William Herzog (1994), noting the frustration of many that Paul did not choose to more carefully circumscribe just what constitutes a just and an unjust government, suggests that a reading of the text against Scott’s matrix of the public and hidden transcripts immediately resolves this dilemma. “If Paul were dissembling, then this widely acknowledged omission is part of his coded speech. The very imbalance of his argument is part of his disguise” (354). With this possibility held up in plain view, Herzog begins his analysis.

Drawing our attention to the historical conditions that lie beneath Paul’s opening claim (his claim that the existing authorities have been instituted by God), Herzog[1] observes that the “rulers of agrarian societies and aristocratic empires value traditional forms of legitimation.” In order to procure and sustain the legitimation of the local religion, the lords seek to “coopt the temples, priests and sacred texts of their societies” (354-55). Thus Rome installed their own high priestly regime, manufactured their own “king of the Jews,” and accepted the High Priest’s annual sacrifice on the emperor’s behalf.[2] Indeed, “most temples,” as with the one in Jerusalem, “support the ruler’s claim to a mandate from heaven and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts.” Thus, for Herzog, Paul’s opening remarks about the divine constitution of Roman power indicate that Paul recognizes “the reality of how politics works in his world” (355). Paul is simply rehearsing the official transcript, not because he agrees with it, but in order to situate his hearers firmly within the grim reality of their subordination. The official transcript must be established before it can be subverted.

Paul continues in this vein by identifying the three groups around which “the entire exhortation is built,” namely, the authorities, their subjects, and the rebels (355). Paul immediately isolates the rebels and warns them off of violent resistance. “Whoever resists (antitassomenos) authority resists (anthesteken) what God has appointed.” Herzog observes that anthesteken is “more confrontational” than antitassomenos and “refers to useless resistance.” Following Hobsbawm (1959; 2000), Herzog repeats the “truism that there were no revolutions in the ancient world, only rebellions that were crushed” (1994: 355). Thus, v. 2 reiterates another “political fact of life; political rebellion was folly and inevitably came to a bad end.” Of course, Paul does not say this in so many words; he speaks “from a loyalist point of view.”[3]

But v. 4a “comes like a surgical strike,” when Paul finally begins to relativize the imperial pretentions he has been loyally reinforcing until now. These archontes (rulers) are diakonoi (menial servants). “Up to this point, the semantic fields separating rulers, ruled and rebels has been clear, but the introduction of the ruler as diakonos changes the equation.” In the Roman architecture, “ruling and serving were antithetical functions and unrelated semantic fields.” Thus, “in the midst of reiterating the public transcript, Paul introduces a coded message from the hidden transcript” (356), thus relativizing the grandiose claims Roman rulers regularly made about themselves, without overtly denying such claims.

The ascription of diakonos to the ruler is quickly and prudently pursued by the reiteration of the ruler’s “divine right” to brandish his sword about. But, Herzog detects, “even this rhetoric has a ‘hidden’ implication because it specifies that the military be used solely to suppress anarchy and wrong behavior. That the use of the military was hardly ever limited to these purposes was obvious. The ‘sword’ thus provided the means of intimidation and brutality that ensured the subjected populations would quietly endure the so-called Pax Romana” (356). Paul’s legitimation of Roman power thus takes up the line of the official transcript, while exposing the official transcript’s lack of correspondence to reality. “If one lived in such a state, one would obey ‘because of conscience’ not just out of fear of its wrath. Unfortunately, such a state does not exist” (357), so subservience remains an unhappy obligation (anangkê).

While the military’s function was to compel subordination internally and to create new subordinates externally, and were “the primary functionaries in the police state,” no less important to Roman dominion were “the bureaucrats responsible for the collection of direct tribute and indirect taxes.” The tributes and customs were essential to Rome’s ability to maintain control of its vast empire. Herzog sees Paul’s language to be adeptly on point here. Paul reminds the Roman Christians that the leitourgoi theou are “constantly busying themselves with this very thing” (13:6), namely, money-grabbing. It is “an apt description,” Herzog writes, “of the bureaucrats who devoted their lives to providing the revenue stream required by the emperor to maintain and expand his political agenda.” These collectors were expert extortionists, “extracting from the population everything but the barest subsistence” (358).

As such, for the same reason that the slave and poor classes are compelled to be subservient, it is necessary to pay tributes and customs. The reason? “Resistance is foolhardy. Rome holds all the cards. Just as the military devotes itself to physical control, the financial bureaucrats devote themselves to economic control. It is useless to fight them.” The most that can be done in this situation is to “give back” (apodote) what belongs to them. Herzog notes here that apodote is the same verb used in Mark 12:17. According to Herzog, Paul’s point is “to give them their due, but no more. This implies resistance to conceding to the finance ministers more than is their due. Give no more than absolutely necessary” (358).[4]

Paul continues to rehearse the public transcript, exhorting the subordinates to render reverence and honor to those to whom it is due. While reverence (phobos) can easily be translated as “fear,” as it is in 13:4, what are we to make of the admonition to render “honor”? To whom is honor owed? Some have suggested that fear and honor are owed only to God, and thus Paul is carefully inserting into the equation criteria for ethical discrimination, effectively relativizing his prior, more absolute claims about the authorities.[5] While this is a possibility, it is exegetically unlikely, especially if we accept, following Nanos, the chiastic structure of the pericope, in which phobon corresponds to archontes, and timen to exousiais hyperechousais. Others have suggested that we read honor sarcastically, inside quotation marks (Walsh 2008). This could be a more promising reading, based on the irreverent attitude Paul displays toward timocratic mores elsewhere in his corpus.[6] We have already noted a third possibility: Neil Elliott has shown how the aphorism was used by the early Christians, specifically the Christian martyrs of the second century. There the offering of honor to Caesar functioned as a sort of “apologetic of the persecuted” (2006: 225-26), which effectively served to throw the emperor’s villainy into stark relief.

But Herzog argues that Paul is merely counseling the vulnerable Christian community to display the routine “public deference that the oppressed show their masters” (1994: 359). Herzog refers us back to Scott, who observed that “the linguistic deference and gestures of subordination” are not merely “abstracted by power” but “serve also as a barrier and a veil that the dominant find difficult or impossible to penetrate” (1990: 32). In many cases subordinated groups rehearse their acts of conformity offstage, and the skills requisite for theatrical duplicity are instilled in the young by instruction and example. This is why “conformity is too lame a word for the active manipulation of rituals of subordination,” manipulation which transforms the rituals of subordination into security measures that sequester an emancipated space for the dominated to inhabit. Thus, it is not mere conformity, but “an art form in which one can take some pride at having successfully misrepresented oneself” (33).

Certainly one of the things the Jews of the diaspora shared was a long tradition of living under domination. As such, they had grown especially adept in the conforming arts, and Paul, Herzog contends, was no exception. Handing down his expertise, “Paul advises the Romans to practice the arts of resistance but in ways that will not threaten the community lodged near the heart of the Roman system of domination. He has managed to sound obedient and loyal,” but the loyalty Paul offers is to “an empire that does not exist.” Thus Paul has conceded nothing to “the actual empire, and his apparent advice about loyalty is coded language for how to survive in an authoritarian environment” (1994: 359).

Labels: New Perspective on Paul, Paul, Pauline Theology, Romans 13