Seminary Lecture - Roman Palestine and the World of Jesus
By Nigel Nicholson,
Grace Memorial Episcopal Church, April 21, 2010
There are four questions I’m going to use as our guide today. They overlap, but between them cover the territory I want to explore together today.
1. How did the world of Jesus and his followers fit into the Roman empire? Probably because of the way the discipline of Classics has been structured in the past we tend to forget that they were in the Roman Empire. But they were…
2. To what extent did the Roman world figure in their lives? That is, did it impinge upon them? How much contact did they have with Roman officials, Roman government, Roman law?
3. What did Roman rule mean both for their everyday lives, and as a symbol? That is, did Roman rule change their lives in their basic material practice, or did it mean simply a change in who was in charge? Did their lives continue much as they had before Roman rule – did they continue to buy their oil and fish from the same places, bathe in the same ways? Perhaps the change was more symbolic, more about how they saw themselves, than what they did everyday? something symbolically, if not in terms of everyday practice? What did it mean to them that their world was Roman?
4. To what extent does the Jesus movement define itself against Roman rule? Were the Romans the “bad guys”?
Background I: Herod
A rundown of Roman history will be helpful here, at least of Roman history in this area and in this period.
Herod is the central figure here. We define the early Roman period as 63 BCE (Before Common Era, equivalent in dating to BC, but less focused on Jesus) to 135 CE (Common Era). Herod was installed by Rome in about 40 BCE as king of a significant kingdom, stretching from modern-day Gaza, and including a decent chunk of southwest Syria; as client king, he ruled freely, but had to support Roman interests, but given that Rome had put him in power, he was presumably pro-Roman.
Rome became actively involved in the area in 63 BCE, when Pompey the Great had completed his conquest of Syria, which took three years, from 66 to 63. Pompey was a very successful general and conquered large swathes of what we now think of as the Middle East. As a kind of tail end operation to his conquest of Syria he besieged and took Jerusalem.
Prior to 63 Jerusalem had been ruled by independent Jewish kingdom called the Hasmonean dynasty. The rulers were all of the same family, the Hasmoneans. Against considerable odds, this dynasty had managed to carve out a relatively small independent kingdom for themselves between the two great empires that followed Alexandra the Great. When Alexander died, like a very bad CEO, he had not provided for his succession, so all his lieutenants fought bitterly for control, grabbing the best bits they could and continuing to fight each other for many years. The two biggest and richest pieces were roughly modern day Syria which was ruled by the Seleucids, and modern day Egypt which was ruled by the Ptolemies. Egypt was perhaps the biggest prize because it was very wealthy in terms of its economic production. But Syria was rich too; a lot of grain came out of Syria, as it was a very fertile area.
The Jews were sandwiched between the two kingdoms, and included mostly within the Seleucid empire, but they then rose up against the Seleucid emperor in 164, in what came to be known as the Maccabean revolt. This was a response to heavy handed, and diplomatically incompetent treatment by the emperor, who decided to pillage and desecrate the temple in Jerusalem. The revolt flared up and against all the odds was successful. This was probably a great shock to anyone who noticed because the Seleucids were a massive global power, and the Jews were a small people, but they managed to carve out a little kingdom for themselves until Pompey came and took Jerusalem in 63. What happened at that point was that Pompey basically reinstalled one of the Hasmoneans, but at this point they were no longer independent; they had to answer to Rome. Rome very much liked this as a way of organizing their empire. They had a slim bureaucracy, and preferred to run things through the systems already in place.
These no really independent kings were called client kings. The Romans would conquer the people and the kings would then rule mostly in the Roman interest. There would be a certain amount of tax coming the Roman way, the local kings would lose control over foreign policy, that is, they couldn’t attack other kingdoms if they felt like it and they were expected to help out if the Romans were attacking someone else. Despite the fact that they accumulated a truly vast empire, the Romans were in some ways genuinely not keen to take over other people’s countries. Or at least they were conflicted about it. They felt that foreign places were the sources of bad things, that if they went out there people would come back with lots of jewelry and money and bad morals and strange cults, and Rome would go down the drain. So they tried to go out and come back quickly – and initially they did this by conquering places and then pretty much leaving them as they were and saying now you have to answer to us. And that’s what they did with the Hasmoneans.
The problem was the Hasmoneans were very badly behaved and they kept fighting, and the Romans kept having to get involved. And then things went too far. One of the Hasmonean brothers called in the Parthians. Parthia was a strong military kingdom roughly in modern day Iraq and this was too much because the Romans couldn’t easily crush Parthia. They genuinely worried about Parthia. If Parthia was getting a toehold in their back door, that concerned the Romans. So the Romans then came in on the side of Herod. Herod won a couple of victories against the Parthians and then the Romans backed Herod, about 40 BCE. Herod was not in fact a Hasmonean. But he did marry into the family, and so created some dynastic legitimacy for himself. But above all, he was now in charge and had the Romans behind him.
So Herod’s rule turned out to be pretty stable. One way in which he sought to bolster his authority was by building. He soon embarked on an really ambitious and rather impressive building program. He decided to make Jerusalem into one of the great metropolises of the ancient world If we’re to make a list, Rome, Alexandria and Antioch would be the top three in this period – big populations, beautiful buildings. Herod wanted Jerusalem to be in that league. He built a lot of public buildings, he built a very long aqueduct – it was important if you were going to have a fancy city to have a good water supply. That was a mark of a fine modern city. He wasn’t making Jerusalem a Roman city but it was going to compete in the league in which Rome competed. It was going to look modern. He built a lot of civic buildings around Jerusalem but most importantly he renovated, and pretty much totally rebuilt the Temple. Frankly he made it a fabulous structure.
We’re luck enough to have a very detailed description of this from a man called Josephus. He wrote two big works, one called the Jewish War which describes the Jewish revolt against the Romans (more on this later), and a second which is more ambitious, and attempts an annalistic history of all Jewish history up until his life time, called the Jewish Antiquities. Josephus was a very interesting guy. He was multilingual – Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic. He was from a priestly family but he was also a general of the Jewish army in the Jewish revolt. Early on he was captured and in captivity saw the Roman light; he didn’t stop being Jewish but he suddenly thought that the Romans weren’t so bad. He started writing crossover works in Greek for a non-Jewish audience. So in many ways the Jewish War was meant to explain the Jewish rebellion partly to his kind of Jewish population (educated Jews who were educated in Greek), but partly to non-Jewish Greeks. So he is in some ways a good interpreter to the outside world.
Now Josephus spent a lot of time describing Herod’s temple in the Jewish War. You have to remember in this context, for Josephus, Herod was a good guy. For Christians, he is often the villain, who tries to kill the infant Jesus, but for a man like Josephus, Herod represented Jewish aspirations to play in the big leagues, and build a great city.
I’ve picked out a few highlights from the five pages of description.
The colonnades were all double, the supporting pillars were 37.5 feet high, cit from single blocks of the whitest marble, and the ceiling was paneled with white cedar. The natural magnificence of it all, the perfect polish and the accurate jointing afforded a remarkable spectacle. … No foreigner was to enter the holy area. .. Of the gates nine were completely covered with gold and silver. …The Sanctuary itself, the Holy Temple, situated in the middle, was reached by a flight of twelve steps. … The face as covered with gold all over, and through the arch the first chamber could all be seen from without, huge as it was, and the inner gate and its surrounding wall, all glistening with gold, struck the beholder’s eye. (Josephus, Jewish War, pp.301-5)
A very important fact about the Jewish Temple was there was a sequence of courtyards and if you were a high priest, you were allowed to go all the way through the courtyard. Fewer and fewer people were allowed in each courtyard so that on the outside courtyard Gentiles and everybody were all there and then women got into the next courtyard but no further, Levites after that, priests, high priests and so on. But in each courtyard you could get a sense of what you were missing in the next one. It was a wonderful spectacle.
So Herod made Jerusalem very beautiful. But he did not make it a Roman city; fundamentally Jerusalem remained a thoroughly Jewish city. He made it compete. It was cosmopolitan in its grandeur. Its population was in some ways mixed but overwhelmingly the law was Jewish.
Now Herod built Roman cities too. He tended to build them in less Jewish areas, particularly on the coast. He built two famous cities of this sort, The first was called Sebast. This was a significant name because Sebaste was the Greek for Augustus, and Augustus was the Roman Emperor at this point in Herod’s rule and so he called the city by the emperor’s name of Augustus.
The second city he built was Caesarea Maritima, “Caesarea on the Sea,” named (obviously) after Caesar. Both these cities, strikingly, had temples in them to both the emperor and Rome. This is striking because Jews refused to worship Rome or the Emperor because of the first commandment. Indeed they tended to get a certain amount of dispensation from the Romans, who respected the antiquity of their religious practices. Their refusal to worship Roman emperors caused a lot of tension but Herod was happy to play ball to some extent. If he was going to set up Roman cities, they would look very Roman. They would have temples in them, they would have people who would go to the temples and that was okay with Herod. Some people feel that Herod actually was not a particularly a good Jew but the consensus now is that is unfair. In public, or rather in public in certain marginal parts of his kingdom, Herod played politics, but in his own palaces, of which there were many, there were no images on the walls, there was just decoration – showing his respect for the commandment against graven images. Equally, he avoided images of himself or Augustus on his coins – oddly enough in contrast to the Jewish coinage of a century later. It thus looks like Herod really did think of himself as a Jew but he understood that he was part of the Roman Empire and he played the Roman Empire game. And Augustus was a big supporter of his.
A description of Ceasarea is given by Josephus. It was a model Roman town:
In a circle round the harbor there was a continuous line of dwellings constructed of the most polished stone, and in their midst was a mound on which stood a temple of Caesar, visible a great way off to those sailing into the harbour, which had a sttue of Rome and also one of Caesar. The city itself is called Caesarea, and is most beautiful both in material and construction. But below the city the underground passages and sewers cost no less effort than the structure built above them. … Herod also built a theater of stone in the city, and ... an amphitheater large enough to hold a great crowd of people and conveniently situated for a view of the sea. (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 15.331-241)
Herod had an obsession with waterworks; a fine city had to have fine water works – great sewers and a nice harbour. And an amphitheatre large enough to hold a great big crowd of people and conveniently situated with a view of the sea. In a good Roman city you have a theatre and in a really good Roman city you have an amphitheatre. And apparently an amphitheatre with a view of the sea was quite, quite nice.
There’s a lot of digging going on in Ceasarea right now. If you visit, you can see the harbor that Augustus built, the impressive aqueduct and the theatre and the circus – you all remember Ben Hur – this was the place for chariot races. When we think of the Romans we often think of horrible gladiator fights; they did like them but what they really loved was going to see the horses and they went many days a year.
Background II: Post-Herod
Herod died in 4 BCE (oddly enough, as you may know, we misdated Jesus’ birth, and so Herod in fact died in 4 BCE, even though he was alive at the birth of Jesus). At his death Herod, like Alexander, didn’t leave a decent succession plan but broke up his kingdom into three pieces for his three sons, Herod Antipas, Archelaus and Philip. Gradually these pieces were separately absorbed by Rome, as Rome gave up on the client king system. The Romans took over Samaria and Judea (with Jerusalem in it) in 6 CE, so only ten years later Rome took that over and directly ruled it. Galilee and Perea they took over in 44, but they cared less about the more rural districts, and only took over Gaulanitis and the other districts east of the Sea of Galilee in the 90s. What we’re going to see is a history of increasing Roman penetration and interference. When they took over Judea, Ceasarea Maritima became the capitol. As far as the Romans were concerned all legal action then took place in Caesarea, the prefect lived there, and when he was replaced by a higher ranking governor he lived there too. The political capital moved coastward, so Judea moved westward for the Romans, but Jerusalem was still the central site for the predominantly Jewish population.
Amusingly from Caesarea, we have an inscription recording the dedication of a temple to Tiberius (the emperor after Augustus) by none other than Pontius Pilate. In the inscription, Pontius Pilate is called a Prefect, which is correct. We tend to think of Pontius Pilate as the governor of Judea because that’s what he’s called in The Gospel of John. But he wasn’t actually governor because at this point Judea was not particularly important; it was kind of a second ranked province which meant that it didn’t have a legion stationed there which further meant that it didn’t have to have someone of consular rank, a really high ranking Roman, running it. The big place was Syria; Syria had a legion and a governor. So Syria had oversight of this small province and the chap in charge of this province was a prefect who was from the next class down, known as the equestrians. As a class they were still fabulously wealthy but they weren’t quite as high in status as the senatorial class. And so Pilate was the next rank down; he really wasn’t a big fish. We’re going to see a much bigger fish (Felix) installed later.
Now right around the death of Herod we get an interesting rebellion led by a Galilean named Judas. This is attested particularly by Josephus who finds Judas to be a very significant figure. We pretty much believe what he said about Judas. He has two entries on this Judas. The first:
A Galilean named Judas tried to stir the natives to revolt, saying that they would be cowards if they submitted to paying taxes to the Romans, and after serving God alone accepted human masters. (Jos., JW, p.133)
There are three important points here. 1) There’s a little rebellion. 2) It’s obviously a kind of Jewish nationalist rebellion. 3) The problem is Roman taxes and Roman overlordship. And Judas is framing subordination to Roman rule as something incompatible with being a good Jew. You’re supposed to recognize God but not Rome. His was a rallying call. We have a slightly longer account of this episode in the Jewish Antiquities. Judas enlisted a Pharisee to his cause and Josephus tells us that the assessment was made by Quirinus the governor of Syria. As we’ll see Quirinus is named in John as the person doing the assessment that brings Joseph back to Bethlehem. We can date this very precisely. Judas and his Pharisee friend did not like the assessment:
They said that the assessment carried with it a status amounting to downright slavery, no less, and appealed to the nation to make a bid for independence. … Heaven would be their zealous helper to no lesser end than the furthering of their enterprise until it succeeded, all the more if with high devotion in their hearts they stood firm and did not shrink from the bloodshed that might be necessary. (Jos., JA, 18.4-5).
Now Judas therefore believes in violent resistance. There were plenty of Jewish groups who didn’t like the Romans but didn’t believe in shedding blood, including, interestingly, Pharisees., even though Judas gets a Pharisee on his side. The Pharisees were very much against the shedding of blood. Pharisees tended to accept things as they were and believed they would just get better. But Judas believed in going on the offensive. So what this shows us is how volatile the situation was that Jesus was being born into. Josephus finds Judas very important because as he tells it Judas is the grandfather of one of the great rebel leaders of the Jewish revolt that comes in 66 and as you’ll see the great Jewish revolt was in some ways a terrible disaster because the Romans completely destroyed the temple. That’s why there is no temple now. The temple has never been rebuilt. So this was the end of the second temple period.
[There are two temple periods. The first temple that was built by Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians in the early 6th Century. When the Persians take Babylon in the mid 6th Century the Persians relocate, move the Jews back to Jerusalem and encourage them to build a new temple. Then begins the second temple period. The second temple exists all the way down, is renovated by Herod, until 70 when the Romans destroy the temple. And at that point the Jews never rebuild the temple. There is a mosque there now, but no temple.]
Now, what happens in the post-herodian period is an increased Romanization of the more rural areas. The Romans are in Galilee now. Galilee is quite a rural area in Palestine but just as Herod Romanized the coast so too the Herodians Romanized Galilee. They started building Roman cities there. But the Romanization is relatively thin. It’s pretty clear that the countryside of Galilee did not see much of Rome but there are two cities that Herod’s successors in Galilee built. One is called Sepphoris. It apparently was very nice but it was fundamentally not a Roman or Greek city. No Greek or Latin inscriptions have been found in it, and we can tell from domestic architecture that it maintained Jewish ritual bathing practice, as the houses featured special Jewish ritual baths.
By contrast Herod Antipas, the son of Herod, built the new city of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, named after Tiberius, the new Roman emperor. He made it completely Roman and more than that he built it in defiance of Jewish law as Josephus tells us. Josephus says:
“The new settlers were a promiscuous rabble, no small contingent being Galilean, with such as were drafted from territory subject to [Herod Antipas, son of Herod] and brought forcibly to the new foundation. Some of these were magistrates, Herod accepted as participants even poor men who were brought in to join the others from any and all places of origin. It was a question whether some were even free men. These latter he often liberated and benefited… by equipping houses at his own expense and adding new gifts of land. For he knew that this settlement was contrary to the law and tradition of the Jews because Tiberias was built on the site of tombs that had been obliterated.” (Jos., JA, 18.36-8)
The city was built on a Jewish graveyard – a terrible insult. So we can see these later Herodians really did Romanize in a way different than Herod. Herod respected Jewish norms in Jewish areas. Herod Antipas, his son, did not.
Now we’re moving into the Jewish revolt period. During most of the 1st century there is increasing Romanization but it tends to be driven by the Jewish rulers themselves, who are getting less interested in catering to the Jewish population. Then we get the Jewish war in 66. In some ways these revolts were a normal part of Roman life. Rome had a lot of pieces of empire and people didn’t like paying tax and they would periodically revolt and the Romans would send in the legions and put down the revolt. In some ways this was just another one of those but in other ways it put an end to all sorts of Roman policies. Rome stopped installing client kings after this.
What seems to have precipitated the Jewish revolt was a kind of backhandedness on the part of the Romans. They initially respected the Temple’s independence but they keep interfering. According to Josephus, Pontius Pilate, a little earlier in the century, had set up the standards of the Roman armies during the night in Jerusalem. This was to trample on Jewish sensibilities and Jewish laws about graven images (as well as to break the basic rule of live and let live that served the Romans well), and there was a great protest. But to protest to Pilate, Jewish officials had to trek off to Caesarea, and beg him for mercy. Pilate initially refused, and arranged to slaughter the protestors, but according to Josephus was so impressed by their willingness to die for their principles that he backed down.
What we see here is a Roman effort to put their stamp on Jerusalem but they withdraw from it because it looks like it might get out of hand, and maybe lead to a revolution. But neither side learns the lesson, and the basic situation repeats itself periodically. The emperor after Tiberius is Gaius, better known as the unhinged emperor Caligula, who made his horse a senator, and ruled only for about four years 37 to 41. He decided not only to set up standards in Jerusalem but to set up a statue of himself in the temple. We have a fabulous document, a kind of memoir of an embassy written by an Alexandrian Jew, who lived in north Egypt called Philo, and known nowadays as Philo Judaeus, Philo the Jew – his Embassy to Gaius. Philo describes how he was sent on an embassy to complain about some other rotten treatment Caligula was meeting out to the Jews in Egypt. While he was in Rome he heard that Caligula had decided to set up a statue of himself in the temple and he talks about this as if it was a declaration of war on the Jews. This just could not be stomached; this was the end. Then Caligula died and again the moment passes, but resentment remains.
And finally in 66 it breaks out all over in a huge war and like all these wars against Rome, this ends up with Rome winning, and Rome destroyed the temple. Three years later, there was one of the great moments in Jewish history. The last rebels held out on this mountain called Masada. You can go there today and you can see the Romans built a huge siege ramp going up the mountain and Josephus describes how, when the ramp is finished, everyone in Masada killed himself. They knew they were going to die, so they arranged a final defiant mass suicide. Josephus’ account is genuinely moving, particularly because he has little nice to say about Masada’s leaders. But this was the end of that rebellion.
The rebellions keep coming. There’s another war in 117 and a really big one in 135 called the Bar Kochba Revolt, centered around a Messianic leader. As a response to this Rome interferes more and of course the more they interfere the more unhappy everybody gets. The net result of the revolt in 135 is that Hadrian – we tend to think of Hadrian as a really fine emperor - Hadrian does what Caligula wanted to do to Jerusalem except more so. He forbids the Jews from going to Jerusalem; he puts up a Roman temple on the Temple Mount with Roman guards in it and makes the whole thing full of Roman things, an unimaginably terrible humiliation.
The Romans are now around a lot. They station legions in the area – and soldiers were irritating. We see this in Roman novels that soldiers were always taking your food and stealing your mules, kicking you randomly. We see this in the Rabbinic writings in the Palestinian Talmud and here I have a couple of sections from the Palestinian Talmud. The first one is a commentary on a line of Deuteronomy:
“‘And he ate the produce of my field… and he made him suck honey out of the rock and oil out of the flinty rock’: …these are the oppressors who have taken hold of the land of Israel and it is as hard to received a farthing form them as form a rock, but tomorrow Israel inherits their property and will enjoy it as oil and honey. ‘Curds from the herd’: these are their consulars and governors; ‘fat of the lambs’: these are their tribunes; ‘and rams’: these are their centurions; ‘herds of Bashan’: these are beneficiarii who take way food from those who eat; ‘and goats’: these are their senators; ‘with the finest of the wheat’: these are their matronae.” “R. Isaac said, ‘There is no festival without a patrol coming to Sepphoris.’” (Isaac, Limits of Empire, 115-6).
Every time the Jews have a ritual, the soldiers are there just keeping an eye out and taking stuff. Continual interference was now the norm; there was no space between Jews and Romans, at least in semi-urban areas.
The Romans and the New Testament
I thought we’d spend the last part of the lecture looking at some passages from the New Testament and just seeing where Rome comes in. We can start with Luke. Luke is in some ways the most interesting gospel for a classicist because Luke is clearly written for Greeks and Romans by somebody who is heavily classically trained. So we can see this for example in Luke chap. 3. This begins: In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberias when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler of Galilee. Luke is set up for people who care about the Roman empire. We might compare this with how Matthew begins with its very long genealogy of Jesus. Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac was the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Juda, Juda the father of Perez and so on. Matthew is clearly addressed to people who know their Hebrew bible. That is, to Jews. Luke is addressed to people who know their Greco-Roman world.
Luke chap. 2 – In those days a decree went out to all from the Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinus was the governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea to the city of David called Bethlehem because he was descended from the house and the family of David. He went to be registered with Mary.
This is the census that we saw Judas being unhappy about. Judas’s rebellion. In Luke this census comes to be the motivation for Joseph returning to Bethlehem. It is central to the nativity. Again it’s clear that Rome is interfering, running censuses, people have to move. Poor old Joseph is living in Nazareth and he’s got to go back to Bethlehem. Rome is moving people around. And of course they are moving people around because they are going to tax them. Once they get registered they are going to start paying.
On the subject of Roman taxes – Matthew 22, that wonderful famous passage. Verse 17: So the Pharisees said to Jesus, “Tell us then what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” But Jesus who heard their malice said “Why are you putting me to the test? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And the brought him a denarius [i.e. a Roman coin]. And he said to them “Whose head is this on the coin and whose title?” They answered the emperior’s and he said to them give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s. [“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s!”]
This is pretty interesting for a lot of reasons. We know that in this period there were all sorts of coins. There were coins that were issued by the present Herodian rulers during the lifetime of Jesus. Roman coins were also normal currency to be used in the market. But also there were coins around from the old Hasmonean dynasty. There were a lot of different coins you could use, but the Roman coinage was the norm. Another good moment about the money is Mark 6:37. What I like about this is just how casual it is. This is about the feeding of the 4,000-5,000. The disciples say we need to send all these people away, they need to get something to eat. And Jesus answered them, you give them something to eat. And they said to him are we to go and buy 200 denariii worth of bread and give it to them to eat? The money they pick, the denarius, is Roman money. If they had money to buy bread it would be Roman money; that’s just what they used. The Romans were in their world in different ways. We need to understand that the Romans invaded in many ways. A city could look Roman. You could be the subject of Roman taxes and laws. But they also provided mechanisms that made life easier – and money, a shared currency that everyone trusted, made the economy work better, for sympathizers and rebels. Money was an accepted part of Roman interference for Jesus.
But we might also note a negative proposition, an absence. What are the cities we see in the gospels? Sepphoris? Caesarea? Tiberias? No. The first miracle in John is a Cana , not a Roman city. Capernaum also comes up a lot, but is not really a Roman city; there were Roman pieces to it, and maybe the odd Roman person, but basically it was a thoroughly unRomanized place. In fact, the vast majority of Jesus’ ministry prior to the move to Jerusalem was not in the Romanized sections of Palestine.
When do we see Romans? We do see the centurion Cornelius and Cornelius is quite fun. This is in Capernaum, not a particularly Roman place. This is Matthew 8:5. When Jesus entered Capernaum a centurion came to him. (A centurion is a Roman officer, pretty well paid but not a big fish put pretty big, not a private.) He appealed to him and said, “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed in terrible distress.” – this is interesting because a typical Roman might not care that much presuming it’s a slave and not a servant. And Jesus said to him, “I will come and cure him.” The centurion answered him, “Lord I am not worthy to have you come into my room but only speak the word and my servant will be healed for I also am a man under authority with soldiers under me. And I say to one go and he goes, and to another come and he comes, and to my slave do this and the slave does it.” When Jesus heard him he was amazed and said to those who followed him, “Truly I tell you in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west who believe in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown out into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go, let it be done to you according to your fait,”h and the servant was healed in that hour.
Lots of interesting things here. 1) We have a centurion who believes in Jesus. That means at the very least he is in some sense attending synagogue. There is probably a synagogue at Capernaum in this period. He is kind of gentile practicing Judaism. There was a category for gentiles who practiced Judaism without doing too much of the ritual.
2) As Matthew tells it, Jesus is not really interested in the Romans. What the centurion represents here is a kind of a stick to beat the Jews with. He’s saying there are so many people in Israel who don’t have faith like this centurion and, for goodness sake, he’s a Roman. In some sense the centurion is below Jesus’ notice. Jesus is concerned with Israel, with the Jews. And this again makes sense of where he is, he’s in Capernaum, or in Cana, and there just aren’t that many Romans there. Interestingly when John retells this story he doesn’t call him Roman. He calls him a royal official – I don’t know what to do with that because a royal official would be a follower of Herod. Herod Antipas rules in Galilee in this period, and he is a client king, but not Roman but it’s the same story. So some interesting differences there.
We see a different Cornelius of Caesarea in Acts 10. This is quite a long story. Acts 10:24 The following day them came to Caesarea (Peter and some followers). Cornelius was expecting them and had called together some relatives and friends. On Peter’s arrival Cornelius met him and falling at his feet worshiped him but Peter made him get up saying, stand up I am only a mortal. And as he talked with him he went in and found that many had assembled. And he said to them, you yourselves know it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.
Cornelius represents this kind of axial moment in Acts when Peter decides to expand the ministry. And he has this dream where he is told to eat this fruit and he says, I can’t eat this fruit. It’s unclean. And Jesus says, no eat. So, Peter concludes that he must preach to the unclean. The Romans thus stand here for the non-Jews, for the wider world, the potential for a ministry of God to reach out somewhat further.
Lastly, where we really see is a lot of Rome is in the judicial system. A couple of things to look out for here with Mark is that the temple authorities arrest Jesus but they have to take Jesus to Pilate. The temple authorities do not have the right of capital punishment. That is something the Roman governors reserve for themselves, for very savvy political reasons – they reckoned that they could protect the people who were on their side. The people who were likely to be killed would, they reckoned, be Roman sympathizers. So they said, there will be no killing without our say so. We’ll do all the killing and if you want to kill someone we’ll decide. So we see here how the Temple high priests are in some ways completely deprived of traditional judicial power. They have to take Jesus to Pilate and then Pilate decides. The whole crucifixion is done under Pilate’s jurisdiction. There were centurions there and the body is Pilate’s to dispose of. Joseph of Aramathea goes to ask Pilate for the right to bury the body. Judicially it is all under Pilate’s control. Indeed, the whole episode is wonderful source for this negotiation between the priest authorities and the secular Roman authorities. We also get a nice idea of some other factors that play in – for example, Pilate’s fear of the mob is more important than the law, and than the priests, who he is ready to defy.
The way the story is told Pilate is sympathetic to Jesus but worried about the riots. That seems quite convincing. You don’t want to get the priests too much on the wrong side and you don’t want the mob on the wrong side. When Luke tells the story Pilate is worried about what the emperor will say. The prefect is answerable up the chain as well as down the chain. We see another wonderful sequence of Roman tradition in Acts when Paul gets arrested. Paul’s in jail and he’s informed there’s a conspiracy against him. He informs the Tribune, a Roman official, that he’s going to be killed. And the Roman official informs the procurator, a man called Felix. Actually Felix is very interesting because Felix’s brother was a free man (ex-slave who got very rich), called Pallas, who was very powerful under the Roman emperors. So Felix had connections. Felix says we’re going to move Paul to Caesarea and keep him in jail there. So the priests have to go down to Caesarea and they say you need to put this man to death. And Felix says, I don’t know about that. What’s really interesting in Acts is that Paul is a Roman citizen. There is some question as to whether this is some sort of later addition because Paul himself never mentions being a Roman citizen in his letters. But in Acts he’s a Roman citizen and this makes for very interesting dynamics because Roman citizens had extra rights. You couldn’t just kill Roman citizens. Indeed anyone who did was liable to judicial investigation. So Felix, when he finds out that Paul is a Roman citizen is very worried about this. He’s got to treat Paul right. Finally when the governor turns over and a governor who is more sympathetic to the high priest comes in Paul plays his trump card, which is to appeal up the chain. He says, I now appeal to the emperor. And the governor has got to go with that. So Paul gets shipped off to Rome and then there’s the shipwreck and the wonderful narrative of Acts after that. This is good Roman legislative procedure; that’s how the provinces worked. And in it we see the way in which Rome kept control of the provinces. They took over all judicial organs to make sure that cases were decided as they wanted.
I guess we might finish with Revelations. Rome hasn’t looked particularly bad at this point but then we get Revelations, 17: Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, Come I will show you the judgment on the great whore, enthroned above the ocean. The kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and with the wine of her fornication the inhabitants of the earth have become drunk.
This is of course Rome. The whore is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth. Revelations is a very anti-Roman text. As Revelations tells it Rome is the great evil. In fact the sign of the beast 666 is the sum of the letters in Nero’s name if you take them as numbers. It is pretty clear that in some sense the beast represents the Roman Empire. It represents a lot of other things too, but it represents one of the ways in which what is anti-Christian is understood in Revelations. Opposition to early Christianity is really understood in terms of a very negative reaction to the Romans. And we can understand this by the increasing interference in everybody’s lives as Rome increased its presence with the various revolts. At this point, in the early second century, Rome was increasingly impinging on everyday life, and it was hard to have a normal, unRoman life.
Thank you very much!
Works Cited or for further reference
Josephus VIII & IX, Jewish Antiquities, trans. R. Marcus, A. Wikgren and L. Feldman (Harvard: Loeb Classics)
Josephus, Jewish War, trans. G. Williamson (Penguin)
Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford, 1992)
Mark Chancey and Adam Porter, “The Archaeology of Roman Palestine,” Near Eastern Archaeology 64.4 (2001): 164ff
