Description
Revised Edition. Rome chose the high priest. The high priest sent Saul to Damascus.
Echoes of Power follows one question from Jerusalem to Rome: was Paul useful to the empire, and did the empire end up running the Church? Ryan Richard Thompson starts with the Roman governors who appointed and removed Judea’s high priests, then follows Saul from enforcer for that priesthood to the apostle who wrote Romans 13 and found friends in Caesar’s household.
He tests his own theory against Josephus, Acts, and Paul’s letters, and then gives a full chapter to the strongest case he can make against it. The second half traces what came after: a persecuted movement that became a persecuting one, the councils that decided which books made the Bible, the texts left out, the edits in the margins, and a Roman Church that put on the mitre.
Nothing here is aimed at anyone’s faith in Christ. The argument is with power, and with what it did to a movement that started out on the wrong end of it.
This revised edition rewrites and expands the 2023 original, corrects its mistakes in the open, and adds a timeline, endnotes, a bibliography, and a glossary.
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