Christianity, as the designation of a founding of a new and more universal “religion,” has its point of origin in this political turmoil and social crisis, an effect of the carefully managed pressure to participate in the imperial economy. The key point here, one of the lasting cultural effects of this moment emerges in the way this questionable or not so heroic “origin” was so profoundly mirrored as a form of theological orientation indistinguishable from a form of historical narration. Roman violence against the anticolonial uprisings of Judea and Galilee became understood—again, already in Acts—as retributive divine judgment against the recalcitrance of the Jews, the necessary displacement and scapegoating that made way for an imagination o