Lance Byron Richey - Roman Imperial ...

Lance Byron Richey - Roman Imperial Ideology and the Gospel of John (2007).jpg

Lance Byron Richey - Roman Imperial Ideology and the Gospel of John (2007).jpg
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This book was originally the author’s dissertation directed by Dr. Julian Hills at Marquette University and completed in 2004. The introduction suggests the work’s thesis, that John’s Gospel is “a conscious effort on the part of John to address issues which would unavoidably have been raised for his community by the Roman Imperial Ideology, or, as it is more commonly called, Augustan Ideology” (xii). This “complex and considerably varied set of beliefs, practices and claims about the nature and source of temporal power in imperial Rome … presented the emperor or princeps as the central figure of the empire on whom [its] continued peace and prosperity … depended” (xiv). The pervasiveness of this ideology, more than the demands of the imperial cult, meant a “pressing need to distinguish the nature and role of the emperor within Roman society from that of Christ within the Johannine community” (xvi). The Gospel, at least in its final redaction, challenges the “fundamental way of conceiving the world” that imperial ideology offered (xix).

Chapter 1 (“Neither Jew nor Roman: Reconstructing the History of the Johannine Community,”) largely rehearses previous work on John that has emphasized the Gospel’s multilayered nature and has sought to reconstruct the history of the Johannine community (so Martyn and Brown). This history conventionally involves a developing Christology, separation from a synagogue precipitated by the Birkat Haminim, persecution and martyrdom, Gentile influx, further christological development, schism, and alienation. From this survey, Richey identifies three key features: Asia Minor as the Gospel’s location; increasing Gentile presence within the community; and persistence of Jewish hostility.

Chapter 2 (“Confronting the Many Faces of Power: Augustan Ideology and Johannine Christology”) reconstructs Augustan Ideology with its focus on “the person of the emperor at the center of the new order” (27). Richey highlights three dimensions: (Augustus’s supreme position and structures for maintaining his [and his successors’] power [auctoritas]; the imperial cult; the role of poets such as Virgil) that resulted not only in establishing the emperor’s position but in creating a worldview that located the empire’s inhabitants in relation to the emperor and the cosmos. This ideology threatened the Johannine community, who did not participate in it, faced persecution for not doing so, and could not claim the Jewish “legal exemption” from it because of excommunication from the synagogue.
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