Christianity and the Roman Empire: ​Jerusalem to Constantinople

(Host: Lucy) 

The second through fourth centuries C.E. saw a profound transformation, and profound upheavals, in the Roman world as a result of the rise of Christianity as a universal religion. Religion, flexible and syncretic, was a powerful source of identity for the Romans, from the temples of misty Britain to the mystery cults of the Middle East. The growing numbers of Christians, as a minority incapable of assimilation, were a disturbing anomaly… and a useful scapegoat.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
How did an eastern Mediterranean mystery cult go from a persecuted minority to
a state religion in approximately a generation? Stay tuned to find out.

(00:23):
Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I’ll be discussing
what’s consistently one of the most popular topics in my survey courses: early Christianity.
How does Christianity get from Point A — the claim that a man executed for crimes against
the Roman empire rose from the dead, actually — to Point B: a more or less clearly defined

(00:45):
religion adopted by many citizens of an empire spanning three continents, poised to spread south
into Africa and west into Europe, having already traveled east into Asia? This, in brief, is how.
At first glance, it may seem surprising to have a center of resistance to Roman rule springing
up in the eastern Mediterranean. The idea that all roads led to Rome has become proverbial…

(01:09):
but in this portion of the empire, all roads led to Jerusalem. The province of Judea was,
like many others in the Empire, multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual. Hellenistic
influences in religion and education were strong, particularly in Alexandria. The signal
variable that set the inhabitants of this province apart, however, was the worship of a single god.

(01:32):
Rome’s religious cults were many and hybrid. And like many other ancient civilizations,
the Romans did not clearly distinguish between the supernatural and the natural world in the way that
many modern societies do. Rather, the practice of magic, and the agency of gods and demons,
were all very real. Moreover, communal worship was important to a sense of Roman

(01:53):
identity. The Jewish inhabitants of the empire did not share this facet of Roman identity — and
their view of the world was profoundly shaped by a religion that insisted on its exclusivity. It’s no
coincidence that the Pharisees rose to prominence in this period, focused on how Jewish law could
and should shape all aspects of daily life. A long history of antisemitism means that they’re often

represented as joyless pedants (02:18):
but what they  were doing was fighting for a distinctive cultural
identity in the face of imperial domination. Crucially, too, we see the Second Temple as
a physical and symbolic center of religious and communal identity. The destruction of the Temple
by the armies of Rome in the first century was a very deliberate act of imperialist brutality.

(02:40):
Not only through such acts of conquest, the Romans quite literally built their empire outwards.
From Tunisia to the British Isles stretched their aqueducts, their theaters, their temples. For men
like Caesar’s legionaries, who fought and marched and received, for their labors, land enough to
farm, negotiating identity took place on a much smaller scale. Men and women, enslaved and free,

were often dependent on impersonal forces:  weather and disease. The writings of Roman (03:04):
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non-elites are often brief and fragmentary. We find records of ordinary Roman lives in graffiti
celebrating their gambling wins, or advertising their shops and their sexual prowess. We also find
the voices of the non-elite majority in epitaphs, inscriptions on tombstones saying things like:

(03:29):
“here my final home, a rest at last from toil;” or, “Oh, dear one, you are free of suffering now!”
They varied widely in tone, from “Into nothing from nothing how quickly we go” to “The god of
wine never let me down.” One of the most popular was often abbreviated: NFFNSNC: I was not, I was,

(03:51):
I am not, I don’t care. (Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.) We might think of it as the YOLO of
the ancient world. Conspicuous by its absence, you will notice, is a concrete idea of the afterlife.
Another source for Roman values comes from the emperor Marcus Aurelius. His “Meditations”
remain a best-selling book about self-awareness and personal development. He looked on moral

(04:15):
self-training as a concrete, practical exercise. He also writes about the difficulty of getting
out of bed in the morning sometimes, and about the necessity of doing so: “Was it for pleasure,
then,” he writes, “that you were born, and not for work, not for effort?” He also believed
“What is not harmful to the city cannot harm the citizen,” and that all human labor had dignity.

(04:38):
Marcus Aurelius’ son brought change. This was not a good thing. Commodus was the first Roman emperor
to inherit the title; he was also a really bad emperor. He was alternately manipulated by and
alienating to the Senate of Rome. The Senate saw his inexperience, and scoffed; moreover,
he chose as his advisors not experienced administrators, men of state, politicians,

(05:02):
or philosophers, but rather his friends. In 189, Commodus encountered (and failed)
a major administrative challenge in the form of a grain shortage. Emperors often took a
personal role in addressing problems of food distribution and famine, a precedent set by
Augustus. Commodus, however, had allowed his inner circle to pursue disastrous policies,

(05:25):
and then to drastically lower grain prices. This led to grain being bought up by speculators and
sold on in the provinces. A small number of businessmen made an enormous profit.
No one was happy. There were riots. Commodus’ advisor, responsible for the failed policies,
was killed. Commodus then intervened personally, decided he was Hercules reborn,

(05:47):
and demanded that the Senate treat him as a god. He even decided that the Romans should
be named “Commodans” instead. He also decided that he should fight in gladiatorial games, which
everyone agreed was a stupid idea. The business of dying is a part of life; in gladiatorial games,
the business of dying well became spectacle. From events marking funerals in the Roman republic,

(06:11):
gladiatorial games had become more common public spectacles in the empire, commissioned either by
the emperors themselves or by other members of the elites wishing to be seen as public benefactors.
It was in the gladiatorial arena that Commodus was killed. And his successor ruled for only
three months before being assassinated by the Praetorian Guard. Years of civil war followed.

(06:36):
It’s worth noting that arenas, as well as bridges and temples and aqueducts,
were common features of Roman cities all over the empire. Gladiators might be volunteers, or slaves,
or prisoners of war. And gladiatorial games were understood as expressing important principles of
public life, as well as being a key ingredient in that life. They also present an arresting

(07:00):
illustration of what Roman society valued, one that has proved irresistibly glamorous to
artists and film makers from the early nineteenth century onwards, fascinated by the paradox of
contemplating the social powerlessness and prowess of the fighters; their vulnerability to death,
and their imposing self-mastery. And I’m going into some detail here because it was in the

(07:23):
arena that much of early Christianity, arguably, was forged, as those condemned to die as martyrs
fought wild beasts, offering a spectacle of Roman — but also Christian — fortitude.
Whether through speech or action, questioning of the Roman hierarchy was not uncommon. The
belief system of Christianity, however, would question its very foundations.

(07:48):
The second through fourth centuries saw a profound transformation, and profound upheavals,
in the Roman world as a result of the rise of Christianity as a universal religion. As we’ve
seen, religion, flexible and syncretic, was a powerful source of identity for the Romans,
from the temples of misty Britain to the mystery cults of the Middle East. The growing numbers

(08:12):
of Christians, as a minority incapable of assimilation, were a disturbing anomaly… and
a useful scapegoat. As the Christian author Tertullian wrote in the late second century:
“If the Tiber overflows or the Nile doesn’t, if there is a drought or an earthquake, a famine or

a pestilence, at once the cry goes up (08:30):
Throw the  Christians to the lions!” For context
is the river that flows through the center of Rome. So if it floods, you suddenly have a public
health disaster, flooded apartment buildings, a bunch of displaced people, and washed-out streets.
The Nile, of course, is responsible for the fertility of Egypt… which grew a lot of the grain

(08:52):
on which the empire and the city of Rome depended. So if it didn’t flood regularly, food shortages
and food distribution crises were not far behind. Early Christianity was diverse, doctrinally and
socially. Even as a very incoherent whole, however, it presented a challenge to Roman
identity and administration, and a very useful scapegoat for the empire’s extended turmoil.

(09:16):
The Great Persecution under the infamous Diocletian, in the late third century,
was a galvanizing and traumatic event. It contributed to the centrality of martyrdom in
early Christian identity. Saints and martyrs were made in the arenas and celebrated in
sermons and liturgies. They occur in some of the earliest surviving Christian texts

(09:38):
we have. We even have one remarkable text, written as an autobiography by Perpetua,
a woman from Carthage in what is now Tunisia, about her own experience of imprisonment and
the anticipation of martyrdom (it was completed by the person she gave the manuscript to.) These
persecutions, coming shortly before the legalization of Christianity,

(09:59):
can be a hard series of events to make sense of. But consider that both the persecutions of
Diocletian, and the legalization of this inconvenient religion under Constantine,
were attempts to make Christianity and Christians fit into the Roman Empire and Roman identity.
Diocletian was a ruthless strategist and a highly effective legislator. He was tasked with forming

(10:23):
or reforming an administrative system that had a hope of succeeding throughout the vast
expanse of the Empire, from Egypt and Asia Minor to Britain. That’s a very long frontier
to defend. The tetrarchy would prove to be of signal importance in the centuries ahead;
it assured continuities in difficult times, if it also sometimes led to conflict.

(10:43):
Still, Rome had plenty of conflict to deal with: the depredations of the Goths, and the
rival empire of Zenobia in Palmyra, are just a few examples. The upheavals under Commodus also
led to long-term destabilization, both economic and political. And as if all that weren’t enough…
there were the Christians. Now, Constantine’s influence in establishing and changing the

(11:07):
church as a whole would not have been what it was had he not been successful in other ways.
He lavished time, money, and imperial and ecclesiastical architecture on both Rome
and Constantinople, maintaining a strong imperial presence in both West and East,
careful to make sure that no part of the vast empire could consider itself neglected.

(11:30):
Now, a lot of scholars have spilt a lot of ink on the fraught question of Constantine’s relationship
to Christianity. It’s a complicated subject in part because the account of the events that
led him to legalize Christianity was, of course, created after the fact. Diocletian had created the

tetrarchy to help govern Rome’s vast expanse:  there was an emperor and a backup or deputy, (11:47):
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essentially, in both east and west. But Maxentius challenged Constantine for leadership of the
empire, which led to a massive rhetorical conflict, as well as a literal military
confrontation, about who the superior Roman emperor was. So in the story of how Constantine

(12:10):
had strange dreams, accurately interpreted by Christian priests rather than those of other gods,
we see the rhetoric of how his experiences are like those of other Roman emperors.
Eusebius, the historian who tells us about this, has a lot of rhetorical work to do. Because the
case to be made is that Christianity can support — rather than undermining — Roman virtue. So

(12:36):
Constantine becomes, rhetorically, the virtuous emperor defeating a tyrant. He visits all the
provinces. He creates “loud proclamations and monumental inscriptions” to make sure
everyone knows about his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. He’s very careful about

(12:56):
interpreting and publicizing supernatural signs. And in receiving instruction in Christianity,
he’s showing humility and wisdom, not just… being weird. Maxentius the tyrant,
meanwhile, is iniquitously using magic. And Christian women can show the same heroic
chastity that Roman women always have. The triumphal arch Constantine created in Rome,

(13:21):
representing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, is perhaps the most conspicuous way in which he
claims continuity with earlier emperors, their triumphs, and their architecture.
The Council of Nicaea, a gathering of bishops and other ecclesiastical and secular officials,
nominally commissioned by Constantine, served to articulate a shortlist of the essentials of

(13:43):
Christian belief, that would come known as the Nicene creed, in the early fourth century. Even
as the texts and ideas of Christianity became — very gradually, and very partially — theoretically
standardized, religious cultures of the late Roman empire remained richly hybrid. People didn’t stop
believing in the prophetic power of dreams, the importance of carefully performed ritual,

(14:07):
or the presence of evil spirits because a new religion was on the scene.
In the nineteenth century and beyond, it was very popular to speak of the Roman Empire as falling
dramatically. Tony Grafton’s description of it “going into reverse gear” is in fact much more
apt. But in its own time, this dissolution was a source of major cultural upheaval,

(14:28):
as we see in Augustine of Hippo’s “City of God.” Augustine was — and is! — one of Christianity’s
most famous converts, and most influential thinkers. In the “City of God,” he explains
at some length why the faith should not be linked to political power. This was a direct response,
of course, to the fact that Constantine had not only legalized Christianity but had gone on to

(14:51):
make it Rome’s state religion. For approximately a century, Christianity was more firmly linked
to political power than it ever would be in medieval Europe, clichés to the contrary.
And Augustine, writing in the years after the sack of Rome in 410, is saying that trying to
line up political structures with religious ideas is fundamentally misguided. This is a

(15:14):
very un-Roman formulation. Rome, he writes, was founded in bloodshed, and driven by the desire
to dominate. And, crucially, he says this is a bad thing. The city of God, on the other hand,
“is rooted in a love of God,” and all citizens of that eternal city “serve one another in charity.”

In other words, says Augustine (15:37):
nobody panic! It’s  true that Rome appears to be coming to an end.
But this is just a clay model. We can move on. We can continue to perfect ourselves. The reward of
holiness is not to be found in earthly power. Early Christian ideas were developed and

(15:59):
articulated not least in the writings of Jerome, the influential cardinal who translated the bible

into the language of the people (16:05):
Latin. It’s  this accessibility which gave his translation
the name of the Vulgate. He also corresponded prolifically with other ecclesiastical officials,
and with religious women, both individuals and groups. The roles of women in early Christianity,
indeed, were remarkable for their diversity, despite the not-infrequent ambivalence of men

(16:29):
towards women’s influence. Deaconesses controlled the distribution of resources within the church;
and communities of women like those to which Jerome wrote chose to devote themselves to
prayer and social service — independent, be it noted, of men! We know of one such woman, Egeria,
who went on a pilgrimage from her home somewhere in France or Spain all the way to Jerusalem.

(16:54):
These are but a few examples of how, in the aftermath of an empire that spanned four centuries
and three continents, Christianity forged new connections across the formerly Roman world.
This and all of our Footnoting History episodes are available captioned on our

YouTube channel. Until next time, remember:  the best stories are always in the footnotes. (17:10):
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