Paul against Empire

The image of a political thinker that arises from Taubes’s readings of Paul is the result of Taubes’s peculiar method of reading Paul through key thinkers of the twentieth-century European thought, such as Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Barth. The political aspects of the philosophers’ readings are brought to the fore by Taubes’s intertwinement of historical and philosophical perspectives, but also of the crossing of the Jewish and the Christian. Taubes’s political Paul is drawn from contradictory meanings within the Pauline epistles, primarily Romans. On one hand Taubes’s Paul is anti-imperial as the apostle’s message amplifies a seething antagonism toward the values of the Greco-Roman world and “declares war” against the Emperor himself. On the other, Taubes’s Paul develops a “nihilism” which is actually “quietist” and withdrawn in relation to direct contestation of actually existing authority. This nihilistic view of the apostle can be further argued for through affinities between readings of biblical scholars of our day and Friedrich Nietzsche, building further upon Taubes’s interpretations of Paul.