One is not born a Christian, one becomes a Christian.
Tertullian
The Gospels affirmed that one found oneself by losing oneself in something greater than self alone. A good cause or movement, an institution such as the army, a project, ambition, or goal, gave purpose and discipline. Having left the army, veterans felt a loss but also a freedom new to them. Profession may help define what we are but who we are is determined by our relationships with other people.
Because of their status and pay, relatively few soldiers were able to maintain a family life. Neither did the wealthy in power reproduce themselves as a class. The third or more of the populace who were slaves did not reproduce their numbers. The effect of epidemics on this already fragile population structure was devastating.
Soldiers turned to religious groups for support. The secret cult of the war god Mithra, ironically a Persian deity of Rome’s most dangerous foe, bonded many officers, officials and important merchants in fraternity. Hundreds of its shrines have been brought to light by archaeologists. All are small as befit an exclusive society. Persian violation of its international fraternity with Valerian’s fall occasioned the near cessation of building of new Mithraic shrines.
Christianity, too, offered a support network but was open to all ranks. It also offered a much better opportunity to meet women.
Romans pressed by circumstances redefined family. Soldiers without sons often adopted slaves they made their heirs; the centurion at Capernaum who asked Jesus to heal his servant was perhaps an example. Familia in Latin included household slaves. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Germanic chiefs physically struck household servants, an act unthinkable to a proper Roman. A master’s children commonly called adult household slaves Uncle or Aunty.
Widows were socially pressured to soon remarry so that their children would not have to support them.
Originally, all property had been inherited by the eldest son, ensuring family solidarity in the Roman Republic. In the Empire, property was equally divided among all heirs in the absence of a will. Individualism and economic competition were promoted, a new freedom to some, anti-social egotism to others. Meanwhile, many plantation owners denied slaves a family life and regarded the children of the farm workers as useless expenses, preferring to buy adult slaves. As plantations grew larger, consuming smaller farms, families withered.
Abandonment of infants, especially girls, was quite common. Alumnus meant an abandoned child adopted and raised to be sold by a slave dealer. The parental drowning or strangulation of infants was entirely legal. Yet policy was contradictory; parents of three or more children were given privileges and at times governmental bonuses. The death rate among children was devastating.
Under Augustus there were seventy-seven senators who had inherited office. Some seventy years later there were only four. The meek inherited the earth however poorly society prepared them to maintain it.
Many factors combined to weaken the Empire but the dwindling population was probably the most erosive. Death by disease would become too common for historians to notice.
Marriage to Romans of the Empire was neither a religious institution nor a romantic one. Lucretius the atheist, Seneca the Stoic and Plutarch, the priest of Eleusis, similarly viewed passion in marriage as ‘inappropriate’ and advised brides to be grateful if their husband was unfaithful. Legally, wives remained under the guardianship not of their spouse but their father or his appointee. A wife could have her own property, although her husband took possession of her dowry.
Sex was blatant and confrontational. Images of male genitalia hung from shop doorways. Prostitutes’ prices were written on the walls of wine shops. In the city of Rome, metal tokens for free admission to the brothels were handed out by the government, along with bread and wine to the fathers of families on welfare.
The impact of Roman law discouraged having large families lest the heirs had less to inherit. The government heavily taxed unmarried men between twentyfive and sixty years of age and unmarried women between twenty and fifty years of age and forbid them from attending the public games. They could not inherit from outside their family. Divorcees had to remarry within six months, widows within twelve. Bachelors and spinsters were rare. Indeed, there was no Latin word for an unmarried woman.
Retired military officers invited other veterans to join their households; men who had served them as staff, bodyguards or well regarded subordinates and their families. When Peter baptized the centurion Cornelius and ‘all his household’ there can be little doubt that this was the situation.
The officers retired to Jerusalem would have brought with them an entourage of kin, servants, comrades, trusted and familiar veterans, their familiars and friends.
Roman Jerusalem was the military veteran’s colony of Aelia Capitolina. The city was destroyed in the revolt against Rome of 66–70AD, its population killed or enslaved and deported. Nevertheless, by 132 imperial decree, Jews had largely resettled the city. That year, the Emperor Hadrian ordered a temple of Jupiter built in the city to prepare it to become an army colony. Once again, Israel arose in revolt, this time led by Bar Kochba, who claimed to be the Messiah.1 He attacked anyone opposing his absolute leadership. The result was further tragedy for the Jewish people.
Hadrian forbid circumcision of converts to Judaism2 and renewed the prohibition of Jewish settlement in the city. Judaism turned in upon itself, its missionary impetus of the first century greatly diminished. By the third century Jerusalem was again largely Jewish in population, with Roman prohibitions unenforced, but only one synagogue existed where there had been hundreds.
Before the first revolt Christians had attended the temple and synagogues as one among many Jewish sects. Between the two revolts a daily prayer, the Twelfth Benediction or Birkat ha-Minim, ‘May the Nazarenes and the heretics be suddenly destroyed and removed from the Book of Life,’ was added to synagogue ritual.3 Nazarene was the word for Christian used by the high priest Ananias in the Acts of the Apostles. Thereafter, Christians no longer attended Judaic ceremonies.
Legionary badges on coinage with images of the god Serapis or the sphinx reveal that most of the city’s veterans were from Egypt’s Legio II Traiana or Alexandrianae fleet marine.4 The emblem of a wheel, rumblings identified with thunder, suggest the presence also of retirees of the Legio XII Fulminata, the ‘thunderstruck’ legion, unique as Christian in sympathies.
Aelia Capitolina was reduced in area and population like cities throughout the Empire by the third century. Between its ruined outer walls, colonnaded tileroofed streets crossed the city from the Jaffa and from the Damascus gates.5 Confined by the south-western wall was the old camp of Legio X Ferrata. The temple of Jupiter, an ‘abomination of desolation’ to believers, stood upon the Jewish-built Temple Mount, the largest manmade platform in the world. A great temple of Aphrodite, the patroness of whores, faced it from the west. A theatre, public baths and a racetrack were additional Roman constructions.
The whereabouts of the churches in the city at the time awaits the archaeologist’s trowel. Probably, the veterans’ colony was near the headquarters of Legio X Ferrata, today a parking lot next to Jerusalem’s National Auditorium. The retirees were free to live in other districts. What would become the churches of St Sabas, a military martyr, and that of St James were probably somewhere between the south-western wall and the military camp.6
The city’s population was quite poor. Jerusalem’s Christians were a minority divided into minorities. Some were Ebionites7 who demanded that every detail of kosher law, circumcision, Jewish holidays and customs be obeyed by Christians of gentile origin. In contrast, Greeks developed Monophytism, propounding that Christ was a vision, never flesh and blood, and, therefore, never a Jew. Both sects drifted away from the rest of Christians. The Nazarenes8 or Jacobites followed the Ebionites in their own lives but made no such demands upon gentile Christians. Approved by Peter and Paul, they held themselves to be truly Jews and truly Christians. In the first revolt most had died rather than abandon their countrymen, although convinced that the revolt was doomed.
Judaism and Christianity had entered upon separate paths. Christ’s teachings were the expansion of Judaic ideas. Christianity moved from its Judaic roots at peril. Much in the Gospels assumed a Jewish sense of values. Jesus’ admonition to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself ’ presumed a healthy self-respect. Some gentiles ‘loved’ neighbours as themselves, despising both.
Jesus broke with paganism’s unity of church and state and ethnic or class exclusiveness. He refused worldly power. Instead of physical and social coercion, he demanded a free choice to reject evil. He asserted the equal importance of every soul. His answer as to why God allows suffering was his own suffering, an example where words might not have moved souls.
In Hebrew, nepes, soul, literally meant breath – spirit intrinsically related to the body. The earthiness of Judaic belief enabled it to soar spiritually without losing balance. Greek philosophy, despite athletics and nakedness in art, despised the flesh, the ‘corruptible clay’ entrapping human spirit. The psyche was literally a butterfly, free of its decaying bodily cocoon.
In Jewish life education in a craft and biblical study were both demanded. Learning was all the more essential to Jewish devotion after the destruction of the temple and its rituals. That Jews scattered throughout the Empire did not lose their identity after the temple’s destruction was an extraordinary achievement.
A Roman might be Italian, Celt, Moor, Greek, Semite, Aethiopus, German, Egyptian, Slav or any one of dozens of tribes. A Christian was a citizen of a universal institution, catholicos, also but by choice, not birth. The ‘Mother Church’ as even the hostile pagan Celsus described it emphasized doctrine not only because truth was one but because keeping a lot as ethnically diverse as the faithful together demanded unity of belief. Judaism could tolerate sectarianism since most Jews shared a common ancestry. Christians did not.
To some degree, both religion and politics tend to reflect family values writ large.
God as Abba, father in Hebrew, remained unique to Judaic and Christian creed, a term of intimacy and affection perhaps better translated as Daddy. Psychology can be applied to both religious believers and atheists. A survey of modern philosophers hostile to religion reveals that most lacked a father in childhood or had one who was dysfunctional.9 Christians who risked their lives to hide Jews in World War II typically spoke with admiration of their parents.
All Roman public assemblies were illegal unless licensed. Permission was hard to obtain. Many towns were denied volunteer fire companies or athletic clubs from fear that any association might cover a plot to revolt. As family life withered, so did private organizations, with the exception of the Christian Church.
The members of that strange cult named for an executed carpenter hid from public scrutiny. Like Jews, they avoided gladiatorial games, the theatre, official ceremonies and the restaurants where the meat was from animals slaughtered with pagan prayers. To pagans this prompted the accusation first flung at Jews, that Christians ‘hated life’. They admitted to drinking the blood of their god and eating his flesh. Some Christian heretical sects had bizarre sexual practices as churchmen acknowledged.10 ‘You can find them in the morning amidst the haze of the garbage dumps, scurrying away like rats with some poor wailing babe carried off to who knows what awful fate,’ a pagan wrote. Infants were commonly abandoned by pagans in the garbage dumps and adopted by Christians. Others were seized to be raised and sold as orphan slaves, alumni by businessmen.
Christians, in abandoning the gods of their forebears, seemed unstable. Divisive religious and ethnic rivalries strengthened and necessitated Roman rule as policeman. An international creed was feared as undermining it.
When creed was from birth, reflection could be minimal. Converts often confronted persecution with more courage than people raised in faith from childhood. They had already made a considered and stressful decision in breaking away from their upbringing.
Rebellion without awareness of one’s own limitations readily becomes arrogance even as faith without doubt can become delusional. A personal morality without community could become a contempt for humanity. Consciencia was ideas shared.
Humilitas in Latin was to know oneself, to be aware of one’s limitations, virtues, likes and dislikes. The centurion at Capernaum had told Jesus:
I am not worthy to receive you under my roof. That is why I did not presume to come to thee myself. My servant will be healed if you will only command it. I too know what it is to obey authority; I have soldiers under me and I say go to one man and he goes or come to another and he comes.11
Humilitas was not false modesty. Conversion required humilitas to find one’s identity. To acknowledge one’s own guilt if lacking in self-esteem is crushing if no one is forgiving. Mercy, forgiveness, in Hebrew hesed, was what Christ above all else demanded.12
Without forgiveness, fearing retaliation, a person might continue in evil. Forgiveness, however, requires an admission of guilt. To forgive those with no remorse and in denial could encourage evil. The cycle of victim becomes victimizer was to be broken; truth, acceptance of responsibility, trust in selfworth and mercy, repentance and forgiveness were key to the healing process. Forgiveness was to be granted ‘seven times seventy’, according to Jesus’ answer to Peter.13
Stoic philosophy, pantheistic and abstract, scorned all emotions. Recognizing neither tragedy nor comedy, it sought to elevate the mind to ignore the body.14 Many pagan religions, in contrast, demanded masochistic orgies of torture and mutilation in expiration for sin. Manichaeanism,15 like the heresies of Gnosticism and Montanism, viewed everything material to be irretrievably of the realm of evil, whether sex, family, business, politics or society. None of these creeds had organizations involved in charitable activities.
Research among twentieth century religious converts reveals that most people are not strongly attached to a new creed’s beliefs until after their conversion.16 Few are originally members of any denomination, but few also are from a family with no religious identity. Typically, the potential convert feels powerless, lonely and vulnerable and is critical of society’s injustices. He or she may seek a more liberal creed than that of strict parents or, if emotionally troubled, one more severe. It is the network of personal relationships with believers and their practical assistance that usually bring the convert within the religious group. Exceptions to these patterns presumably mark converts of especially intellectual or individual character.
Sacrifice of some personal desires can have rewards for community.
Amidst epidemics, Christians treated the sick regardless of creed. The famed pagan Roman medical doctor, Galen, who admitted abandoning his patients amidst plague and fleeing Rome, called Christians tending the ill ‘naturally courageous’.17 Most people stricken by epidemic recovered if given continued aid in their weakened condition. While some Christians tending the sick died, others acquired immunities, which, unknowingly, they spread in their community.18
Paganism seemed helpless to console in such disasters. Its religion had no doctrine to urge benevolence towards strangers. Its loyalties were exclusive. Bereft of loved ones and enabled to recover by Christians, some pagans were probably attracted to their community.
The faith spread most quickly in cities because of the ease of communicating with large audiences, but also because the Church provided a network of sorely needed social welfare amidst people uprooted and confused. The homeless, unemployed, orphans, widows, ill and aged received concrete aid as well as spiritual.
The early Christians followed Jewish principles in opposing abortions and infanticides, increasing their numbers. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that Jewish condemnation of the killing of unwanted infants was an example of their ‘sinister and revolting’ practices.19 Most victims of infanticide were girls, causing a disproportionate male majority in pagan society.20 Women were the majority of Church members. Intermarriage usually resulted in children being raised in the faith.
Pagans regarded unmarried women with contempt even if they were their daughters, according to the poet Catullus.21 Widows were pressured to remarry although they would lose their inheritance. The fewer heirs, the better for the rest, was the mentality of many upper class Romans.
Early Christianity was sexually revolutionary in encouraging people to marry for love, regardless of slavery, class, parental arraignments or ethnic origin. The Church also gave both men and women an option frowned upon in paganism, the freedom to remain celibate.
Women in the Church frequently remained single rather than marry men chosen by pagan parents. Many took active leadership as deaconesses. The marriage of a free person with a slave or ex-slave or an aristocrat with a commoner was illegal under Roman law. The Church permitted it, leaving the legal inheritance in confusion. Slaves could not legally marry, yet the Church insisted that their union was sacrosanct, setting slaves against their masters.
Paul, following Jewish law, allowed converts to divorce hostile spouses whose bitterness thereafter can be well imagined.22 In mixed marriages partners might love one other, but could barely tolerate one another’s beliefs. Husband and wife, parents and children, siblings and in-laws might be religiously divided. Death did not bury the discord. Christians were buried in Church cemeteries, not with their pagan families. Children became bones of contention between parents of different beliefs.
Women greatly influenced men to enter the community of believers. Army wives, living far from their families, needed wits and independence of spirit. A soldier depended upon his wife’s fidelity and good judgment. With the social network of the ecclesia to aid her, he could feel more secure. For many the Church was, in effect, family.
‘Who is grateful would be generous had he the means’ was the proverb of the North African slave and playwright Terence. Gratitude is perhaps the purest of all religious motives.
A person had to be introduced to the ecclesia by a trusted member. The catechumen or novice was not allowed to attend the sacred meal nor receive any other sacrament until baptism. Fearing official informers and cultic thrill seekers, the ecclesia was so secretive that persecutors were shocked to discover Christians among family and close friends. Increasingly, knowledge of the faith was more than hearsay and held by someone familiar.
In Roman society the exploited unleashed their rage upon those worse exploited, the conquered aided in conquest of others, and slaves and citizens clashed in hatred, while Christianity preached that ‘Among us there is neither slave nor freeman, Greek or Jew, male or female…’23
Linus, the second Bishop of Rome, was a slave. Slaves generally lived lives not only physically harsh but psychologically barren, character and talent ignored unless profitable to the master. The Church offered opportunity to affirm ability, its ranks many: priests, scribes, healers, prophets, the deacons who handled all Church finances, teachers, singers and what might be termed volunteer social workers.
Quite likely, the veterans retired to Jerusalem because they were already of Christian persuasion. Denied baptism while on active duty, they were eligible when retired.
Belief in a hereafter was an essential of Christian faith, a belief that by the third century few pagan creeds but those of Egypt held and stoics despised. Plutarch described a priestess of Alexandria who strode through the streets with a flaming torch in one hand and a jug of water in the other, shouting that she would burn heaven and douse Hades so that people could act in pure moral freedom without expectation of reward or punishment.24 Virgil had written ‘Happy the man who has trodden under his feet fears and inexorable fate and the roar of greedy hell.’ Virtue to the stoic was its own reward, a dubious consolation to the victimized.
Plutarch’s priestess had admirable intent but ignored justice, an oversight in keeping with aristocratic values.
To many Romans, there was no responsibility, achievement, justice or freedom – only fate. Jesus insisted that although evil will happen, one must not be its agent. To some Romans this may have seemed egotism but to Christians one had a duly to save one’s own soul. Baptism was a heightened awareness rejecting evil. It was a free choice, a finding of self, not alone but as a member of a community of belief, consciencia.
Early Christians had a sober attitude towards ‘magical thinking’. The acts of the martyrs show that they expected no miracles to save them. In the church people prayed for healing but organized to care for the ill. Imprisoned martyrs not infrequently were visited by believers ready to use bribery and political pull to aid them.
The ruling class considered religion a necessity to keep the losers of society in their place. Why then object to Christianity? If it taught human equality, so did Stoicism. The faith was in accord with most Stoic morality, including that regarding slavery and rights of women.
Stoicism aspired to philanthropy but remained individualistic and unorganized. It was no threat to Empire. The Church was organized to deal with social problems the government ignored. The Church, not Christianity, seemed a threat to those in power.
The Roman upper class was profoundly conservative and authoritarian. It respected ancient creeds because their origins were beyond memory and criticism. Christianity was new, its potential unpredictable and immeasurable.
There were several forms of baptism. Martyrs were regarded as baptized ‘in blood’ if not in water: ‘red’ martyrs. Baptism by desire was to seek God according to one’s circumstances, even if unaware directly of Jesus’ teachings. Who obtained it was not for man to judge considering that, without the goodwill of many non-believers, Christians would have suffered much worse persecution.
The Church, to a convert like Mauricius, would not have seemed alien in culture. Its seven sacraments were comparable to the seven ranks of initiation of the pagan mystery cults. There were many cultural borrowings within the Church, including the Easter egg reminiscent of Osiris, the Egyptian god of resurrection, and the bowtie pretzel in the form of the hieroglyph for prayer baked for religious holidays. The wedding ring, holy water and Christmas tree were borrowings. The Church had no desire to crush native culture but adopted many of their usages.
As Paul clearly took for granted in his first letter to Timothy, most priests were married, ordained after the congregation approved. Priests elected the bishops with approval of the ecclesia. That word adopted from Greek originally meant not church but town meeting. Most centurions were chosen in much the same way. Bishops were expected to be celibate, separating from their wives if married. The administration of the Church closely paralleled Roman imperial organization. Curiously, in Gaul, where only the Celtic word garçon for servant or boy survived amidst Latin, administrative regions within each diocese would bear the names of the dozens of pre-Roman tribes.
Conversion, religious or otherwise, is rarely a one-way street. The stronger the religious imprint before Christianity, the more deeply it influenced the new faith. To win over a pagan priest or priestess to Christianity generally incorporated many of their followers. Like light through a stained glass window, every culture encountered to some degree coloured the new creed, not diminishing but enriching it. Most heresies were carry-overs from paganism rejected by the church.
A two or three-year period of probation was required before baptism, depending upon the bishop.25 The veterans had probably asked for baptism soon after arriving at Jerusalem, their convictions reinforced by their numbers. Usually, people were baptized in a group, once a year on Easter Sunday. About 279 or 280, clad in white, after spending the entire night in ceremony, some of the veterans received the sacrament in the light of early morning from the city’s bishop, Zabdas.
To violate their baptismal vows would be to them to lose their innermost being. Their faith did not make them selflessly mindless, but the more stubborn when crossed in conscience.
Mauricius and those with him probably never anticipated that they would return to army duty amidst the violent transformation of the Roman world.
To pagans ready to give honour to any creed demanded, seeing all as names for one, this was an arrogant independence. They saw themselves as tolerant, Christians and Jews were seen as exclusive but at least Jews honoured the religion of their ancestors as all should. Christians betrayed their own traditions and thus caused the distrust and resentment that conservative folk might feel toward them.
So those in governmental authority believed. They had the power to crush such dissonance.