Auto touto. The NIV translates 13:6 to read:

This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.

There are multiple problems with this translation, the first of which is that the translators have gratuitously added two English words—“authorities” and “governing” are nowhere to be found in the Greek—effectively solidifying their interpretation of the text by embedding it in the translation. The Greek actually reads: dia touto gar kai phorous teleite. leitourgoi gar theou eisin eis auto touto proskarterountes.

A literal translation would read:

For this also is why you pay taxes. For God’s priests [or God’s ministers] are constantly occupying themselves with this very thing.

The NIV has gratuitously inserted the word “authorities” as the subject of the clause, when in fact leitourgoi (ministers/priests) is in the nominative case, clearly the subject. The participle, proskarterountes, functions grammatically as the object of the subject’s action: For God’s priests (leitourgoi gar theou) are (eisin) constantly occupying themselves (proskarterountes) with this very thing (eis auto touto). The NIV has given the participle its own special clause (who give their full time to governing), but they have done so without any exegetical warrant.The other gratuitous addition is the word “governing.” This is not in the Greek. The Greek says “eis auto touto” (to this very thing), and the referent is actually ambiguous. But the NIV has anachronistically projected modern taxation ideals back onto the Roman taxation system, by suggesting that Paul is arguing that taxes are necessary because they help the state to govern well. But as many have shown (e.g. Keesmaat 2007: 151), the vast majority of ancient tax dollars did not go to governing, but to military expansion and to the aggrandizement of the imperial cult. While auto touto could be a reference to governing, the only mention Paul has made remotely related to governing is in v. 4, which speaks of the terror of the sword. If this “governing” is the “very thing” Paul had in mind to support by encouraging to pay their taxes those in the church who had just been displaced en masse at sword point, his reasoning would hardly have been satisfactory to his hearers.

There is an alternative reading. Grammatically, it is possible that the leitourgoi theou are not members of the Roman bureaucracy at all, but the Christians themselves. This line would read, “This is also why you pay taxes, for God’s priests (i.e. all Christians) are constantly busying themselves with (paying taxes).” But this reading is highly unlikely, especially if we take the chiastic structure of the text to be at all determinative (see above, p. 18).

Ultimately, Herzog’s reading (1994: 358) is the most likely, in which “this very thing,” the thing with which the “ministers of God” are constantly busying themselves, is the collection of taxes itself. Besides being grammatically preferable, it also has the virtue of corresponding rather cogently to the historical situation.

Anthistemi. In 13:2, Paul uses the word anthesteken (resist), a cognate of anthistemi. This is significant because it is the same word used in Matthew 5:39, usually translated, “Do not resist one who is evil.”[1] Wink has shown decisively that “resist” in Matthew 5:39 indicates armed, militant resistance, as in the formation of a militia. Here I quote Wink at length:

Resistance implies “counteractive aggression,” a response to hostilities initiated by someone else. Liddell-Scott defines anthistemi as to “set against esp. in battle, withstand.” Ephesians 6:13 is exemplary of its military usage: “Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand [antistenai, literally, to draw up battle ranks against the enemy] in the evil day, and having done all, to stand [stenai, literally, to close ranks and continue to fight].” The term is used in the LXX primarily for armed resistance in military encounters (44 out of 71 times). Josephus uses anthistemi for violent struggle 15 out of 17 times, Philo 4 out of 10. Jesus’ answer is set against the backdrop of the burning question of forcible resistance to Rome. In that context, “resistance” could have only one meaning: lethal violence. Stasis, the noun form of stenai, means “a stand,” in the military sense of facing off against an enemy. By extension it came to mean a “party formed for insurrection” (so also Luke 23:19, 25), in Acts 19:40 as “rioting,” and in Acts 23:10 as “violent dissension.”

In short, antistenai means more in Matt. 5:39a than simply to “stand against” or “resist.” It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection. Jesus is not encouraging submission to evil; that would run counter to everything he did and said. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition. Perhaps most importantly, he cautions us against being made over into the very evil we oppose by adopting its methods and spirit. He is saying, in effect, Do not mirror evil; do not become the very thing you hate. (1992b: 199)

As we have seen, such an understanding of anthistemi quite neatly fits the historical and literary context of Romans 13, and helps to explain the significance of the terror of “the sword” in 13:4. The machaira (sword), was a symbol of authority donned by Roman police-soldiers, but was also used by special police units in putting down violent resistance movements (Yoder 1972: 206, esp. n.14). If Paul is using anthistemi here as it is used most frequently in the NT and in the LXX, it is clear he has in view the possibility of violent resistance. As Borg has shown (1972: 208-11), militant Jewish uprisings in Rome were by no means unheard of. A reading closely following that of Stubbs, above, would cohere with Wink’s remarks. Here we can see the continuity between Paul and the Jesus tradition precisely in the way they instruct God’s people to resist the enemy. In both cases it is Rome that is in view as the enemy. In both cases militant resistance is denounced. In neither case is political quietism promoted. In both cases, what Stassen has called “transforming initiatives” (2003) and what Scott would call the “weapons of the weak” (1985) are offered as a means of conciliatory resistance to the imperial order.

Moreover, if we take Herzog’s persuasive argument about Jesus’ negative attitude toward Roman taxation as determinative, there is the further possibility of agreement between Jesus and Paul on the question of the tribute. Herzog (2004) argues that Jesus stood firmly opposed to the tribute, but that his response when cornered on the issue in public (Mark 12:13-17) was a virtuoso performance of dissembling discourse in which Jesus alludes to a hidden transcript in the midst of his performance of the public transcript, and in doing so radically reinterprets the payment of the tribute as an exercise in ritual cleansing. The coins Caesar wants back in tribute contain idolatrous inscriptions in the first place. Since no good Jew should possess idolatrous images, the natural thing to do is to return the blasphemous coins back from whence they came.[2] Although Jesus stood in hard opposition to the economic devastation Roman taxation helped to perpetuate in Palestine, his response (Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s) is the perfect example of the “politics of disguise and anonymity” which is the intersection at which the offstage and onstage transcripts collide. If Herzog’s reading of Mark 12 is even close to the mark, and I think it is, then the reading of Stubbs and others—which sees Romans 13:8 (the hidden transcript) as a subversion of 13:7 (the public transcript)—would put Paul firmly in continuity with Jesus on yet another point. Both effectively reinterpret what it means for the people of God to participate in what would ordinarily be oppressive rituals of subordination, subverting rituals of subordination into acts of liberation.

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