The chapters in the volume do not aim to resolve, through seamless syntheses, the tensions in dialectical images of the past and present. That is not theory’s chief purpose—at least in the minds of our four theorists. Theory here mediates between images, between the past and the present. What is more, the analyses in this volume are not organized under categories of biblical theology and synthesized by them. Rather, we try to discuss early Christian texts without recourse to biblical and traditional theological categories, even in their secular remains. We offer images not typically associated with early Christian texts: malls, arcades, and libraries; automaton chess players, and chess boards; bodies without organs, machines, rhizomes, national anthems, and call centers; political revolutions, Lenin, Stalin, and mathematical sets; performativity, drag, and mattering bodies, both human and non-human, earthly and celestial. And we offer mediating theories, concepts, and categories not traditionally associated with interpreting early Christian texts: gentrification; body-of-Christ-without-organs, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, simulacra and simulation, facialization; evental sites, mathematics, set theory, and queer theory. These images and theories challenge unspoken premises of our scholarship, and they produce new montages of thought.

Drawing from critical theory, Stephen Eric Bronner notes: “The extent to which a work becomes popular—regardless of its political message—is the extent to which its radical impulse will be integrated into the system.” Critical theory, when in dialogue with early Christian texts, points out the inevitable: the extent to which an early Christian text becomes popular—regardless of its political message—is the extent to which its radical impulse will be integrated into the system. This inevitability not only applies to the texts themselves, but also scholarship about them, and yes, even critiques of scholarship about them. But are there ways to move beyond this inevitability? Can religious literature avoid assimilation into the status quo? In this introductory chapter, Whitlock argues that the critical theories of Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler help counter this inevitable integration of early Christian texts into the status quo. While their theories do not claim save or renew texts, they do claim to estrange them, continually making them strange again.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Walter Benjamin in the context of critical theory and early Christianity. The chapter begins by underscoring Benjamin’s insistence on including both the present and past while examining history, blasting both together in dialectical images. Next, it outlines Benjamin’s life, providing context for his ideas. Finally, the chapter summarizes the two essays in this section, one by Robert Paul Seesengood and another by Carl Levenson, and suggests further research on the aura of early Christian origins in light of Benjamin’s ideas in “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.”

Walter Benjamin’s Marxist critique of urban spaces, as exemplified in his description of the gritty French seaport Marseille in his essay “Chambermaids’ Romances of the Past City” and in his Arcades Project, focused upon the transformation of urban space through the forces of capitalism. Urban spaces become gentrified and made docile by the growth of capital and wealth. In his essay “Unpacking my Library”, Benjamin brings his attention to book collection and ownership as a secret attempt to commodify and control ideas, a capitalistic urge that shapes the center of even philosophy and spiritual transformation. The canonical Apocalypse of John also features urban transformations: the city of Rome (called “Babylon”) and its commercial enterprises are replaced with the Heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 17; 20). Revelation also has a library; its catalog includes a seven sealed scroll (Rev. 4 and 5) and a Living Book (Rev. 20:12-15). In this essay, Seesengood reads John alongside Benjamin. How does John view the city, view reading, and view the dynamics of the two together? Public libraries began in American civic space with the goal of broad, populist access to knowledge and intellectualism.

Levenson imagines a dialogue between St. Augustine and Walter Benjamin that mirrors the structure of Benjamin’s final testament, his essay “On the Concept of History.”  Three questions are in focus: (1) Where do patterns in life and history come from?  (2) Can a future Messiah redeem the present moment?  (3) Can we in the present redeem the sorrows of the past?  As the dialogue unfolds, images from Benjamin’s writing (e.g. the chess-machine, the little hunchback, the tragically ineffective “history angel,” the flaneur of Paris) interact with images from Augustine (e.g.  the Edenic garden, the wanderer, the Messiah tortured and triumphant, the mysterious unchanging inner light). Augustine’s theory of time and memory sheds light on Benjamin’s concept of a weak – but real – messianic power that reaches out to assist the past in the present; also pertinent are Kabbalistic doctrines taught by Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s life-long friend.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Gilles Deleuze in the context of critical theory and early Christianity. The chapter begins by delineating Deleuze’s rhizomatic approach to history and texts, an approach avoiding hierarchical, rigid, tree-like structures, but one focusing on moving intersections and networks in all directions. Next, the chapter outlines Deleuze’s life, providing context for his concepts. Finally, the chapter summarizes the three essays in this section by Bradley McLean, Matthew Whitlock and Philip Tite, and Sharon Jacob, and suggests further research on minor and major languages in early Christian texts in light of Deleuze’s concepts of minor and major literature.

This article argues that each Pauline Christ group can be interpreted as a Deleuzoguattarian ‘body of Christ without organs,’ which is to say, as a self-organizing system, without reference to a transcendental plane (1 Cor 12:27, Rom 12:4-5). While this body of Christ did indeed possess organs (Christ followers), the connections between them and Christ, and between them and the ‘organs’ (or ‘desiring-machines’) of other bodies, were just as significant as the connections between the ‘organs’ themselves. Scholars can better understand the dynamics of the historical emergence of Christ groups by investigating what ‘desiring-machines’ the first Christ groups were plugged into, and what symptoms were produced in them by being plugged into other desiring-machines. Such an analysis requires an appreciation of the three stages of the emergence of a ‘body without organs’: namely, 1) connective synthesis, 2) disjunctive synthesis, and finally 3) a conjunctive synthesis. Taken together, these three passive syntheses, which form a body without organs, provide a functional analytic for theorizing the emergence of early Christianity in the first century CE.

What does Critical Theory’s discussion of simulacra reveal about the quest for Christian origins? Whitlock and Tite explore Deleuze’s theories about simulacra, contrasting them to those of Jean Baudrillard, and then applying them to the Acts tradition. On the one hand, Baudrillard views simulacra negatively, claiming that we have been so overcome by copies of copies that we have lost sight of the real. His theories affirm the dichotomy between the real and the virtual, and the original and the copy. Applying Baudrillard’s theories to the quest for Christian origins, Whitlock and Tite demonstrate how we are left only with copies of copies of early Christian “origins.” And if we seek the “authentic” or “authoritative” essence of Christianity behind these copies, we find, in Baudrillard’s terms, “the desert of the real.” On the other hand, Deleuze views simulacra positively, claiming that life is a simulacrum of becoming, an infinite and evolving series of real images and real differences. Deleuze’s theories challenge the dichotomies between the real and the virtual, authentic and inauthentic, authoritative and apocryphal—dichotomies too often undergirding modern quests for Christian origins. Using Deleuzian theories, Whitlock and Tite examine early Christian texts not as authentic and authoritative representations of an original source or essence, but as a continuous and evolving series of real images and real differences, a simulacrum of becoming. Applying these theories to the Acts tradition, Whitlock and Tite examine how stories of Cornelius repeat and differ from Luke to Acts, and from Acts to the so-called apocryphal Acts, and how this series of forms, in Deleuze’s words, leads to “the abandonment of representation.”

Sharon Jacob’s chapter, “Face-ing the Nations and Becoming a Majority Empire of God: Reterritorialization, Language, and Imperial Racism in Revelation 7:9-17,” illustrates the ways in which linguistic imperialism helps construct a homogenous subjectivity of the colonized other in the empire. Using D&G’s theories on deterritorialization, reterritorialization, facialization, and language to interpret Revelation 7:9-17, Jacob suggests that the image of the nations speaking in one language constructs them into pliable, compliant, recognizable, and comprehensible entities. At the same time, the insertion of heterogenous nations into a single, unified, homogenous vision of the empire of God can be viewed as the beginnings of the nationalistic vision of the divine empire of God. The new divine order “is a multinational, multicultural, multilinguistic multitude that speaks in one language. The facialization of these nations, illustrated through an overt and deliberate reterritorialization of their language and dress, racialized in order to familiarize, constructs a nationalized vision where only one nation, speaking one language, wearing one dress, gathers to worship only the one and true God.”

This chapter discusses the life and work of Alain Badiou in the context of critical theory and early Christianity. The chapter follows Badiou’s own piece about his life: “Philosphy as Biography,” outlining nine key topics of his philosophy and life as they relate to early Christian studies: math and poetry, the Paris Commune and Pauline communities, the event, “the raw” in the present, hostile seduction, Marxism and the subject, love, Plato, Sartre and Lacan and Althusser. The chapter ends by summarizing the three essays in this section by Bruce Worthington, James Crossley, and Hollis Phelps, and suggests further research on Badiou’s ideas about the language of faith and their connection with early Christian texts.

In this article, Bruce Worthington applies Alain Badiou’s theory of the event to account for the emergence of early Christianity as a distinct political body within a cultural set. The article rejects the idea that Christianity authorizes itself on the basis of 4th century institutional creeds or ecumenical conferences; instead suggesting that early Christianity—like all radical groups—emerges rather quickly, in relationship to an event that has happened. The article highlights, at greater detail, Badiou’s notion of the “evental site” and what this might mean for early Christian historiography, reintroducing the link between events and subjectivity in the study of Christian Origins. The article concludes by suggesting that, of course, there is great diversity in early Christian subjectivity; but this diversity is related to an event (Jesus’ death and resurrection) that serves as an organizing principle in early Christian historiography.

James Crossley provides a deliberately anachronistic reading of the origins of Christianity through a comparison with Marxist revolutions, Marxist readings of revolutions, Marxist revolutionaries, and Marxism after the revolution. While the comparison is absurdist, it can still give us an insight into the ways in which political movements survive, adapt, and transform—including the movement that would become Christianity. The essay gives some consideration to the recent political events and the revival (and now fall?) of left-wing movements.

Irenaeus’s recapitulation theory of atonement and his reading of history more generally appears to many contemporary readers as hopelessly naïve, since it relies generally on an allegorical method. Irenaeus situates otherwise discreet events typologically, putting them in an ontological relationship with each other that seemingly flattens any sense of historical contingency and, indeed, history itself. Phelps provides in this chapter a re-reading of this notion of recapitulation, drawing on the work of Alain Badiou. Assuming Badiou’s general ontology, which conceives of being as multiple in excess of any organization of the one, he draws specifically on his notions of evental recurrence and the resurrection of truth procedures to outline a materialist theory of typology on the basis of Irenaeus’s theology. When read through the lens of Badiou’s philosophy, recapitulation can be understood differently than a reduction of history to types. Recapitulation is, rather, a way to grasp being’s excess and map evental trajectories from it, forcing connections between otherwise contingent and distinct events.

This chapter discusses the life and work of Judith Butler in the context of critical theory and early Christianity. The chapter begins by delineating Butler’s approach to bodies and their fluidity, both individual and corporate. The former is found in her early work, the latter in her most recent. The chapter then outlines Butler’s life, providing context for her concepts, especially focusing on gender performativity and the performativity of assembled bodies. Finally, the chapter summarizes the two essays in this section by Valerie Nicolet and Peter Anthony Mena, bringing Butlers concepts into conversation with Paul and Origen. The chapter ends by suggesting further research on Butler’s writings on precarity and assembly, and how they bring light to early Christian presentations of assemblies, that is, how bodies assemble to “speak” often before they speak vocally.

This chapter offers an engagement of Judith Butler’s work in Bodies that Matter and, through a reading of Galatians, questions Pauline scholarship in two directions: (1) it proposes a way out of a binary reading of Paul, and (2) it affirms the necessity of a queer critique of readings of Paul. After introducing Butler’s work, it looks at the strategies that Paul uses to produce subject and abject spaces, with a focus on the role of the law in Paul’s rhetoric and the gender boundaries that are drawn by Paul’s rhetoric, particularly in terms of masculinity. The interaction with Butler highlights the fact that approaches which try to figure out whether Paul is progressive or rather conservative do not sufficiently consider the rhetorical and strategic dimensions of his letters.

In his On First Principles, the popular second-century Christian philosopher-ascetic, Origen of Alexandria, develops a complex cosmology—rooted in neo-platonic philosophy and buttressed by Christian theology—in which all matter in the universe is imbued with intellect and reason. Because of this all matter also has the ability to unify itself with a creator God that it shares a part of its intellect with. That all matter possesses intellect and reason, and simultaneously free will, complicates ideals of animacy, both ancient and contemporary alike. Philosopher Judith Butler has been criticized for her abjection of matter—more specifically, bodily matter—into the realm of language and discourse thereby rendering the materiality of existence as discursive. In this paper, Mena considers Butler’s theories as well as the relationships between language, bodily matter, and human identity as theorized by Butler as well as Mel Chen, José Esteban Muñoz, and Sonia Hazard. Mena utilizes these theorists’ works, in tandem with other more recent approaches in gender and feminist scholarship under the umbrella of “new materialism,” in order to develop an understanding of Origen’s cosmology that sheds light on contemporary indifferences toward particular bodies. Furthermore, Mena considers the function and implications of assigning particular degrees of animacy to different bodies. Ultimately, Mena demonstrates that in Origen’s On First Principles, and likewise in Platonic works like the Timaeus, one can glean a complex cosmology that accounts for bodily differences that is both discursive and attuned to the materiality of human existence.