Paul’s idea of God’s empire: the limited scope of his gospel

Did Paul proclaim a universal gospel? “Of course he did,” you mutter. Or: “Of course he did, you nutter!” What use is a non-universal gospel?

Well, on the train from Jeddah to Medina, I came across this paragraph in Neil Elliott’s Paul the Jew under Roman Rule: Collected Essays (2024):

Indeed, Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as kyrios, the “lord of God’s empire,” relied heavily on Roman political concepts, and “could easily be understood as violating the ‘decrees of Caesar’ in the most blatant manner.” As Calvin Roetzel and John L. White have shown, the very breadth of his eschatological vision—of an oikoumenē of nations, united in faithful obedience to a single lord—relies upon Hellenistic, and most especially Roman, political ideology. (124)

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