character.”45 Less a matter of supplanting the discipline’s signature method of “participant observation” than of imbuing it with an ethico-political mandate, a growing number of anthropologists have taken to conceiving of their work and, specifically, their writings as “powerful spaces in which to authorize and legitimate the painful and often devastating histories that we anthropologists are allowed to listen to and sometimes see with our own eyes.”46 Hence the salience, for Fassin, of the distinction between testis and superstes: the humanitarian worker, like the anthropologist, does not live the “painful and often devastating history” in question but rather observes (or otherwise hears about) it; both are witnesses exactly to the extent of their remove from the event to which they testify and, in an important sense, from those—as Fassin would say, those superstes—whose sufferings and resultant affects they seek to convey. The juridified world to which such testimonies are addressed, in other words, demands that the self of the witness be wholly separable from that which has, according to the aid worker or anthropologist, so indelibly left its mark on the psyche of the victim. And presumably, moreover, their identity qua aid worker or anthropologist, or whatever other name they may wish to assign themselves, will, barring some breach of professional conduct, endure independently of their work of bearing witness, for the latter task, though likely assumed in a moment of perceived necessity, was not after all essential to their capacity to go on.
The witness of Paul, on the other hand, derives not from observation, nor even—and here we need to challenge the usefulness of the testis/superstes opposition—from experience, but instead from recognition, an initial lack of which takes the form of Paul’s remarkable bewilderment in the famous story of his conversion. “Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus,” we are told in Acts 9:3–5, “suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The incredulity of the question indicates that Paul must lose his vision before he will see, and that he will testify to what he has seen only when he has been able to identify the voice that summons him, and the light that blinds him, with the one who came to the people of Israel preaching peace, who healed the sick and fed the hungry, and who was later put to death on a tree. Against the Pauline event postulated by Badiou, the ostensible locus of which is the ex nihilo, “absolutely aleatory” moment of subjective “caesura,” Paul is to become a witness not to the experience of a light blinding him on the road to Damascus but to the actuality of the resurrected Christ embodied in the corporeal existence of, among others, those who have fallen prey to Paul’s repressive violence. The witnesses exhibited in Acts are not merely those who have observed or experienced something and then gone on to tell others about it. Paul is a witness because his very life, a life of rejection and persecution, has been made a testimony to the inauguration of a kingdom that, “against every Gnosticizing impulse,” is not merely “spiritual” but is also practical and material—a kingdom, in short, “that takes up space in public.”47 Accordingly, in line with what Douglas Harink characterizes as the determinatively apocalyptic vision that runs throughout his writings, Paul “does not see in Christ one religious option among others. He sees in Christ nothing less than the whole of creation and all of humanity under God’s final judgment and grace. . . . Paul is uncompromisingly focused on a single, incomparable, final, and exclusive theological reality which constitutes, includes, and determines all other reality: Jesus Christ.”48 And just as Paul’s eyes have been opened to a new reality, so, too, has he been called to open the eyes of the gentiles “so that they may turn from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18, 23). Here, then, is apocalyptic at its most basic and comprehensive. “The resurrection of Jesus actually creates a new mode of seeing—‘light.’ To miss the resurrection of Jesus, therefore, is to forfeit the ability to see.”49
Hardly a matter of brute facticity or abstract truth, the reality enunciated by the resurrection is one that is inseparable from—indeed, more often than not, is literally written on the bodies of—those who have assumed the task, however painful or demanding, of proclaiming and thereby participating in it. Now it may seem that this “reality enunciated by the resurrection” is by definition a happy one, a triumphalist one, a reality whose unending reenactment in the life of the visible church, far from necessitating “painful or demanding” practices of discipleship, might just as easily lend itself to assumptions such as those which, according to scholars of the Roman imperial Church, served to underwrite that institution’s consolidation of power both within and beyond its borders: namely, the assumption that “the power of heaven and of the age to come had, in a sense, been domesticated and made available here and now.”50 In Acts, however, we discover that to partake of the body and blood of Christ is to be transformed into a community of crucifixion—with all of the uncertainties and discomforts (to put it blandly) that implies—even and at the same time as the resurrection remains its inescapable telos and condition of possibility. For what Acts shows us is that the resurrection can only be accessed and encountered once the believing community has learned to live not simply after but through the experimentum crucis, the experience of the cross. This is the case not only with the apostles and Paul, who, “captive to the Spirit,” is persistently led “to testify to the good news of God’s grace” in cities where only “imprisonment and persecutions are awaiting” him (Acts 20:22–24), but also with Stephen, at whose lynching Paul makes his first appearance in the New Testament text.
Of course, it is with Stephen that another, maybe paradigmatic meaning of witness comes sharply into view: that of the martyr, whose faithfulness even to the point of death simply denotes the more acute form, the intensification, of what Luke suggests will be the typical Christian mode of acting and being in the world. The significance of Luke’s conferral upon Stephen of the appellation “witness”—as in Paul’s speech to the angry Jerusalem crowd in Acts 22, where he relates how he said to the risen Jesus that “while the blood of your witness Stephen was shed, I myself was standing by, approving and keeping the coats of those who killed him”—cannot, according to Rowe, be overestimated:
Whether or not Luke was here consciously forging the first explicitly verbal link between “witnessing” and becoming a “martyr” in the later Christian sense of the term, the text doubtless draws clearly the line between the mission of witnessing to the risen Jesus and the reality of trial, suffering, and death. In so doing, it elevates for clear inspection what it means to be a witness in the missionary theology of Acts. It is, in fact, to reenact the life-pattern of the suffering Christ, to suffer for his Name, to be put on trial, to face the possibility of death, and to proclaim the resurrection. In short, it is to embody the cruciform pattern that culminates in resurrection.51
In marked contrast to the constellation of images that we tend to associate with martyrdom, images that have been filtered through entrenched ideologies of nationalism and warfare, masculinity and individualism, the violent deaths of Stephen and, soon thereafter, countless others are profoundly misconstrued when they are regarded as instances of courageous heroism or self-abnegating sacrifice. Such renderings threaten to extricate martyrs like Stephen from the narrative frame which alone makes their deaths intelligible, a narrative, Rowan Williams contends, in which the narcissistic drama of heroism has been eschewed in favor of freedom from the imperatives of violence.52 Inhabiting this freedom means finding oneself most fully at home in a world that is no longer ruled by the specter of death—and yet, precisely to that extent, it also means finding oneself most fundamentally at odds with how the world runs itself. It is in this way that the remembrance of martyrs becomes a radical political act: in so remembering, we are reminded of the possibility of an alternative to the economies of fear and mastery that so unremittingly compel us.53
It is at this point that we may return to the accusation of accommodationism that has long inflected interpretations of Acts (among which, as we mentioned at the outset, characterizations like Badiou’s are merely symptomatic). How can we continue to evoke an alternative politics in light of what appears to be such a seemingly insurmountable consensus? One of the foremost contributions of Rowe’s book, it seems to us, flows from his assertion that the demarcations that populate our language—such as that of “religion” from “politics”—render it difficult to comprehend the far-reaching