Anti-Imperial Subtexts in Paul 315 according to Luke, both a citizen of Tarsus and a citizen of Rome, and there is no reason to believe that Rome would have found his dual citizenship problematic. Thus, a claim to citizenship in heaven might have struck Roman officials as odd, but probably not, in and of itself, as an unacceptable competing loyalty. Further, we mustn’t forget that, even in Philippi, most members of the church probably did not have and never would have Roman citizenship because Rome wouldn’t think of granting it to them, and it is not self-evident that Rome would have been bothered by the fact that they claimed citizenship elsewhere. 5. In Search of the Right Narrative There is, then, no compelling reason for thinking that Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is particularly subversive in its intent, and while Phil 3,20 makes use of a political metaphor, it is not clear that Paul was trying to undermine the Roman empire by means of it. This does not mean, however, that proponents of an anti-imperial Paul are completely wrong, even if they have overstated their case. For it can hardly be denied that Paul’s Gospel has a highly subversive quality about it. It really does challenge totalitarian ideologies of all stripes, not least that of imperial Rome. Later in the first century and certainly in the second, Christians in Asia Minor and elsewhere were confronted by the hot anger of Dea Roma once she understood that the claims of the Christians’ Lord were indeed incompatible with her own. How do we, then, account for the difficulty in uncovering sub- versive subtexts in Paul’s letters, even when we sense that they have a definite subversive quality about them? The problem does not lie in the search for subtexts per se. This, as we noted, is quite legitimate; we cannot expect Paul to have made blatantly anti-imperial statements in the context in which he lived and wrote. Rather, the problem lies in the failure of post-colonial interpreters to demonstrate a convincing controlling narrative into which these subtexts are thought to tap. They have generally attempted to ground them, implicitly or explicitly, in Paul’s Christological narrative, but, as we noted, the existence of a consciously anti-imperial narrative behind Paul’s Christological state- ments has not been definitively established. There is, on the other hand, evidence for an alternate narrative in Paul, one that was rooted in a typically Jewish apocalyptic view of history and envisioned the impending demise of the Roman Empire. Its subversive potential was not to be underestimated, as any Roman military or administrative official who served in Palestine in the first