Content area
Full Text
Lord of the Entire World: Lord Jesus, A Challenge to Lord Caesar? By Joseph D. Fantin. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011, xxiii + 327 pp., $120.00.
This volume is a revision of a dissertation that was originally completed in 2007 at University of Sheffield under the supervision of Loveday Alexander. The aim of the book is to identify the possibility of a polemic in proclaiming Jesus as Lord in contrast to Caesar as lord in the Greco-Roman world. In 1 Cor 8:5-6 is the proclamation that there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, which stands in contrast with a contemporaneous inscription establishing the domain of Nero: ... (SIG3 814.31, IG VII.2713, PHI 146221). Fantin's work reconstructs the historical context of Paul's day to see if there were conflicting views of worship in these titulary statements-... and ..., and whether a tension would mount among Christians who were faced with the dilemma of a polytheistic, syncretistic, and pluralistic worldview that heralded the imperial religion of Rome.
Fantin states that his historical reconstruction utilizes historical criticism and a linguistic study of the setting of first-century churches. According to his introduction, the historical-critical approach of study serves the purpose: "to understand emperor worship within a context of first-century Roman religion" (p. 21). The second part of his method, a linguistic study, examines the word ... in its association with the living Roman emperor along with the linguistic categories of semantics and pragmatics that are taken from modern communication theories (pp. 25-29). Fantin first revisits the line of scholarship that previously interacted with potential imperial references in Paul's writings: the Paul and Politics Seminar that consists of avid enthusiasts of Paul's anti-imperial stance (Horsley, Silberman, Stowers) and the movement's opponents (Kim, Burk, Miller). Fantin distinguishes his work from the rest by nuancing his position: Paul was not primarily anti-imperial but the Lordship of Christ is strongly suggestive of a definitive Lord who displaces all earthly rulers.
Following the introduction, the next two chapters contain more introductory material. Chapter 2 further discusses the identity of Paul, his writings,...