At the end of the 20th century, "postcolonialism" described the effort to understand the experience of those who had lived under colonial rule. This kind of thinking has inevitably brought about a reexamination of the rise of Christianity, which took place under Roman colonial rule. How did Rome look from the viewpoint of an ordinary Galilean in the first century of the Christian era? What should this mean for our own understanding of and relationship to Jesus of Nazareth? Opposition to Roman oppression regularly marked the immediate Palestinian context of Jesus' mission. Jesus is often "depoliticized," treated as a religious teacher imparting timeless truths for all people. Now, however, many scholars see Jesus as a political leader whose goal was independence from Roman rule, so that the people could renew their traditional way of life under the rule of God. In this book, Christopher Bryan reexamines the attitude of the early Church toward imperial Rome. Choosing a middle road, he says that Jesus and the early Christians did indeed have a critique of the Roman superpower - a critique that was broadly in line with the entire biblical and prophetic tradition. One cannot worship the biblical God, the God of Israel, he says, and not be concerned about justice, including international justice, here and now. On the other hand, Bryan does not think that the biblical tradition challenges human power structures by attempting to dismantle them or replace them with other power structures. Instead, he says, it consistently confronts such structures with the truth about their origin and purpose. Their origin is that God permits them. Their purpose is to serve God's glory by promoting God's peaceand God's justice. As Bryan puts it, "the prophetic tradition subverts 'the powers that be' by persistently demanding that they do their job." To treat Jesus' political critique as a call to replace one human power structure with another ("home rule for Israel") is to miss its point. It is also to be in danger of missing the way in which, as a critique, it continues to challenge those who live under structures of government quite different from those that would have been envisaged by the authors of the New Testament.
