of it in his last great symbolic actions. It is now becoming more widely recognized, I think, that the synoptic evangelists present the Last Supper as a “new Temple” moment. Jesus, having pronounced God’s judgment on the old Temple in his dramatic action and then his discourse on the Mount of Olives, now gathers his friends around him to celebrate a “Passover meal with a difference,” a meal that not only looked back, like all Passover meals, to the exodus itself, but forward to the new exodus that Jesus was about to accomplish. Like all Passover meals, it was not just a signpost, but a means, through the sharing of food and wine, of partaking in that event about to be accomplished. When Jesus wanted to explain to his followers the meaning of his death, he didn’t give them a theory; he gave them a meal.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to keep in mind, though the gospels are inviting us to do so on every page. And it is the failure to bear this in mind, perhaps, that makes it so difficult to hold together the idea of God’s kingdom breaking into the world and God’s son going to a shameful death. Insofar as the gospels do hold those things together, this isn’t simply a confidence trick. It is because they have a different view of God and God’s kingdom. To this we shall return in due course. 6 The Launching of God’s Renewed People THIS BRINGS US NICELY to the third speaker in our sound system. Like the second one, this third one has often been turned up far too loud. This has meant both that the music it is quite properly trying to play has itself been distorted and that the music coming from the other speakers (apart from the equally distorted second one) has been overwhelmed. In much modern biblical scholarship, in fact, this one has often drowned out all the others. Here the gospels are read simply as reflections of the life of the early church, with no real connection to the narrative of Israel and (except in conservative circles) no real thought that the story of Jesus might be the story of God in person. Instead, we have the gospels as the projection of early Christian faith, reflecting the controversies and crises of the early church, which, according to the theory, placed in the mouth of a fictitious “Jesus” sayings that in fact came from early Christian prophets speaking in his name. Before we go any farther, it is important to stress that this is at best a half-truth, and the wrong half at that. Though of course the gospels reflect the life of the early church, in which the four evangelists lived, prayed, and wrote—how could they not reflect that life?—the whole point for each of them, and for any sources they had, was that something had happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus through which the world had changed, Israel had changed, humankind had changed, their vision and knowledge of God had changed, and they themselves had changed. They were reflecting the changed world, to be sure. But they were talking about the change itself, how it had come about, and what it all meant.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Slightly behind and extending to the right of those five symbolic pikes is a long marble-framed and marble-supported bronze frieze. The scene is a classically stylized version of the battle of Issus mosaic from Pompeii’s House of the Faun, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. In both scenes, the left half shows Alexander attacking, and the right half shows Darius fleeing. One half is the West and the future. The other is the East and the past. In May of 2000 you have not yet heard the words, but you already know the concepts. It was not shock and awe. It was shock against awe. It was shock over awe. Shock from the vastly fewer number of massed Macedonian phalangists (the anvil), their flanking aristocratic cavalry (the hammer), and a forward-charging leader protected only if his companions could keep up with him. Awe from the vastly greater number of dispersed Persian troops, their scythed chariots and war elephants, and a leader well protected by elite bodyguards to the rear. Shock destroys awe, as always in the Western way of war, whenever the enemy marches out to death and destruction in the proper and expected manner. Alexander was brave, brilliant, and a military genius. He was also savage, brutal, and a paranoid alcoholic. In theory, he went east to liberate the Ionian Greeks, to avenge earlier Persian invasions, and to civilize a unified world. In actuality, he slaughtered his way from the Granicus to the Indus, died young, and left his surviving generals a terrible war machine to turn against one another. It was not democracy replacing autocracy, but simply one autocracy displacing another. But even when the short, two-edged steel stabbing swords of the Roman legions made obsolete the long pikes of the Hellenistic phalanxes, Greek held as a common language. And without that lingua franca Paul could not have reached his converts or written his letters. But that grace came at a ghastly price, whisper the ghosts of Tyre and Gaza. You leave the seafront, turn north past the Archaeological Museum and the grounds of the International Trade Fair toward the campus of Aristotle University, and then head west along the Egnatia Odos, which recalls the name but does not trace the route of Rome’s ancient Via Egnatia. You finish the run from Egnatia into Monastiriou Street and the Capsis Hotel. “It was not until the reign of Augustus,” writes Victor Davis Hanson in The Wars of the Ancient Greeks and Their Invention of Western Military Culture, “that Alexander—the propagandistic potentialities of his hero worship for any would-be world conqueror were obvious—was seen in his now familiar role of Alexander Magnus” (174). Recall, for example, from Chapter 2 that Alexander was portrayed at the Forum of Augustus as the prototypical human-become-divine by world conquest. Macedonian globalization in the fourth century B.C.E. was a prototype for Roman globalization in the first century C.E. Augustus followed Alexander into divinity by world conquest. Outline

• From The Pisces (2018)

  This seemed even weirder than him touching my foot. He was holding on to the rock and I leaned against him. I put my head over his shoulder, the way Dominic liked to support his neck on one of my limbs. He was cold and his skin was very soft. I felt like I was hugging a strange baby, but also like we had always known each other. We hugged and I felt like I dissolved into him, like I was diving into the ocean itself. I looked over his shoulder and saw the cresting waves, the whole ocean suddenly turning white, as though I were on the threshold of heaven. I had been so afraid of dying, but suddenly I knew that death would be okay and beautiful—and even dying would be okay, because there was a heaven, sort of. Maybe it was not the way religious people imagined it, but I saw it as some kind of luminous womb to which we would all return. And because we would return there, in a way we were already there. I started to cry. All the pain and fear of the past nine months poured out of me. Theo stroked the back of my head with his hand. I didn’t want to ever move. I was floating above myself and I looked down and saw us there on the rock. I wondered how I had been led to this. He pulled back. He didn’t ask why I was crying. “It’s hard, right?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Life is so oppressive and scary and…oppressive, and the whole time the ocean is right here. It’s like I can’t believe it’s been there this whole time. I feel like I have a new love for it or something.” “Yes,” he said. “I understand.” “Do you want to kiss?” I asked. “I’m not sure if that is how you feel about me? Or maybe you just like me as a friend. I’m not sure.” “Yes,” he said. “I want to kiss you very much.” We kissed on the lips, gently at first. His eyelashes were thick and black and he tasted like the ocean. His lips were chapped from the saltwater, I guess, and it felt like I was kissing a flower. I licked each of them. Then he opened his mouth a little wider and I lightly put my tongue in the front of his mouth. He began to suck on my tongue and I felt that my tongue and the rest of me would go through him, like I was going to be pulled inside him as though he were a big fish. I got dizzy. I took his tongue into my mouth and I felt that I was circling through his body, but also through an entire life cycle of some sort. I felt that I was spinning forward. He kissed my forehead and I laid my head back on his shoulder. “So how old are you anyway?” I asked.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I didn’t even think about Theo. For once I was not thinking. Maybe for the first time ever. I felt space in my mind, in my skull, which I had never felt before. Had that too always been there? If it had always been there, then life, it seemed, could have always been beautiful, redeemable, sacred. But if it had always been there, it was strange that I had never found it before. If something so beautiful and pure existed right between your ears, why wouldn’t you stay there forever? Why wouldn’t you live there? — I started to laugh. I couldn’t tell if I was coming, or if I had already come. But then the laughter subsided and I felt a darkness crawl over me—a cool darkness that was dead serious—and I realized that I had not come yet and was going to. His tongue was like a dog’s tongue—a little rough—so unlike my fingers or vibrator. It was like a magic carpet or something, in that I came and came and came. It was like the orgasm began, then stopped, then started a couple of times and I felt that I was able to control it, before I rode the carpet all the way up to where it crested and then exploded. I stayed in it longer than I had ever experienced. And just as I came I became aware of him again. I said his name out loud, I heard myself say it. But I also felt a connectedness between me and something bigger—beyond him—as though there were a split screen. He was on one side of the screen and the universe was on the other. I felt love for both of them. I lay there on the rock and stared up at the sky, silent, for a long time. He kept his face in between my thighs and I hugged his head with my knees. “Would you like me to come out of the water?” he asked. “What?” He took his head out from under my skirt, looked me in the eye, and smiled. “I said, ‘Would you like me to come out of the water?’ ” “So much,” I said. “More than anything. More than anything I would like you to come out of the water.” “I’m scared,” he said. He looked like a little boy when he said that, scrunching up his nose and squinting. “Of what?” I laughed. “Are you scared of me? But you just had your face in my pussy.” “I have some imperfections,” he said. “I have—something is wrong with my body. I’m afraid for you to see.” “I think you’re beautiful,” I said. “You are a gorgeous creature. I would never judge you. Anything that could be different or weird about your body I would only see as even more special.” “You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “About what you see.” Now I wondered what it was that was wrong with him. Did he have a shrunken lower body?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Matthew’s comment fills this in from another angle: All this happened so that what the Lord said through the prophet might be fulfilled: “Look: the virgin is pregnant, and will have a son, and they shall give him the name Emmanuel”—which means, in translation, “God with us.” (1:22–23) In other words, we are to look at Jesus and see in him, however strange it may seem, the personal presence of Israel’s God, coming to be with his people and rescue them from the plight their sins have brought upon them—which, in ancient Jewish terms, was focused not least on the “exile” they were still suffering, the plight of being overrun and ruled by pagan nations. Look next at the other end of Matthew’s frame. Jesus has been crucified and then raised from the dead. Now he addresses his followers, in words that Matthew must have known were astonishing by anyone’s standards. And the final sentence echoes that “Emmanuel” promise. “God with us” has become “Jesus with us”: Jesus came toward them and addressed them. “All authority in heaven and on earth,” he said, “has been given to me! So you must go and make all the nations into disciples. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you, every single day, to the very end of the age.” (28:18–20) In Jesus himself, Matthew is saying, Israel’s God has come back to be with his people and will now be with them forever. This outer frame enables us to understand those strange scenes in which Matthew has the disciples actually worshipping Jesus after he stills the storm. Matthew makes this more explicit than Mark: They got into the boat, and the wind died down. The people in the boat worshipped him. “You really are God’s son!” they said. (14:32–33) Again, once we learn what is going on—once we think in first-century Jewish terms rather than in the terms of late modern Western skepticism and its alternatives—we begin to notice all sorts of other things too. We notice, in particular, that Jesus tells several stories about masters and servants, to illustrate what he himself was doing, while being aware that, within the world of his hearers, stories about masters and servants, kings and subjects, and so on, would unhesitatingly be recognized as stories about Israel’s God and Israel itself. The primary example of this is a parable found in both Matthew and Luke in slightly different versions. (Scholars have often suggested, as with other similar phenomena, that one of these versions is “original” and the other is “adapted” and have then speculated as to which is which. This is ridiculous. Jesus was a traveling teacher in the days before print and electronic media.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Once we have noticed this theme in the baptism story, we are bound to see it all over the place. We have already noted several of the obvious passages. I think of Mark 10:35–45, where the “servant” work of the “son of man” demonstrates the new kind of power that is to be unleashed in the world, confronting the rulers of the world with God’s new way. I think of the Emmaus road story, where the risen Jesus declares that the divine plan always involved the Messiah suffering and then “coming into his glory” (Luke 24:26). We note that “coming into his glory” does not mean simply “going to heaven” in the normal sense; “glory” is a way of saying “sovereign majesty,” so that the saying exactly combines the two themes we are looking at. The crucifixion was the appropriate and long-prophesied way by which the Messiah would come to be king of all the world, and Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, describes how that works out. I think too of John’s interpretation of the same theme. As so often in the fourth gospel, it is spread subtly but richly throughout the narrative. When the soldiers dress Jesus up in a purple robe, they do so in order to mock him, but John tells us of it in order to declare that Jesus is indeed the one in purple, the one before whom the nations will bow. Pilate circles around the possibility that Jesus is in some sense “king of the Jews,” but without realizing that, according to the Jews’ own ancient traditions, their king is to be king of the whole world. John knows that he is telling a story of someone dying the death of a criminal. He is determined that his readers will “hear” the story also as the death of the rightful king. Jesus’s kingdom will not come by violence (18:36). It will come through his own death. When he is lifted up from the earth, he will draw all people to himself (12:32). The “Title” on the Cross This leads us exactly to the “title” on the cross. The Latin word titulus was used to describe the public notice that would be attached to the cross of a condemned criminal, indicating the charge that had led to this extreme verdict. (The practice was well known in European countries until at least the nineteenth century.) Though skeptics have challenged many features of the gospel narratives, this one is generally regarded as very well established, because it fits with normal Roman practice, it is recorded in all four gospels, and it is hardly the sort of thing someone would make up (Jesus’s execution was a very public affair, and many people would have seen the notice for themselves). The fullest description is that in John: Pilate wrote a notice and had it placed on the cross: JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  That won’t ever change, whether we’re together or apart.” She remains quiet and I’m grateful this conversation is happening while I’m driving and she’s in the backseat, so she doesn’t have to see my tears and I don’t have to see hers. “Are you OK?” I ask and even as I do so, I know I’m looking to her to reassure me that she will make it through our split intact. “I mean …” she starts and pauses. “This isn’t the best thing that’s ever happened to me but yeah, I’m OK.” I burst out laughing. I am so in awe of this brave, resilient and funny little girl and I know that I will do whatever I can to keep her this way. She’s not quite done with me yet though, wanting to know if I will someday marry another man and if so, if that means she will have an entirely new father. I am grateful that we have moved past some of the heaviness and grief of our conversation to imagine what the future could look like and I laugh again, teasing her that she’s getting ahead of herself and moving way too fast for me. “Oh yeah, I forgot,” she says, giggling. “Daddy stays my daddy no matter what.” “Exactly,” I say. “And our feelings for each other might change but our feelings for you never will.” This much, at least, I know is true, and it feels good to be able to declare the words authoritatively. * Sunday, drop-off day, arrives. Michael and I both want to bring Georgia for her first time at overnight camp, but even if I can manage to sit in the car for the ride there with him and Georgia, there’s no way I’m getting back in that car with him alone afterwards. After a flurry of text negotiations, we agree to take two cars. The drop-off itself is as uncomfortable as it is quick. In the cabin, I smooth new sheets on Georgia’s bed and direct Michael with short and sharp words. We take pictures of her in her pastel tie-dyed sundress in front of her small rustic cabin and are effusive with our goodbyes, but the second she runs off, we are silent. “Bye, Laura,” he says quietly as I open my car door. I hold up my hand in what is both a wave and a stop sign and pull out. There’s no reason I can think of that I will need to see or speak to him for the next two weeks and I feel nothing but relief. I’ve had no choice but to frequently interact with him about money and schedules and kids, and every time it has felt akin to pouring salt in a wound. That I’m about to get a break from him and maybe from my own anger makes me feel lighter and freer than I have in months.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  On the castled height of Pergamum observe the wondrous light bathing the marble of Hellenistic temples at noonday…. If you have ancient texts to decipher, the sunbeam will bring stone and potsherd to speech. If you have sculptures of the Mediterranean world to scrutinise, the sunbeam will put life into them for you—men, horses, giants, and all. And if you have been found worthy to study the sacred Scriptures, the sunbeam will reanimate the apostles and evangelists, will bring out with greater distinctness the august figure of the Redeemer from the East, Him whom the Church is bound to reverence and to obey. And then, if you speak of the East, you cannot help yourself: made happy by its marvels, thankful for its gifts, you must speak of the light of the East. (xv) Something special happens, we are convinced, when you stand on the heights of Priene in the Mediterranean sunlight and read that huge fallen beam from a temple once dedicated to the “Imperator Caesar, the Son of God, the God Augustus.” There and elsewhere, on Pauline and non-Pauline sites, we ask you to stand with us, possibly on location, but certainly in imagination. Second, this new approach from integrated archaeology and exegesis breaks new ground as it relates the apostle Paul to the Roman imperial world that surrounded him, the Jewish covenantal religion that formed him, and the Christian faith that enthralled him. PAUL AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Although we will of course travel to cities Paul actually visited, we will also study sites he never saw, but sites that tell us much about the world in which he lived. Our new question is this: Where does archaeology uncover most clearly Rome’s imperial theology, which Paul’s Christian theology confronted nonviolently but opposed relentlessly? In Paul’s lifetime Roman emperors were deemed divine, and, first and foremost, Augustus was called Son of God, God, and God of God. He was Lord, Redeemer, and Savior of the World. People knew that both verbally from Latin authors like Virgil, Horace, and Ovid and visually from coins, cups, statues, altars, temples, and forums; from ports, roads, bridges, and aqueducts; from landscapes transformed and cities established. It was all around them everywhere, just as advertising is all around us today. Without seeing the archaeology of Roman imperial theology, you cannot understand any exegesis of Pauline Christian theology. Some scholars of Paul have already emphasized creatively and accurately the confrontation between Pauline Christianity and Roman imperialism. That clash is at the core of our book, but we see it incarnating deeper and even more fundamental strains beneath the surface of human history. What is newest about this book is our insistence that Paul opposed Rome with Christ against Caesar, not because that empire was particularly unjust or oppressive, but because he questioned the normalcy of civilization itself, since civilization has always been imperial, that is, unjust and oppressive.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I lay down on one of them in the fetal position. When I awoke it was after one a.m. and the tide was rising higher. My body was coated in salt and ocean foam. I felt like I was part of the rock and part of the ocean, and I wondered if this is how Sappho felt, even in her deepest desperation, part of the earth, like that desperation or longing or eternal cosmic want was something to be celebrated—something natural—holy even, or at least, not just something to be endured. What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right? I was almost ready to give up, when I saw him in the distance swimming toward me. I started laughing and some tears came to my eyes. “Hi!” he called. “Hello!” I giggled. “It’s good to see you. I was afraid you weren’t coming back.” I felt emboldened by how excited he seemed to see me. “Do you want to get out of the water and sit on the rock with me?” I asked. “No, you come closer to the water,” he said. “If I get out it will be too cold for me to get back in again.” “I can’t sit on the water,” I said. “No, just come closer to the edge. Put that blanket down on the rock. Lie down on it and just face me. Please? If you don’t mind.” I did what he said. I watched myself. Was this natural, what I should be doing? Or was I so sick that I would do anything that this strange boy asked? He couldn’t even bother to get out of the water to meet me. Was that a bad sign? But he was so kind in other ways, so attentive and present. “Now what? “Do you want to hug me?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I do want to hug you.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I like the way the splashes look in the moonlight and I like having the ocean to myself. Well, almost to myself.” “Yeah, it’s nice out here,” I said. The wine was wearing off. I suddenly felt exhausted. His teeth were shiny white, but not like an actor’s. They didn’t look bleached or fake. They were practically iridescent, like the inside of a shell. There was something almost feminine about him, pretty, but his jaw was well defined. These surfer boys. I always forgot that they were real. I mean, I knew that they existed. I knew they were alive. But it really seemed to me that the surfing was a costume, like they were only pretending to be so enamored of it. How could anyone be that devoted to something so lacking a destination? Just wave after wave, over and over. I wished someone were that enamored of me. But their love for surfing was real. It was a fact. They really loved surfing as much as they appeared to love it. This one didn’t have a board, though. This wasn’t a surfer. This was a swimmer. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Lucy.” I felt old. “Nice to meet you, Lucy,” he said. “I’m Theo.” When he said his name, his hotness increased. He was real, there in the water, real in a way that I wasn’t. He was swimming and wet and I was—what was I doing? I thought of all my books, the ones waiting for me in piles back in my parching Phoenix apartment, collecting dust. I thought of the university library. I imagined the library growing and growing, the books piling up on the edge of this ocean. One wave could destroy them all. They were so dry, like they were actually made of dust. My skin, too, felt like an old book: powdery parchment etched with lines that supposedly contained knowledge, but when you looked closer they were only empty scribbles. Not the right kind of knowledge. If you put me in the water, I too would dissolve. I was sure of it. “Do you always swim at night?” “Yes,” he said. “The waves are more intense but it makes you stronger.” “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?” “No,” he said. I looked at the moon. Then I looked back down at him, and I got scared. Who was he? I didn’t want to die. Or at least, I didn’t want to feel myself dying or drowning. Here I was, sitting on the rocks at midnight talking to a stranger, my legs hanging off the rock. He could just grab my ankle, pull me off the rocks and hold me under, and that would be that. But why would he do that? I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it—when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  You look down, then, one final time from Philippi’s high acropolis. The view southeast is not as open as southwest, but you hold together, as if in a simultaneous moment of time, both Octavian and Paul on the Via Egnatia to west and east of the city. Any comparison seems absolutely ludicrous. But with Paul, with dusty, tired, much-traveled Paul, came Rome’s most dangerous opponent—not legions but ideas, not an alternative force but an alternative faith. Paul too proclaimed one who was Lord, Savior, Redeemer, and Liberator. He announced one who was Divine, Son of God, God, and God from God. But Paul’s new divinity was Christ, not Caesar. His was a radically divergent but equally global theology. Two Sons of Two Gods It is a profound if standard mistake to dismiss Roman imperial theology as empty rhetoric, poetic hyperbole, or pragmatic flattery. It was, actually, the ideological core of Roman imperial power, the theological heart of Roman global rule. In 1906 and 1909 Gustav Adolf Deissmann, then at the University of Heidelberg and later at the University of Berlin, searched Western museums and Eastern sites to show the importance of nonliterary written memorials from the Roman Empire in the first century C.E. for a proper understanding of earliest Christianity. By nonliterary he meant texts on stone, metal, wax, papyrus, parchment, wood, or ceramic recently discovered by archaeological excavation. That search began, according to his classic Light from the Ancient East, after he read the title “Son of God” used for the emperor Augustus. It was the theou yios [Son of God] in No. 174 of the Berliner Griechische Urkunden that stimulated me, all in a flash, to a considerable part of the work that has occupied my life as a scholar. Some thirty years ago I happened to see the unbound volume in the hands of Wilhelm Schulze in the [University of] Marburg library. Looking over his shoulder, I noticed the text, which caught my eye owing to its being an autograph reproduction. I was arrested, fascinated by the theou yios and found myself, as I continued to turn the leaves, everywhere in the world of the New Testament and the world surrounding it. (346) He was reading the language of Augustan imperial theology and hearing the counterlanguage of, say, Pauline Christian theology. I remember discussing with a librarian friend of mine the fact that in many inscriptions and papyri of the Greek east Augustus and (with the name of their divine father inserted) his successors are called “the son of a god.” My friend, a classical scholar, smiled benignly and said there could be no significance in that, “for” it was a translation of the Latin divi filius. I do not think that a Christian out of one of St. Paul’s churches would have smiled at the expression or have considered it non-significant. (346)

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  We begin this chapter at Aphrodisias because it illustrates most forcibly two major themes of this book, the relationship of Paul to Roman imperial theology and to his Jewish religious tradition. The former theme focuses here on the Sebasteion, or Augusteum, whose elegant gate, three-storied facing porticoes, and high-stepped imperial temple celebrated the Roman Julio-Claudian divinities by inserting them among and above the ancient gods and traditions of Greece. The latter theme focuses here on a Jewish inscription that explicitly distinguishes Jews, converts, and a third category of “God-worshipers,” with rather surprising numbers in each category. We continue by considering the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles as a most ambiguous source for understanding Paul’s life and work, mission and message. We presume, by the way, that the same author wrote that two-volume work that is now separated into the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, but we do not presume that author is “Luke, the beloved physician” from Colossians 4:14 (we use “Luke” simply for convenience). On the one hand, Luke emphasizes certain elements with regard to Christians, pagans, Jews, and Roman authorities that reflect his own, much later views rather than Paul’s much earlier experiences. On the other, he emphasizes the presence of “God-fearers” or “God-worshipers” in Jewish synagogues and underlines Paul’s controversial successes among them. Those pagan sympathizers, not full Jews but no longer pure pagans, will be crucial for this book’s understanding of Paul’s polemics with those fellow Jews on whose domain he was confrontationally convert poaching. Luke, in summary, both knows much about Paul’s time and place, but also interprets it according to his own time and place. Both those elements must be carefully and critically assessed in reading Paul through Lukan eyes. We finish this chapter on another site that Paul never visited, Delos, amid the Cycladic Islands of the Aegean. We chose it for two reasons. First, it was a microcosm of Paul’s world, a miniature crucible of that world’s political, economic, social, and religious ferment. Second, it is today an entire island preserved for archaeological study. In its many temples, shrines, and synagogues we see both Roman theology spreading eastward from Rome, but also Eastern religions spreading westward toward Rome. We recognize in both cases the absolute conjunction between religion and politics. We catch glimpses of the voluntary associations that organized religion and economics within Greco-Roman commercial life. Above all, we see the ancient tradition of Judaism moving powerfully among Greeks and under Romans. It was only amid that mobility and because of its possibility and security that Paul could operate so successfully. The Sculptures of the Imperial Sebasteion

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Caesar of Heisterbach abounds in stories of the gracious offices Mary performed inside the convent and outside of it. She frequently was seen going about the monastic spaces, even while the monks were in bed. On such occasions her beauty was always noted. Now and then she turned and gave a severe look to a careless monk, not lying in bed in the approved way. Of one such case the narrator says he did not know whether the severity was due to the offender’s having laid aside his girdle or having taken off his sandals. Mary stood by to receive the souls of dying monks, gave them seats at her feet in heaven, sometimes helped sleepy friars out by taking up their prayers when they began to doze, sometimes in her journeys through the choir aroused the drowsy, sometimes stretched out her arm from her altar and boxed the ears of dull worshippers, and sometimes gave the staff to favored monks before they were chosen abbots. She sometimes undid a former act, as when she saw to it that Dietrich was deposed whom she had aided in being elected to the archbishopric of Cologne.2023 To pious Knights, according to Caesar of Heisterbach, Mary was scarcely less gracious than she was to the inmates of the convent. She even took the place of contestants in the tournament. Thus it was in the case of Walter of Birbach who was listed and failed to get to the tournament field at the appointed hour for tarrying in a chapel in the worship of Mary. But the spectators were not aware of his absence. The tournament began, was contested to a close, and, as it was thought, Walter gained the day. But as it happened, Mary herself had taken the Knight’s place and fought in his stead, and, when the Knight arrived, he was amazed to find every one speaking in praise of the victory he had won.2024 Thomas of Chantimpré2025 tells of a robber whose head was cut off and rolled down the valley. He called out to the Virgin to be allowed to confess. A priest, passing by, ordered the head joined to the body. Then the robber confessed to the priest and told him that, as a young man, he had fasted in honor of the Virgin every Wednesday and Saturday under the promise that she would give him opportunity to make confession before passing into the next world.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  NEW GOLDEN AGE. Recall once again that Saeculum Hymn sponsored by Augustus, composed by Horace, and sung chorally by twenty-seven girls and twenty-seven boys at the great New Golden Age celebrations on and around the Campus Martius in 17 B.C.E. The hymn’s invocation opened the Saeculum Games and appeals to Apollo both indirectly and directly: “O quickening Sun, that in your shining carriage ushers in the day and hides it, and are reborn another and yet the same, never may you be able to view any greater than the city of Rome…. Do you, Apollo, gracious and benign, put aside your weapon and give ear to your suppliant sons” (9–12, 33–34). Nearly two millennia after that celebration and almost on Augustus’s birthday, an accidental discovery on September 20, 1890, in the western end of the Campus Martius provided remarkable details about those eschatological games that celebrated the dawning Golden Age. Workmen were constructing a sewer along the Tiber at Piazza P. Paoli just before the Corso Vittorio Emanuele crosses the Tiber on a bridge of that same name. They discovered a medieval wall constructed of random bits of earlier material from the surrounding ruins. By day’s end when that wall was disassembled, the crew turned over to officials over one hundred inscribed fragments, seven of which, with an eighth added later, were in minuscule script from the Augustan period. They once belonged to a nearly 10-foot-high plaque attached to an even larger square pillar, erected to record the ritual proceedings of the Saeculum Games. The inscription preserves a terse and methodical register of the three-day celebration that counterbalances Horace’s poetic and choral script, and it reveals Augustus’s pronounced and personal role in the games’ rituals. The preparations for the celebrations included ritual bathing and purification of the people, and once they began, women in mourning were to set aside any sign of grief and courts were to suspend the administration of justice. But Augustus himself was clearly orchestrating and presiding over the rites, as one paragraph describing the sacrifice to the Fates illustrates: On the following night, on the Campus Martius, next to the Tiber, [the Imperator Caesar Augustus sacrificed] according to Greek rite [nine female lambs to the divine Fates] as whole burnt offerings; and by the same [rite he sacrificed nine female goats as whole burnt offerings and spoke the following prayer:] “Fates. As it is [prescribed for] you in those books…[I beg you and pray that] you may increase [the power and majesty of the Roman people]…in war and peace; […and that you may grant eternal safety,] victory and health [to the Roman people,…and the legions of the Roman people]; [and that you may keep safe and expand] the state of the Roman people, […and that you may be] favorable and propitious [to the Roman people],…[to me, to my house, to my household]…” (CIL 6.32323, translation from Beard, North, and Price, Vol. 2, 140–44)

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Give concord and peace to us and to all that dwell on the earth, as thou gavest to our fathers, when they called on Thee in faith and truth with holiness, that we may be saved, while we render obedience to Thine almighty and most excellent Name, and to our rulers and governors upon the earth. "Thou, Lord and Master, hast given them the power of sovereignty through Thine excellent and unspeakable might, that we knowing the glory and honor which Thou hast given them may submit ourselves unto them, in nothing resisting Thy will. Grant unto them therefore, O Lord, health, peace, concord, stability, that they may administer the government which Thou hast given them without failure. For Thou, O heavenly Master, King of the ages, givest to the sons of men glory and honor and power over all things that are upon earth. Do Thou, Lord, direct their counsel according to that which is good and well pleasing in Thy sight, that, administering in peace and gentleness with godliness the power which Thou hast given them, they may obtain Thy favor. O Thou, who alone art able to do these things and things far more exceeding good than these for us, we praise Thee through the High-priest and Guardian of our souls, Jesus Christ, through whom be, the glory and the majesty unto Thee both now and for all generations and for ever and ever. Amen." II. A literal translation of the poem of Clement of Alexandria in praise of Christ. {Umno" tou' Swth'ro" cristouv . (Stomivon pwvlwn ajdavwn). "Bridle of untamed colts, O footsteps of Christ, Wing of unwandering birds, O heavenly way, Sure Helm of babes, Perennial Word, Shepherd of royal lambs! Endless age, Assemble Thy simple children, Eternal Light, To praise holily, Fount of mercy, To hymn guilelessly Performer of virtue. With innocent mouths Noble [is the] life of those Christ, the guide of children. Who praise God O Christ Jesus, O King of saints, Heavenly milk All-subduing Word Of the sweet breasts Of the most high Father, Of the graces of the Bride, Prince of wisdom, Pressed out of Thy wisdom. Support of sorrows, That rejoicest in the ages, Babes nourished Jesus, Saviour With tender mouths, Of the human race, Filled with dewy spirit Shepherd, Husbandman, Of the spiritual breast. Helm, Bridle, Let us sing together Heavenly Wing, Simple praises Of the all holy flock, True hymns