04_Peters_copiaaa_67-84 28/04/15 12:15 Pagina 74 74 JANELLE PETERS too, participate in intercity benefaction. While Junia Theodora’s coronal honors come by virtue of her benefaction, the Philippians’ intercity benefaction inverts the normal benefaction relationship in that the givers do not receive a crown. Rather, the Philippians be- come Paul’s crown and in so doing become a community with bor- ders that reach beyond Philippi 24. As in the construction of Junia Theodora’s identity by multiple cities and multiple temporal peri- ods (present and eschatological), the crown that the Philippians constitute is an eternal one. This multiplicity of civic identity suggests that the Philippians would have interpreted the two instances of politeuma in Paul’s epis- tle broadly as having to do with civic bodies rather than simply vol- untary associations. An orientation toward the Roman colony of Philippi on the part of Paul is suggested by three unique elements in Philippians. First, of course, is the contested term politeuma 25. Second, Philippians is the only letter where Paul scrupulously lists his own social honors and achievements as a Pharisaic Jew (3,5-6). Such a Jewish identification would have reinforced the associations of politeuma with the military origins of the institution in Ptolemaic Egypt, a structure that continued to provide Alexandrian Jewish elites such as Philo with considerable influence and autonomy. The Jewish associations of a politeuma would not be with a voluntary association restricted to a city or a guild. Finally, Paul addresses the overseers and deacons in his salutation only in Philippians (1,1) 26. I contend that, in its conjunction with the crown motif, Paul’s use of the term politeuma also relates to the project of Paul’s construc- tion of an alternate cultural apparatus in place of the one operating in the Roman cities in which his house-churches were located. In Ernst’s translation of the verb at 1,27 as “Gemeinde sein”, we see that Paul is creating a community 27. He equips it with elements 24 Z.A. CROOK, Reconceptualising Conversion. Patronage, Loyalty, and Conversion in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (Berlin 2004) 223. 25 Writing on the politeuma in Philippians, Spicq has defined the term as uniting a group of citizens of common origin in a polity whose organization exists between an independent colony and state. See C. SPICQ, Notes de lex- icographie néo-testamentaire (Göttingen 1982) 717. 26 For a recent discussion of this issue, see J.H. HELLERMAN, Reconstruct- ing Honor in Roman Philippi (Cambridge, UK 2005) 117-123. 27 J. ERNST, “Anfechtung und Bewährung. Das Bild einer christlichen Gemeinde nach dem Philippienbrief”, Das Evangelium auf dem Weg zu