Paul who founded Christian churches in Asia Minor and Greece. Eventually, he took his teachings to Rome itself. The early converts to Christianity in Ancient Rome faced many difficulties. The first converts were usually the poor and slaves as they had a great deal to gain from the Christians being successful.
If they were caught, they faced death for failing to worship the emperor. It was not uncommon for emperors to turn the people against the Christians when Rome was faced with difficulties.
In AD 64, part of Rome was burned down. Eventually working his way into favor with Vespasian, Josephus returned to Rome where he remained for the rest of his life, writing assiduously on behalf of his people, perhaps to make amends for what many Jews considered to be traitorous behavior during the revolt.
Henceforth, in their own land, the Jews would have only the rights allowed to all Jews in the Diaspora. The Jews of Rome did not lose their special privileges, but they, like the Jews in Judea, suffered the outrage of a tax imposed on them by Vespasian.
After the soldiers of Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, the funds contributed by Jews from all over the world for the upkeep of their Temple were diverted to the support of the Roman Capitoline Temple of Jupiter. The tax was a small one, amounting to only about two denarii a year, a sort of poll tax, similar to a tax imposed at the same time on people from Alexandria and Asia, and the equivalent to the traditional contribution of a half-shekel in Palestine.
The Jewish Temple revenues augmented the imperial treasuries that had been depleted by Nero's extravagances, but the use to which the fiscus Iudaicus was applied was meant particularly to punish all the Jews for their stubborn resistance to Hellenization and Romanization. The sacrilege of this forced support of a pagan temple made it unbearable to the Jews.
When Domitian succeeded his brother Titus as emperor, the tax, levied even on Jewish women and children, was extended to include non-practicing or secret Jews, proselytes, or anyone merely accused of Jewish sympathies. It was enforced vigorously and viciously, even against Roman citizens who may have been exempted from the tax by Vespasian.
False denunciations of non-Jews began to proliferate, for personal, business, or political reasons, causing trouble for them in public life and with tax assessors.
The benevolent Emperor Nerva C. During Nerva's reign, a bronze sestertius was struck, bearing on the reverse side the words, "Fisci Iudaici Calumnia Sublata [the slander relating to the tax on Jews has been eliminated]" accompanied by a palm tree, a symbol of Judaism and the Jews. This inscription referred to Nerva's prohibition of excessive and unfair application of the tax and to his determination to stop the blackmail of innocent citizens with the threat of denunciation to the tax assessors.
Although the tax was not abolished until C. The Emperor Hadrian C. The ban was directed not only at the Jews, but also at other peoples of the empire, mostly from the East, who practiced circumcision in a way, he simply broadened an early edict of Domitian against castration, which had nothing at all to do with the Jews.
Hadrian's ban interfered with a deeply significant ritual act that had been basic to the Hebrew religion since the third millennium B. More significantly, it might also have deterred many non-Jewish men from any inclination to convert to Judaism. Hadrian's successor, Antoninus Pius C. During his reign, Hadrian established a Roman colony in Jerusalem, named Aelia Capitolina in honor of his family and Jupiter Capitolinus, the greatest of the Roman gods.
Jerusalem thus suffered the ultimate desecration in Jewish eyes when a temple dedicated to Jupiter was built on the holy site of their ruined Temple. Hadrian's inflammatory acts led to intensifying antagonism that precipitated the disastrous Bar Kochba Revolt C. Alon examined Hadrian's attitudes toward the Jews in the light of historical sources and recent scholarship and observed that, like others who tried to rule over the Jews, Hadrian was frustrated by the persistent Jewish unrest that seemed invariably to be made worse by Roman efforts to keep order.
Like many newly founded Roman towns in the provinces, or established cities taken over after a conflict and Romanized, Aelia Capitolina was now largely inhabited by retired Roman soldiers who had already spent a long term of service in the Roman encampment there. They were given local property as a reward and encouraged to settle permanently.
The historic city became off-limits for Jews who, from then on, could enter Jerusalem only once a year to mourn the loss of their city at the Wailing Wall. Under the Severan dynasty , which succeeded the Antonines, the founding of new cities and changes in administration brought extended gentile control over certain areas in Palestine.
The Galilee, which was mostly Jewish, was one of the few districts that remained exempt from Hellenization. Yet, the overall position of the Jews improved: they could hold public office and were allowed to practice their religion freely.
Also, the evidence of considerable synagogue construction and reconstruction in some areas and the apparent personal wealth of some of the Jewish population as reflected in lavish funerary appointments in the Beth She'arim catacombs, indicates that there was economic recovery from the preceding periods of conflict. His respect for the Jews and the Christians alike led him to keep representations of Abraham and Christ with images of other legendary figures in his palace shrine.
There are no records of the post-Severan imperial treatment of the Roman Jews until the reign of Constantine C. Under Constantine, Christianity was officially recognized as the Roman state religion, and the capitol of the Empire was moved to Constantinople in the East. In C. But he went beyond Jesus, who had only preached to Jews. Relaxing the rules This meant taking a more relaxed approach to ancient Jewish laws about food and circumcision. It was a slap in the face for Jewish tradition, but it was also the central reason for the rapid spread of Christianity.
As the Christian movement began to accept non-Jewish members, it moved further away from the strict rules imposed on Jews. In so doing, it gradually became a new and separate religion. An easy target Despite its growing popularity, Christianity was sometimes misunderstood and membership could bring enormous risks. What matters to the issue at hand here is that he converted to some sort of Christianity at some point during his life.
The story goes that he'd had a vision of the cross before one of the crucial battles in the civil wars that brought him to power, and on that cross was written in hoc signo vince , "With this ensign, conquer! But close examination of the historical evidence from the day muddies the waters considerably, suggesting this is an invented history since it's confirmed only long after the fact and then by sources with a direct interest in promoting the emperor's allegiance to Christian belief.
The truth is, Constantine was only finally baptized on his deathbed, and his biography hardly constitutes a model of the good Christian life. Whatever the what-really-happened, this emperor's adoption of Christianity stopped once and for all the persecution of Christians in the West. If, in issuing the Edict of Milan in , Constantine did not go so far as to declare Rome a Christian state, he did enforce a policy of official neutrality in Christian affairs.
Under his regime, Christians were free at last to speak as themselves in public without fear of reprisal or torture and, more important, to worship as they wished. It was surely his hope that the Edict of Milan and a general posture of tolerance would help restore order within the government and the state.
Just the opposite happened. By sanctioning Christianity, Constantine quickly learned that he had made himself an important figure in the Church and, like any influential "board member," he was now obliged to give his advice on matters of consequence which, as it turned out, were all there seemed to be in this religion. The Christian Church in his day was, in fact, boiling over with controversy, and Constantine—much to his surprise and, no doubt, dismay—found himself having to render judgment about complex theological issues.
If anyone ever in history was poorly prepared or ill-equipped to debate the nature of the Trinity, it was this lucky bastard. The evidence is unclear about Constantine's motivations for adopting the Christian religion. Part of him must have believed in it, part of him must have believed it would help bind together a fractured society, and part of him surely hoped that from it would rise a new brand of soldier pledged to follow the Emperor's cross-encrusted signum into victory.
If so, his conversion turned out to offer the mere mirage of peace and order, for not only did his investment in Christianity embroil Roman government in doctoral-dissertation-level religious disputes, but it seriously alienated the many who refused to join the Church, those traditional pagans who still constituted the majority of Romans , the conservatives of their day.
What's particularly compelling in all this is that, while the city of Rome and its urban counterparts across the late classical world were splintering into gangs and cults and various interest groups, life and religion in the countryside, where the vast majority of people under Roman sway lived throughout antiquity, changed remarkably little as far as we can tell. There, the worship of local gods and spirits persisted, even as countless armies marched by and revolutions revolved.
Well past Roman times and into the Middle Ages, these so-called pagan beliefs carried on. Indeed, Charlemagne's Christ as late as the eighth century met more than one Thor on the battlefield of gods. It's important, then, to note that most of the phenomena we think of as Roman, including Christianity, were features of life in municipal Rome, the life which urban, not rural Romans knew.
Furthermore, to many Christians in the day, especially Church administrators, there were "heathens" inside their ranks, too. Because much acrimonious debate surrounded the formation of the hierarchy which ultimately came to govern the early Church, this antagonism tended to center around what constituted being a "good upstanding Christian. Fascinating, isn't it, that even back then "choice" was a word around which the winds of controversy swirled?
One of the earliest and most prominent of the heretical groups denounced by Church officials was a class of believers called the Gnostics. In evidence as early as the second century CE, they represented not so much an organized sect as a motley collection of alternative Christians whose views on the nature of Jesus and the lessons of his ministry differed broadly, sometimes directly contradicting each other as much as the Church.
To many of the bishops and saints who held the reins of the burgeoning Christian community at that time, these factions represented a real—if not the real—enemy. Because of the diversity it embraced, it's impossible to sum up Gnostic theology quickly or simply.
Nor does it help that the Church's condemnation did not allow a single Gnostic scripture to survive intact from antiquity. This cache of fifty-two scriptures included several works by Gnostic authors whose "gospels" were later censured and censored by the Church. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi trove, most of these writings had survived only in tattered fragments, several completely lost.
But with their resurrection came a whole new insight into the complexity of Christianity's early years and growth as a religion. As Elaine Pagels says p. Yet even the fifty-two writings discovered at Nag Hammadi offer only a glimpse of the complexity of the early Christian movement.
We now begin to see that what we call Christianity—and what we identify as Christian tradition—actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others.
Now, for the first time, we have the opportunity to find out about the earliest Christian heresy; for the first time, the heretics can speak for themselves. To give just a brief glimpse of the scope of this "heresy," most Gnostics write about Jesus in less literal terms than orthodox scriptures. To them, the real world was evil, incapable of either containing or deriving from a true divinity.
Thus, Jesus wasn't really among us, but just seemed to be. Gnostics subscribed to the notion that those who met this god in real life saw him only with the crude instruments of sensation humans possess—eyes and ears—and these crude tools of perception had misled them grossly.
What they had really encountered was merely a specter of Jesus' actual presence, a shadow of his true luminous godhead. This meant Jesus' suffering on the cross was not the point of his life and ministry. To many Gnostics, he was far too removed from the material world to feel human pain.
In this context, wearing a crucifix makes little sense; waving it around in battle even less. Nor does baptism. One Gnostic author remarks on how people "go down into the water and come up without having received anything"—that is, they just get wet—and with this, martyrdom cannot carry special meaning, either.
But the heart of the controversy between the Gnostics and the Church centered around the value of bishops and priests, and whether there was any need for clergy at all. To many non-orthodox Christians, such things were "waterless canals," without any definitive basis in what Jesus was verified to have said. Instead, wholesome Christians must find their own way to heaven by exploring their personal feelings, not participating in empty rituals bearing no clear sanction from Christ.
Or, in the words of the Gnostic teacher Theodotus , "each person recognizes the Lord in his own way, not all alike. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as "heresy"; ideas which implicitly support it become "orthodox. What Gnostics saw as the model for a better way to heaven were Jesus' miracles which to them hinted at his supernatural essence.
They preached also that the knowledge of self was the knowledge of God, saying "When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. Referring to Mary Magdalene as one of Christ's disciples, the Gnostic Gospel of Mary envisions her as the foremost of the apostles and calls her the "woman who knew the All.
All in all, it was a very different take on Christian thinking than that endorsed by the Church politic. Indeed, to more than one theological expert in the last century, the discovery of the Gnostic scriptures has proven nothing less than shocking, especially in how profoundly at odds the Gnostics were with what later evolved into the standard view. More confusing yet was that so complex and radically diverse a system of thought existed so early in the Christian tradition, and that was nowhere near the end of radical thinking in the first few centuries of the religion's evolution.
In the later stages of the Roman Empire, neither pagans nor Gnostics proved the fiercest foe the early Church would face. Because in principle Gnostics refused to act collectively, they made an easy target for the clergy's growing intolerance toward internal diversity.
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