Weapons of the (Christian) Weak: Pedagogy of Trickery in Early Christian Texts

Confrontational behaviors do not tell the whole story about resistance. Among other things, Jesus of Nazareth seems to have taught his disciples how to cheat the dominant. What the reddite Caesari scene probably depicts is a peasant prophet befuddling some proxies of the ruling class by playing dumb and making riddles. This teaching was not lost. Double-sided expressions, ambiguous speeches, and code-switching practices are found throughout early Christian literature, where they feature as polysemic figures suggesting forms of noncompliance other than life-threatening acts and gestures of negation. Building on Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, James C. Scott’s theory of infrapolitics, and Michel de Certeau’s analysis of poaching, this paper browses through Early Christian texts in order to unearth a “pedagogy of trickery” – i.e. possible instructions about how to take advantage of the susceptibility of the dominant elite in the here and now and how to get away with it.