Which brings us to the larger why. From Jesus' comment about rendering to Caesar and God, to Augustine's two cities, to the revision of the Roman law by Justinian and Tribonian, the Christianity of the late ancient Mediterranean fully absorbed and represented in all aspects the dualism of divine and secular law that you are trying, from a perspective beginning 1,000 or 1,500 years later, to explain. From the historian's point of view, nothing can be more conducive to misunderstanding than picking the story up in the middle. Indeed, the famous and—for the Church—highly objectionable argument given by Gibbon in the 15th chapter of his Decline and Fall is that Christianity succeeded precisely because of the dualism that allowed the Emperors to be at once the heads of both Church and State, and to be of two bodies in doing so.

So what is gained by leaving historical analysis behind, and hypothesizing that Christian understandings of the division between secular and divine law are newly made in each generation, if not in each lunchtime, by the untutored but economically rational speculations of individual Christian workers? Why would such a perspective, assuming it has explained its raison d'etre to its own satisfaction, want to take on a view from Marx, who by his nature will be indigestible to an ahistoical approach? I understand what is said here better than I understand why it is said, which might be the best route to the overall improvement of the present draft. What is the reader actually supposed to get from it that justifies the jettisoning of what others would begin from?

I made major changes to my first draft and moved that essay to JackSherrickFirstEssayNotes