The Anti-Christian Emperors

[Federico M]

opinion was expressed that it is quite plausible  that  the Roma fire of  64 for 
an equivalent of Al-Qaeda  atack.

Well, I suppose that the accident is more likely, but given his architectural interests, that is evident also on coins, I suppose it cannot be excluded that Nero himself was really responsible (at least of the beginning) of the fire, induced to have the possibility of reconstructing a part of Rome without being blamed for putting people out of their homes...

Federico

[Robert_Brenchley]

Now I've checked what Tacitus said (always a good idea!) I see I accidentally strengthened his remark; he didn't write that the Christians were followers of Jesus, but that, as Curtis wrote, the name derived from him. There's an ambiguity there, I think. Even the New Testament reflects a certain confusion at times; what of Apollos, who makes an appearance in Acts 18; he 'had been instructed in the way of the Lord' and 'taught accurately the things concerning Jesus', but he 'knew only the baptism of John', and was not accepted as a member until he'd had things explained to him 'more accurately', and had been rebaptised in Jesus' name. So he belongs to some branch of the movement which Luke, who doesn't want to admit to there having been divisions and quarrels in the church, won't fully accept even though they teach accurately about Jesus! I think there was a lot going on that we just don't know about.

[David Atherton]

When I have a question concerning Tacitus and his works, I normally defer to Sir Ronald Syme:

"Tacitus, carefully noting an incident at Rome in the sequel of the great conflagration under Nero, registers the origin of the name 'Christiani' with doucumentary precision."

"Tacitus (it is fair to surmise) had conducted investigations into the behaviour and beliefs of those malcontents, discovering perhaps no deeds of crime or vice but only an invincible spirit that denied allegiance to Rome when allegiance meant worship of Caesar. Yet it was an 'exitiabilis superstitio'." (Tacitus, vol II, pg 469)

[Robert_Brenchley]

His language is completely pejorative, and while he gives the origin of the mname, what he doesn't do is to say how widespread it is, whether all groups of 'Christiani' are linked, or whether the name is used for unconnected groups which happen to use similar language. We might speak today of 'millennarians' who make the imminenent Second Coming a central plank of their religion, and say that the idea goes back to the person who started the Seventh Day Adventists. But the name encompasses numerous unconnected groups, some of which have very different agendas.

Writing at around the same time as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger says of trials of Christiani that 'I do not know what are the cusomary penalties or investigations.... whether the name itself, even if inocent of crime, should be punished, or only the crimes attached to that name'. He questioned a number of former Christians, and discovered a harmless society, which they had left when an edict against secret societies had been published. He subsequently tortured two servant women, and discovered 'nothing but a depraved and extravagant superstition' (similar perjorative language to Tacitus). His concern isn't that he's dealing with a bunch or terrorists - he makes no mention of any such idea - but that there are allegations that the temples are deserted. It's an unlikely story on the face of it, but similar allegations are a prominent part of the story in Acts, written not too long before.

So there's clearly confusion about what these people are, what crime they've committed (if they were known to have torched Rome, surely every governor would have known it!), and they're eventually banned under a general ordinance against societies, implying that at the time there was no specific law against them. I teach Religious Education, and I spend a great deal of time addressing confusion about Islam, which is far better known that Christianity was then; governments and police show similar confusion to my students. Just after 9/11, for instance, a local Sikh leader was arrested because a policeman saw a picture of Guru Nanak in his house, and assumed that any guy with a long beard and a turban had to be bin Laden! Given the prejdice displayed against the Christiani, which would have been exacerbated enormously if some of them were terrorists, I wouldn't trust the Roman writers of the period to be at all objective about them.

[David Atherton]

I agree with many of your points Robert.

In the days of Nero, there could not have been very many people who we would think of today as Christians.

It's very possible that the name 'Christini" was an umbrella term encompassing many different messianic sects then residing at Rome.

[Numerianus]

Unfortunately,  I do not know any study explaining satisfactory why the Christian
project was so successful  in a long run (written not from the point of view of Roman Catholic  church).
Apparently, it failed down in the first century  and, possibly, due to energetic measures of Nero.
 In the thread on the Roma fire we arrived, seemingly, to an understanding
that   it is  very  unprobable that Nero ordered to burn Rome or was happy with the fire.  He lost  more than any other citizen! Reading Tacitus, I arrived to a conclusion that he was a talented ruler, of the same level as Vespasianus.   

[Robert_Brenchley]

I don't think it's true to say that Christianity (which is largely an anachronism in that context!) 'failed' in the 1st Century; it may well have been quite successful as a Jewish movement, but this history has been thoroughly suppressed and there's little to go on. As long as it remained essentially Jewish, its success in the Hellenistic world was nevessarily limited. It wasn't until the middle of the 2nd Century that it began to find interpreters (known to history as the Apologists) who really set out to re-interpret it for a Roman audience, and it took theologians like Clement of Alexandria (late 2nd Century) and Origen (early 3rd) to reall get things shifting. By the time of Constantine, it was powerful, wealthy, thoroughly Romanised, and its time had come.

[Massanutten]

   Seems to me that Paul was writing to Christian communities all around the Hellenistic oriented part of the Empire in the mid first century.  Certainly these communities were trying to define themselves within a set of doctrine and there was obviously disagreement in the dynamics of forming that doctrine, but most certainly it must have been Messianic in it's basis which would have increasingly seperated them from their Jewish roots.  It's my opinion that this new religion was growing like wildfire for people who found an appeal that made it desirable and in my mind that was in great part due to the promise of a better afterlife like that familiar to the Christian and Muslem of today.  After all, the only ones that had a chance of a happy eternal life in the 'Roman' world were the Augusti!

[Robert_Brenchley]

Paul's communities were very small and scattered; the Roman church could meet in one house, for instance. Obedience to Jewish law is consistently a big issue, though Paul is quite flexible in his responses to the problems. It's clear from Galatians 2 that, despite major tensions, when the crunch came, Paul had to do what James and the Jerusalem lot wanted; the same picture of dominance by James is seen in Acts. What we see there is still a Jewish movement, with significant Gentile participation. It's only in Romans that we can say that the Gentile group is clearly predominant, and that seems to be down to the specific situation there. Jerusalem, which was obviously as Jewish as you can get, dominates for the whole of that generation.

In the 2nd century, there's a steady move towards the development of a Hellenistic form of Christianity, doubltess due to a decline in Jewish presteige on the one hand, and a desire to be acceptable to the Romans on the other. But htrough that century, you still find writers insisting that the Church had the true interpretation of Mosaic law, which is a very Jewish stance to be taking! It's only in the 3rd Century that you really get the rise of a completely Hellenised church, though Clement of Alexandria in the second was the pioneer of that.

[Numerianus]

There is a stunning parallelism with the history of Church in the  first centuries and the history of the Communist Party.
Before the WWI there is a small radical group of Jewish intelligencia in Russia lead by Lenin. The communist project
was not popular at all. However, the war changed  everything and the project became feasible, especially, due to  the German money massively injected at a suitable moment: Lenin's group ("bolsheviks") took the control on the whole country.
Lenin died soon and his cult was established. Similarly  to Christianism, the project became international. The Jewish origin of Ul'yanov-Lenin was declared  top secret and  only in perestroika  it was revealed that his grandfather  from mother's line got a permission from the Jewish community  for the conversion in 1820, had a successful career  and  obtained a nobility from the emperor (I believe that this facts are still not  well-known).  The communist historicians rewrote history to give an importance  to very minor facts. Jewish names were deleted from records (one can see the process comparing successive prints of the same book: The History of Civil War).  It seems that the Christianism also had a ``stage of generalization", probably, in the 3rd century when the  Roman empire was on the edge of collapse. To be honest, Christianity is just a branch of a Judaism. This point of view became tolerable or acceptable only recently. Now one can find more and more often that the  European civilization is not just Chistian but Judeo-Christian.   

[Massanutten]

   Well, Robert, far be it for me to argue with a scholar which I am most certainly not.  I just think it would be terribly interesting to know what that early congregation was like while it was first starting to define itself.  Most certainly and logically it had to have been deeply connected to the Judaic community from which it sprang.  But at the same time it must have been developing a set of Messianic tenets that clearly set it apart from the mainstream.  Whatever the actual numbers of followers were in the first century, the fact that it had established itself in so many places is remarkable considering it was within the first generation of people who had witnessed the lifetime of the Christ.  And in numbers that would have gained the notice of the Romans who were already passing edicts against "secret societies" as pointed out in an earlier post.  

[Robert_Brenchley]

The question is, what's the 'mainstream', and how do you define it? Before 70, there was such a diversity of Jewish groups that some scholars speak of 'Judaisms' in the plural. Mostly, we know very little about them, and there must have been many more strands we know nothing of at all. To define one group over and against a Jewish 'mainstream' at this time is risky, and probably impossible. After 70, the Pharisees (or at least the liberal, pro-Roman ones who survived the defeat) began to re-invent themselves as rabbis, and it does become possible to speak in those terms. But each was, to some degree, defined by the other, just like Protestantism and Catholicism after the Reformation.

When it comes to Messianism, you can't say, simplistically, that 'the Jews' were expecting 'the Messiah'; every messianic text has a different spin on it, and we just don't know what proportion of the Jews were expecting anything at all. The term isn't much used before the church popularised it, and a lot of the documents point to angelic, rather than kingly, intervention. I think this links with an early Christology which saw Christ as an angel, combining the two. It's pretty clear that 'messiah' meant a human king, rather than a divine figure, ruling in God's name, and was only spiritualised later. Josephus peaks of 'kings' who appear to have been messianic figures, at least to their followers; the term 'messiah' is reserved for Vespasian. bar-Kochba was declared to be the Messiah by a leading early Rabbi, Akiba. Both revolts appear to have been inspired by messianic hopes as much as by Roman tyranny, and the pro-Roman Jews who dominated the scene afterwards spiritualised and de-politicised the term, following the lead the pro-Roman section of the church had taken a century before. Messianism was very much something inherited from Judaism, like everything else in 1st-generation Christianity!

[Massanutten]

  Points well taken, but I didn't mean to infer that every Jewish sect had a Messianic focus.  My point was that whatever the word or words used to describe it that it must have been central to this new Jewish sect that eventually evolved to be the group that we would know as Christian.  And it would seem logical that it would be central to their apostolic message to convert new followers.  Otherwise what was it that gave them an identity at all?

[Robert_Brenchley]

Originally nothing more than the idea that Yeshua ben Yosef (AKA Jesus) was the Messiah! The Jerusalem church under James must have fitted fairly well into the Jewish spectrum, since it dominated the scene for a generation till his death, probably in 62, and the disaster of 70. If Josephus' account of his murder by the Sadducees is authentic, then he must have been someone fairly important in the city, perhaps a popular religious leader, since the High Priest was apparently deposed by the Romans aster the Pharisees complained about the matter. This also suggests that he wasn't too far from the Pharisees in his 'take' on the Law. The Paul faction has its roots in what appears to have been a very early split between Jerusalemites and Jews from the Dispersion. TheNew Testament books often show a line on the Law which isn't too far from the liberal wing of the Pharisees, but Paul seems to have become so liberal that many Jews wouldn't have seen him or his followers as practising Jews at all, and over time, they followed one path, while what became Rabbinical Judaism followed another. But they share the same root, in Second Temple Judaism.

[Hermes III]

Sorrry to interrupt such a great conversation at such a late date, but it seems to me that Yesuh the  son of Joseph was very disturbed that his teachings were being accepted by the Samaritans, I mean the Goyim, and not by the People he meant to teach.  I wonder whether he would have traded all his fame, and all his future influence, if he could have been accepted as a true Jewish Prophet.

[Massanutten]

   Seems to me that it is like asking if J was 'out of his time', would he have opted to be a TV evangelist.......don't know, but I'll bet the choir would knock your socks off!!!

[Robert_Brenchley]

I don't think we can really answer that one for sure; all we have to go on is the evidence of Christian communities in the generations after his death, and they don't agree abot a lot of things! What we can be reasonably sure of is that he was a Jew, and that therefore he identified with some part of the spectrum of Jewish beliefs, and that he was a Galilean. Galilee was a very multi-ethnic area with little history of Jewish rule (the name probably derives from Galil ha-Goyim; the District of the Nations). Jews were a minority there, while the majority of peasants were probably non-Jewish Israelites (Jew, at that time, primarily referred to Israelites who identified with the Jerusalem area and its religious agenda) with more affinity for Samaritans than Jews. So where did Jesus stand; did he grow up as a nationalistic exile, identifying with Jerusalem and its strictness, or was he a liberal with more concern for his non-Jewish neighbours? We're gueassing here, and we're not helped by a dearth of direct evidence as to the views of Galilean Jews.

[Massanutten]

   But wasn't he somewhat more that a Jew from Galilee?  As an advocate of the Essene wouldn't he have had a somewhat extra-Jewish view of the world?

[Robert_Brenchley]

I don't think he was an Essene! There were similarities; both movements accepted the idea of the Temple while rejecting the regime there as corrupt, and both seem to have organised themselves in comparable ways; possibly that was how a Jewish movement of the day was expected to organise itself. But the Essenes were extremists on the Law who rejected laxer Jews, never mind Gentiles. They even refer to themselves as 'the House of Separation'. One of their rules (from the 'Damascus Covenant') was that if an animal fell down a well on the Sabbath, you didn't pull it out (this would have been work), and if a man fell down you couldn't use a ladder or rope to get him out. You didn't associate with people outside the group on the Sabbath. Their rules on the purity of Jerusalem were so strict that they had to go so far outside the city to go to the toilet that the journey there and back was more than a Sabbath days' journey (the distance you could walk on the Sabbath). According to Josephus, they didn't 'go to stool' (Victorian translation) there on the Sabbath. The mind boggles! The Jesus movement, on the other hand, was open to Gentiles, even if the extent of their membership was controversial, and relaxed (mostly) about the Law, though again there was a lot of controversy about it. The attitudes of the two are complete opposites.

[Massanutten]

   Perhaps 'advocate' is a little more than I wanted.   Familiar certainly (his cousin the Baptist was certainly one)!  But though strict in their practice, didn't the Essenes also tolerate and study alternative religions to find aspects of the Yahweh as might be illuminated by the study? And if so wouldn't that exposure have created a predilection to including non-Jews in his movement?

[Robert_Brenchley]

J the B may have been an Essene if what Luke wrote about him is historically correct, and there's no guarantee of that. If he ever was, he must presumably have left at some point, since going out baptising all comers is completely at odds with Essense practice. They were essentially reactionaries, against increasing Hellenism (though, like all Jews of the time, they were actually pretty thoroughly Hellenised themselves), and against Sadducean domination of the Temple. Many of their surviving writings reject other Jews; they don't mention Gentiles except as the enemy. What evidence we have that they may have been more open to other religions comes from secondary sources, and is probably not correct.

[Massanutten]

   Robert, thank you for your patience.  What I have been trying to understand is 'what was this cult that the Romans at the time of Nero in the mid 1st century found to be a harmless but curious religious sect' ?  We know that they refused to perform any of the rites that would require them to perform sacrifices to the welfare of the Roman State or it's emperor.  We apparently know that they were not in favor of the hard line Jews dominating the Temple and it's religius politics.  So what was it that set them appart and gave them an identity?  To say they were followers of the Christ figure is obvious, I guess.  But what does that mean?  Much later on (4th century) they were recognized by Constantine for their ablity to perform what amounted to welfare acts in the distribution of food and clothing to the poor and needy which the Roman State was not really set up to do.  In extrapulation, does that provide the hint of a clue to what they were about at the beginning?  Something extending beyond their Jewish roots; actively seeking converts in the lowest castes of the "Roman" world; and perhaps a rite of baptism as an act of rebirth?  You must be right in that at the beginning they were represented by small groups scattered around the Mediterranean basin.  But they did grow and there must have been something in what they were about that made them  powerfully attractive........

[Numerianus]

Reading Tacitus or Suetonius one cannot concclude that
 '...the Romans at the time of Nero in the mid 1st century found to be a harmless but curious religious sect'.
Definitely, it was condemned as very dangerous cult.  By the way, nowadays Europeans consider
as dangerous sectes some religious movements which  have the most reputed status of Churches in the US,
is not it?
 
It seems that Nero's eradicated the branch  presumably guilty in the Roma fire and related with Christ.
As a proof one can recall a strange fact: fifty years later
or so  Hadrian confused  the cult of Christ with that of Serapis, see the discussion in
 
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=18555.0

[Robert_Brenchley]

There's noting unique in the Christians' prediliction for evangelism; Judaisn was itself much more of a missionary religion then, and the Christians didn't go round knocking on strangers' doors offering a cheap trip to heaven if you signed up to a list of doctrines and went to their church! What they did was offer an open door, to a degree, in an age which was far more religious than this. Full membership of the church, or at least the Gentile section of it, was easier than becoming a Jew; no need for circumcision or the 613 commandments of the Law! In all probablility, that was much of its attraction; it was a monotheistic faith in an age when people were looking for such, and was more successful at adapting to an Romano-Greek setting than its rivals. Christian writers certainly claimed that their care, or 'love' for one another was a major factor in attracting people, and it would be an odd one to choose if there wasn't something in that. We know from their behaviour under Max Daia that this caring wasn't confined to their own community, which may well have helped spread the attraction. But unfortunately there's much which is lost; we know the Roman authorities in the late 1st and early 2nd Centuries loathed them, at least when it suited them, but we don't really know why. It could be simply that they were a vulnerable minority who could easily be used as scapegoats, rather like the Jews in more modern times. When Tertullian says, 'When the Tiber rises to the walls, when the Nile fails to rise, when the sky fails to move or the earth does, if there is famine, if there is plague, the cry goes up at once, "Christians to the lion!" What, all of them to one lion?' he may well have his finger right on it.

[Massanutten]

   I very complex and interesting era to be sure.  That the Romans who normally were very tolerant of 'foreign' religions would feel threatened by this one says much in that their worst dreams did come true......