The fact that for some that might still be so doesn’t excuse us from doing our best to reintegrate what the Enlightenment had pulled apart, both in the name of serious ancient historical study and in the name of responsible biblical study for today’s world. There is of course a danger, not always avoided in recent studies, of seeing the New Testament now simply the other way up but still within the Enlightenment paradigm: in other words, of declaring that it’s all ‘politics’ and that to read it as ‘religion’ or ‘theology’ is to domesticate or privatize it. Now, however, we have all been alerted to the fact that the kingdom of God was itself, and remained, a thoroughly political concept that Jesus’ death was a thoroughly political event that the existence and growth of the early church was a matter of community-building, in conflict, often enough, with other communities. (Until recently, Revelation remained outside the implicit canon of many New Testament scholars, and even when it was considered its striking political significance was often limited to reflections on its thirteenth chapter.) There is a quantum leap now being made from the old way of reading the Bible, in which certain political ‘implications’ could be drawn here and there from texts which were (of course) about something else, and the occasional concentration on rather isolated texts - one thinks of the ‘Tribute question’ in the synoptic tradition, and of the notorious first paragraph of Romans 13 - as being the only places in the New Testament at least where real ‘political’ issues came to the fore. We have come to see that trying to separate the two in the ancient world, not least in the Middle East, is as futile as trying to do so in certain parts of the modern world. We have moved away quite rapidly in recent years from the old split, which was assumed by and built into the fabric of Western biblical studies, between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. Bartholemew, 2002, Carlisle: Paternoster, 173–193. (Originally published in A Royal Priesthood: The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically, ed.
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