Roman Imperial Texts: A Sourcebook

Annales

Introduction

This is a sourcebook of Roman texts for readers of the New Testament. It is a supplement to one’s reading of the New Testament, a tool to prompt consideration of how its texts relate to the Roman Empire and how the Christianities that grew out of the communities behind those texts came to relate to the state. A look at the texts and images from the Roman Principate that are roughly contemporary with the New Testament allows one to understand with more precision how these texts present Jesus as God’s Son, who brought good news for humanity, what functions the early churches reflected in the New Testament fulfilled and what challenges they experienced, and how the early Christians, as seen in the book of Revelation, experienced the expanding and tightening hold of Rome on their lives.

Part 1 of this book is primarily focused on the Gospels. Part 2 is primarily focused on the book of Acts and the letters of the New Testament—those written by Paul and those by others. Part 3 of the book is primarily focused on the book of Revelation. Readers seeking an efficient way to use this book might best begin with the section that covers the part of the New Testament on which they are focusing, though texts from throughout the New Testament are cited in each of the three parts below. New Testament texts appear in boldface in order for readers to find them easily, and this volume is indexed by ancient sources, names, and subjects, in order that readers might gain access as quickly as possible to material most useful for them.

The texts and images in this sourcebook come from the reigns of the emperors from Augustus to Hadrian (27 bce–138 ce). All New Testament scholars, even those who date Luke and Acts in the second century, would agree that by the death of Hadrian, most of the New Testament had been written. Some might date the Pastoral Letters later, but most would consider them to have been composed by 138 ce. So the collection in this sourcebook makes an attempt to provide texts and images roughly contemporary with the New Testament texts, from the period that we call the early Principate, a time period we shall consider in more detail at the beginning of Part 1.

Some interpretation is of course involved in the selection of texts and images in a sourcebook for New Testament readers. But I have made an effort not to articulate a specific relationship between a given New Testament text or author and the Roman texts or images found here. New Testament texts are aligned with Roman texts and images, but no assumption is made regarding whether the New Testament text is subverting or endorsing specific ideas found in the Roman texts. In this regard, Geza Vermes’s caution regarding how much one’s reconstruction of a background can be formed to fit a preconceived reading or an imagined foreground for a text must be remembered in our reading of these Roman texts and images.

[1]

These texts and images must be viewed as resources for a more complete context in our reading of the New Testament, not as focused evidence for a particular application of the canonical texts.

The suggestion that New Testament readers look to the Roman Empire is not new. Adolf Deissmann’s Light from the Ancient East and his Bible Studies looked explicitly to Hellenistic and Roman parallels to understand the language of the New Testament, as well as the Septuagint.

[2]

Today in New Testament scholarship, those who look to Roman parallels often do so as part of a political reading of the text. They assume that the New Testament texts are intentionally subverting the Roman Empire’s claims over the world.

[3]

The look to the Roman Empire is not a strategy unanimously valued among New Testament scholars, and therefore this sourcebook may be considered tendentious by some. John Barclay’s essay Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul makes the case that Paul did not oppose the Roman Empire as such.

[4]

Barclay, who therefore sees no point in looking expressly for anti-imperial texts in Paul, argues that Paul’s understanding of categories like the elemental powers of the world might include some aspects of the Roman Empire, but are much bigger than it was. He also understands Paul’s Letters as written explicitly to Christians, to be read in private assemblies; in contexts, that is, where Paul had no need to disguise his meaning through oblique references in order to keep himself or his congregations safe. Because they are private documents, Barclay finds no evidence in them of what James C. Scott has called hidden transcripts.

[5]

Barclay therefore finds it noteworthy that Paul says so little about the Roman emperor or other explicitly Roman ideas. But this argument from silence needs to be considered in light of the phenomenon that Paul usually does not name or directly mention opponents or people who are otherwise causing him problems. For example, all agree that Paul has specific people in mind in 2 Cor. 2:5-8; 11:12-15, though he does not name them. In an analogous way, Paul may have Roman authorities in mind in 1 Thess. 5:3, since here he quotes a slogan of the Roman Principate. And as a letter writer, Paul does not always explicitly state the major ideas that seem to be motivating his discourse. The texts of Rom. 1:13; 9:1-3; and Philem. 21 leave unidentified the significant ideas of fruit among the Romans, the basis of Paul’s grief over his fellow Jews, and what more he wants Philemon to do. If Paul can be enigmatic when referring to people who bother him or when describing his plans or his own grief, the supposed silence regarding Rome may not prove its insignificance to Paul. Authors do not mention those from whom they are trying to differ, as Harold Bloom shows so well.

[6]

Barclay admits that the diction of the New Testament includes terms that could be used in the propaganda of imperial Rome. But Barclay is reacting against the insistence by authors such as Richard A. Horsley and N. T. Wright that in certain New Testament texts, the human author is intentionally focusing the discourse specifically on the Roman Empire. In this context, Barclay’s caution remains a helpful reminder not to claim too much for any reconstruction of authorial intention. As for Barclay’s insistence that Paul’s Letters are private documents and thus would not carry hidden transcripts embedded within them, we might simply observe that Paul had very little control over who might read his letters after they were dispatched, especially if he knew at the time of composition that they would be read at different house churches (Rom. 16:3-5, 10-11) and if he or his associates encouraged the letters to be exchanged with other churches (Col. 4:16). Besides the question of Paul’s Letters, in a sourcebook like this we also seek a context for the narrative and apocalyptic material of the New Testament, whose original audiences seem even more difficult to delimit than the congregations that received Paul’s Letters.

Barclay’s insistence that the point of conflict evident in Paul’s Letters is between Paul and the polytheistic fabric of the Mediterranean world, rather than specifically with the Roman Empire, is a much-needed emphasis.

[7]

The elemental powers that oppress the world certainly include more than Rome (Gal. 4:9; Col. 2:15). The designated thesaurus for this sourcebook, the Roman Principate, must therefore not be mistaken to be the only political or religious context through which the New Testament should be read. The New Testament records the life of Jesus and the founding of the early church, events that occurred while the Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean. Decades later, when the texts that now compose our New Testament were written, this empire was still in power. But the contexts of Jewish culture, the Jewish Scriptures, and locally specific cultures throughout the Mediterranean world are also significant for any reading of the New Testament.

Still, the fact remains that the Roman Empire found something wrong with Paul, even if he did not oppose the Roman Empire as directly as N. T. Wright suggests. So if we follow Barclay in his claim that Paul is not intentionally subverting the Roman Empire in his letters, we are still left with a relationship of incompatibility between Paul the apostle to the nations and the Roman Empire. There is, therefore, some utility in a book that offers parallels between Roman texts and images from the Principate and New Testament texts. This sort of presentation at least allows one to read the New Testament in a new way, and it encourages one to think through how its texts are directly opposing (à la Deissmann or Wright) or ignoring (à la Barclay) the Roman Empire.

This book does not proceed on the basis of any reconstruction of authorial intention in New Testament texts with regard to the Roman Empire. It will thus be useful for someone who is influenced by writers like Wright or Crossan and Reed, who view an author like Paul as directly making a frontal attack on the Roman Empire in his letters. It will be equally useful for someone who is influenced by a point of view like Barclay’s. For either of these positions, so different in regard to reconstructing Paul’s conscious relation to Rome and yet so similar in attempting to argue for authorial intention, this book provides texts and images that might have analogous resonance with ideas in the New Testament. The reader is thus offered resources and stimuli for thinking and articulating the ways in which the New Testament frame of reference includes or omits Rome, in order to understand the New Testament better.

This book will also be useful for those who seek to understand the historical phenomenon of Christianity. It is no secret that by the fourth century of the Common Era, the universal vision of the Roman Republic and Empire had been co-opted by Christianity.

[8]

The book therefore provides opportunities for reflection on how the New Testament, whether its authors bought into the Principate’s categories or not, provided a frame of reference that allowed that to happen within just four centuries.

Primary texts allow us to escape the confining perspectives of our current moment. Yes, this sourcebook is responding to the current interest in the political dimensions of the New Testament. Yes, the selection of texts and images arises out of my idea that some of them are ideologically analogous to what we encounter in the New Testament. But no assumption is made that all of the parallels are analogous, and I leave it to each reader to decide if the parallels offered illuminate the New Testament texts in helpful ways. If some of the texts and images in the pages that follow are new to some readers, then these texts and images provide new windows onto the New Testament texts with the efficiency and freshness that only voices from outside our own world can provide. Readers will inevitably disagree regarding the relevance of one or more of these primary texts and images as supplements for New Testament readers. But even if selected primary texts or images do not prove a particular relationship between the New Testament and the worlds behind the text, such primary documents are useful for helping readers to discover a new world.

[9]

It remains for us to take and read these primary texts and images, in order that we might become more comprehensive and thoughtful readers of the New Testament.

Geza Vermes, Jewish Studies and New Testament Interpretation, in Jesus and the World of Judaism, ed. Geza Vermes (London: SCM, 1983), 58–73.

↵

G. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, trans. L. R. M. Strachan (German edition of 1922; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1927); Deissmann, Bible Studies: Contributions Chiefly from Papyri and Inscriptions to the History of the Language, the Literature, and the Religion of Hellenistic Judaism and Primitive Christianity, trans. Alexander Grieve (German editions of 1895 [Bibelstudien] and 1897 [Neue Bibelstudien]; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1901).

↵

N. T. Wright, Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire, in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, imperium, interpretation, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 160–83; John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’ Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004); Warren Carter, John and Empire: Initial Explorations (New York: T&T Clark, 2008); Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001); Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006); Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).

↵

John M. G. Barclay, Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul, in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Judaism, ed. John M. G. Barclay, WUNT 1/275 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 363–87, especially 383–85.

↵

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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John M. G. Barclay, Paul, Roman Religion and the Emperor: Mapping the Point of Conflict, in Barclay, Pauline Churches and Diaspora Judaism, 359, 361.

↵

Henry Chadwick, Christian and Roman Universalism in the Fourth Century, in Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity, Essays in Tribute to George Christopher Stead, ed. Lionel R. Wickham and Caroline P. Bammel, SuppVC 19 (Leiden: Brill 1993), 26–42.

↵

Arnoldo Momigliano, What Josephus Did Not See, in Pagans, Jews and Christians (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 108–19.

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1

1

Introduction

Divine Sons and Their Gospels

The Gospels in our New Testament are famously difficult to categorize as literature. Different from most biographies, they concentrate on events leading to Jesus’ death. The canonical Gospels differ among themselves on the best way to present Jesus’ teachings, and still again they differ from some of the more sayings-oriented Gospels produced by other Christians, such as the Gospel of Thomas.

But this unique status of the Gospels is our problem. In the first and second centuries of the Common Era, the word gospel, literally good announcement (the Greek word is euangelion, which was then fully accepted in Latin as the loan word euangelium), was used to describe what actions or events associated with various Roman emperors had occurred for the welfare of the world. Thus in the inscription from Priene, number 4 below, we read of the gospels—the announcements of good news—that the birth of the emperor Augustus brought to the world.

The Principate is the time period in which the Roman state came to officially designate one man, popularly called a princeps or first one, to lead its empire. The Principate is sometimes delimited to the period from the reign of Augustus through that of Marcus Aurelius (27 bce–180 ce); sometimes it is extended to the beginning of the reign of Diocletian, before the latter appointed others to join him in leading the empire (27bce–284 ce ). During either of these periods, the princeps, a single first one, was practically speaking the emperor of the Roman world, whether he refused the latter title and sought to keep the forms of the Republic—as seen in Augustus’s reign—or openly flaunted the Senate and any vestige of Republican government—as evident in records of Domitian’s reign.

The title son of god, divi filius, was routinely assigned to these Roman emperors. Any resident of the Mediterranean who applied the phrase to someone else was speaking in a politically charged environment, and perhaps would be heard as critiquing the reigning emperor, or at least recognizing that there was another source of goodness that approached what the emperor could offer. The imperial office was known as a benevolent source of resources for those who could not support themselves and for cities or peoples who needed financial aid for their region or for an athletic contest.

In this section, a variety of texts are offered that illuminate the New Testament’s Gospels. These Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written, copied, and canonized by those who regarded Jesus of Nazareth as a divine son who announced the kingdom of God in a way that meant good news for the world. The Romans had executed this person as a criminal, and yet his followers went on to use language and imagery that Roman propaganda of the first century typically reserved for the Roman emperor. This section of the sourcebook therefore seeks to help readers consider what the Gospels must have sounded like to those who first heard them—remember that most early Christians could not read—when they encountered them in the first or second centuries ce. We will see in these excerpts that the Roman emperors are described as destined to rule, ushering in a golden age, and as the benefactors of the whole world. Some of them were deified (or proclaimed to be divine) when their life on earth ended. All of the emperors we will mention participated in the religion of divine virtues, that is, the worship of certain qualities, such as Peace, Victory, Concord, Hope, and Faith as divine entities that should be worshiped. The imperial lexicon provided a helpful trove of linguistic resources that the earliest Christians adapted to celebrate and worship Jesus. We cannot prove how conscious the evangelists (the authors of our canonical Gospels) were of the imperially loaded language they used to describe Jesus, and this sourcebook makes no claim to read the intentions of New Testament authors. It is obvious that the evangelists and other New Testament authors faced quite a challenge in proclaiming Jesus to be divine, and his birth and life as good news, in a world where, for the majority of people, the Roman emperor was clearly the son of god and ultimate benefactor; a world that (to judge from these sources) was enjoying the golden age brought by Rome’s widening rule. Reading the New Testament Gospels alongside the texts and images of imperial Rome might help us hear them in a new way.

The Roman emperor is mentioned in a variety of places in the New Testament.

[1]

Despite the personal excesses and human limitations of the Roman emperors, their influence cannot be ignored by anyone seeking to understand the social environment in which the New Testament was composed. It is not difficult to see that the people living under Roman rule in the first and second centuries ce did not demarcate the ending of the Republic and the beginning of the empire as clearly as historians are wont to do today. Suetonius’s biographies, The Twelve Caesars, begin with Divine Julius, who is usually included in the final years of the Republic, before he presents Divine Augustus, usually credited today as being the first emperor. This section devotes more space to Augustus than to the other emperors, since his imprint on the form and vision for Roman rule was deepest and most enduring of any who led Rome.

Octavian was born in 63 bce. After Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 bce, his will revealed that he had designated Octavian as his adopted son. Though this certainly involved the inheritance of a significant sum of money, it was worth much more in the legitimacy and supporting constituency it brought the nineteen-year-old who aspired to lead the Roman Republic. Octavian—later to be known as Augustus—assumed the title princeps, or first one. The ways in which he came to lead the Senate, transform the Republic to an empire, and remain in power until he died of old age have been variously debated. In the past, the imperial period of Rome’s existence may have been looked at as a natural, perhaps inevitable, development of the laws and reforms initiated by Julius Caesar.

[2]

In the twentieth century, Sir Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution presented Augustus’s accomplishments as a carefully orchestrated and elegantly executed revolution. Syme’s book was the breakout moment for the view of the Roman Empire as the result of the calculated steps of Octavian as a brilliant opportunist and revolutionary.

[3]

People understand what happened from the reign of Julius Caesar through the Julio-Claudians, who succeeded him in different ways, along a continuum of continuity or rupture. All agree, however, that Augustus, who led Rome from 27 bce to 14 ce , was certainly the most influential among those we now call emperors of the early Roman Empire, or Principate.

Not all of the emperors were deified—proclaimed to be divine—upon their physical deaths, but Augustus’s deification was by all accounts a unanimous action by the Roman Senate and people. The golden age that his propagandists claimed he had brought to the world by means of Roman rule was sufficient testimony of his divine status and the gods’ predestination of his rule. But even before death and the apotheosis that marked the Senate’s approval of a deceased ruler, all emperors could be referred to as son of god, since each was considered the son of his predecessor, beginning with the divine Augustus, son of the divine Julius. It remains for us to explore how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John portray Jesus and his accomplishments as divine, in a world where there was always a more obvious rival.

As you read the texts and view the images in this section, please stay alert to how the Roman emperors of the Principate were in some cases viewed as divinely predestined to rule, granted supernatural knowledge or powers, considered to be benefactors for the entire world, and declared to be divine after their physical deaths. An appreciation of the Roman emperor along these ideological lines might enhance how we hear the evangelists’ descriptions of one whom the Romans executed under the sign, King of the Jews.

Matt. 22:15-22 // Mark 12:13-17 // Luke 20:20-26; Luke 2:1; 3:1; John 19:12; Acts 25:8-12; 1 Tim. 2:2; 1 Pet. 2:13, 17; Rev. 17:9-14.

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Though Theodor Mommsen’s work on the empire was slow to be published and not as extensive as his work on the Republic, this may best summarize the way he would characterize the transition from what we call the Republic to the empire. Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Reimer and Hirsel, 1854–1856); Mommsen, Römische Kaisergeschichte nach den Vorlesungs-Mitschriften von Sebastian und Paul Hensel 1882–86, ed. Barbara Demandt and Alexander Demandt (Munich: Beck, 1992).

↵

Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939). For an evaluation of Syme’s model, see Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher, eds., Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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2

Augustus

Augustus (63–14 bce; emperor 27 bce–14 ce)

1. DEEDS ACCOMPLISHED BY THE DIVINE AUGUSTUS (RES GESTAE DIVI AUGUSTI 27 BCE-14 CE)

[1]

The Deeds Accomplished by the Divine Augustus, or Res Gestae Divi Augusti, is a statement of Augustus, the first emperor, in which he documents all that he did for the Roman people and the world. Scholars have thoroughly debated the precedents for Augustus’s statement. After considering funerary inscriptions, celebratory inscriptions for military triumphs, or even the possibility that Augustus wrote the Res Gestae as support for his eventual apotheosis, John Scheid offers Cornelius Nepos’s On Illustrious Men as a literary precedent for the Res Gestae, with the conclusion that the latter is a sort of political autobiography.

[2]

By contrast, Alison Cooley identifies the closest precedents to be an inscription in which Pompey offered his battle spoils to a goddess and a poem on the gravestone of Cornelia, a daughter of Scribonia, the first wife of Augustus. Points of contact with other genres lead Cooley to identify the Res Gestae of Augustus as a one-of-a-kind document that allowed Augustus to specify his place in the political and social spheres of the Roman people.

[3]

One aspect of Augustus’s genius is that he knew how to remind the Mediterranean world of all the good he brought to it, as can be seen clearly in this document. But often, as those in the lower levels of any society know, a favor from someone more powerful can also be a bid for control. This document would evoke different responses from those who heard it, depending on whether they had benefited or experienced loss by means of the Roman peace. The scope of deeds accomplished detailed in the document, however, helps us understand the long reach of this new political office that Augustus occupied as a princeps who was also a son of god.

§1. When only nineteen years old, I initiated and funded an army by which I won liberty for the Republic when it was bullied by a faction.

[4]

Because of this, the Senate, with honor-bestowing resolutions, added me to its rolls, in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, granting both the right to vote