James A. Kelhoffer examines an often overlooked aspect of New Testament constructions of legitimacy, namely the value of Christians' withstanding persecution as a means of corroborating their religious identity as Christ's followers. The introductory chapter defines the problem in interaction with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital. Chapters 2-10 examine the depictions of persecuted Christians in the Pauline letters, First Peter, Hebrews, Revelation, the NT Gospels, and Acts. These exegetical analyses support the conclusion that assertions of standing, authority, and power claimed on the basis of persecution play a significant and heretofore under-appreciated role in much of the NT. It is also argued that depictions of persecution can have both positive implications for the persecuted and negative implications for the depicted persecutors in constructions of legitimation.An epilogue considers later examples of early Christian martyrs and confessors, as well as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs . The epilogue also addresses the ethical and hermeneutical problem of asserting the withstanding of persecution as a basis of legitimacy in ancient and modern contexts. This problem stems from the observation that, although the NT authors present their construals of withstanding persecution as a basis of legitimation as if they were self-evident, such assertions are actually the culmination of numerous presuppositions and are therefore open to dissenting viewpoints. Yet the NT authors do not acknowledge the possibility of competing interpretations, or that oppressed Christians could someday become oppressors. Accordingly, this exegetical study calls attention to an ethical and hermeneutical problem that the NT bequeaths to the modern interpreter, a problem inviting input from ethicists and other theologians.
What Christian would not want to hear Mark's gospel as the first believers heard it? Using the tools of modern scholarship, Peter's Last Sermon takes seriously Mark's audience. The community would have heard rather than read the gospel. It would have encountered the story as a whole instead of piecemeal in short texts for sermons. Missing would have been the static of Matthew, Luke, and John. As for the speaker? While most modern scholars table the question of authorship, the post-apostolic writers of the second and third centuries claim with one voice that (though penned by Mark) the gospel actually went back to Peter. So to hear the gospel as did those early Christians was to hear it as if coming from him. Does it make a difference to our understanding of Mark's message if from Peter? Yes. And the result is surprising. Peter's Last Sermon takes us on a journey through Roman and Jewish texts to meet the Jesus not of the modern Church but of Peter's proclamation in Rome. Nero's persecution had left the community in crisis. What was Peter's message for his time? Christ was different from expected, he said, but how? James Dawsey shows that Christ broke the messianic expectations of his Galilean followers and the Jerusalem religious elite of his day. And as the reader of Peter's Last Sermon will see, he surprised Mark's hearers a generation later. The Gospel of Mark still confronts us in new ways
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