God and Empire | John Dominic Crossan | Apocalyptic Resistance

God and Empire - How Imperial Invasion of Israel shaped the Bible. Both in what it assimilated and what it resisted. Geotheology. The Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans et cetera.
The Empires all had religious and theological justifications and influence that were either assimilated or countered/resisted.

Apocalypse against Empire
Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism
A fresh and daring take on ancient apocalyptic books. The year 167 b.c.e. marked the beginning of a period of intense persecution for the people of Judea, as Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted — forcibly and brutally — to eradicate traditional Jewish religious practices. In Apocalypse against Empire Anathea Portier-Young reconstructs the historical events and key players in this traumatic episode in Jewish history and provides a sophisticated treatment of resistance in early Judaism. Building on a solid contextual foundation, Portier-Young argues that the first Jewish apocalypses emerged as a literature of resistance to Hellenistic imperial rule... to supply an oppressed people with a potent antidote to the destructive propaganda of the empire — renewing their faith in the God of the covenant and answering state terror with radical visions of hope.

John Dominic Crossan:
That transcendental clash between empire and eschaton, specifically between Roman imperial theology and Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, is the absolutely necessary matrix within which to understand Jesus’ execution by Rome and resurrection by God. Thereby, of course, and as ever, Israel’s God was on a collision course with empire.First, why did Jesus happen when he happened? If you reply that it was divinely providential, I rephrase the question: why were at least some of his fellow-Jews ready for that specific providential event at that time and in that place? Second, why did two populist movements, the Baptism movement of John and the Kingdom movement of Jesus, occur in the territories of Herod Antipas in the 20s of that first common-era century? Why then? Why there? And here is another set of questions—to focus that former set even more precisely. First, since Nazareth was Jesus’ native village and he was always called “Jesus of Nazareth,” why this relocation in Matthew 4:13: “He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea” that is, by the inland Sea or Lake of Galilee? He moved not just from a very tiny village to a somewhat larger one, but he moved from a hillside village to a lakeside one. Why? Second, why were Jesus’ best-known companions all associated with fishing villages around the north- west quadrant of the Sea of Galilee? Capernaum—in the predominantly Jewish territory of Herod Antipas Jesus was a Jew within Judaism within the Roman Empire. That is not just the possibly interesting background but the necessarily constitutive context of his life. We deliberately use the term matrix to avoid any idea that you could pass background and go straight to foreground or even pass context and go straight to text. By matrix we mean everything you must know to understand Jesus in his own time and place before it is possible to understand him in ours. Why were the titles of Caesar Augustus — Divine, Son of God, God from God, Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, and Savior of the World — taken from a Roman emperor on the Palatine hill and given to a Jewish peasant on the Palestine plain? Was it low lampoon or high treason? Either way, the Romans were not laughing. What were the priorities of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom? How was the status quo of Roman imperial theology subverted by this obscure Galilean whose message continues to indict empire today? After the death of Alexander the Great, his Greek super-empire was broken up among his generals and their subsequent dynasties. By the 160s BCE, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, ruler of the Greco-Syrian mini-empire, sought to consolidate his security against Egypt by bringing Israel—militarily, politically, economically—into tighter cohesion and under tighter control. Among the aristocratic and high-priestly leadership of Jerusalem, some Jews considered that a desirable operation. But, when other Jews resisted that acculturation, Antiochus launched a religious persecution. Some Jews, led by those we know as the Maccabees or Hasmoneans, fought back militarily and were able to stop the persecution, defeat the Syrians, and expand their own territories under a hundred years of relative peace—before Pompey’s Romans fully and finally arrived in the 60s BCE.Other Jews resisted non-violently, and it is their vision that gives usthe biblical book of Daniel. It was actually written within that same dangerous matrix of the Jewish 160s BCE, but it fictionally imagined its protagonist, Daniel, as a prophetic sage during the Babylonian Exile in the 500s BCE.

Judeo Christianity is a theological mixing with many ingredients from the ancient world formed from that experimentation and evolution.