Empire and Epistemicide: Historical Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Peace and its Erasures

Harvard Divinity School

When is peace not peace? When does pluralism only seem like pluralism from the perspective of the people in power? Christianity famously took form during the Pax Romana—an era of celebrated stability in the Roman empire—even as its message about the dawn of the messianic age and the coming of the kingdom of God resonated among those who saw the same age, instead, as a time of political oppression, cosmic upheaval, and eschatological unraveling. Likewise, to the degree that the Roman empire can be characterized by terms like ethnic “diversity” and religious “tolerance,” it was in a manner marked by massive erasures—both of knowledge and ways of knowing, pertaining to whole peoples. Arguably, a parallel dynamic marks Christian approaches to Jews and so-called “heretics” and “pagans,” with consequences for memory, forgetting, and archival amnesias especially with the empire’s Christianization—and with rippling effects that continue to shape our present. In this session of "Religion and Just Peace | A Series of Public Online Conversations," Annette Yoshiko Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, reflected upon the perennial questions above using examples from these ancient religions and empires. This is the second event of a five-part series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to the work of just peacebuilding. This event took place on February 3, 2025. Full transcript: https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/02/03/video-empire-and-epistemicide-historical-perspectives-rhetoric-peace-and-its-erasures