6. THE CREATION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, 44 B.C.E.

Jesus and His Teachings

Jesus (c. 4 B.C.E.–30 C.E.) grew up in a troubled region. Harsh Roman rule in Judaea had angered the Jews, and Rome’s provincial governors worried about rebellion. Jesus’s execution reflected the Roman policy of eliminating any threat to social order. In the two decades after his crucifixion, his followers, particularly Paul of Tarsus, elaborated on and spread his teachings beyond his region’s Jewish community to the wider Roman world.

Christianity offered an answer to the question about divine justice raised by the Jews’ long history of oppression under the kingdoms of the ancient and Hellenistic Near East: If God was just, as Hebrew monotheism taught, how could he allow the wicked to prosper and the righteous to suffer? Nearly two hundred years before Jesus’s birth, persecution by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (r. 175–164 B.C.E.) had provoked the Jews into revolt, a struggle that generated the concept of apocalypticism.

According to this doctrine, evil powers controlled the world, but God would end their rule by sending the Messiah (“anointed one,” Mashiach in Hebrew, Christ in Greek) to conquer them. A final judgment would follow, punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous for eternity. Apocalypticism especially influenced the Jews living in Judaea under Roman rule and later inspired Christians and Muslims.

During Jesus’s life, Jews disagreed among themselves about what form Judaism should take in such troubled times. Some favored cooperation with Rome, while others preached rejection of the non-Jewish world. Unrest in Judaea led Augustus to install a Roman governor to suppress disorder.

The writings that would later become the New Testament Gospels, composed around 70 to 90 C.E., offer the earliest accounts of Jesus’s life. Jesus wrote nothing down, and others’ accounts of his words and deeds are often inconsistent. He began his career as a teacher and healer during the reign of Emperor Tiberius. He taught through stories and parables that challenged his followers to reflect on what he meant.

Jesus’s public ministry began with his baptism by John the Baptist, who preached a message of repentance before the approaching final judgment. After John was executed as a rebel, Jesus traveled around Judaea’s countryside teaching that God’s kingdom was coming and that people needed to prepare spiritually for it. Some saw Jesus as the Messiah, but his apocalypticism did not call for immediate revolt against the Romans. Instead, he taught that God’s true kingdom was to be found not on earth but in heaven. He stressed that this kingdom was open to believers regardless of their social status or sinfulness. His emphasis on God’s love for humanity and people’s responsibility to love one another reflected Jewish religious teachings, such as the scriptural interpretations and moral teachings of the scholar Hillel, who lived in Jesus’s time.

Realizing that he had to reach more than country people, Jesus took his message to the Jewish population of Jerusalem, the region’s main city. His miraculous healings and exorcisms, combined with his powerful preaching, created a sensation. He became so popular that his followers created the Jesus movement; it was not yet Christianity but rather a Jewish sect, of which there were several, such as the Saduccees and Pharisees, competing for authority at the time. Jesus attracted the attention of Jewish leaders, who assumed that he wanted to replace them. Fearing Jesus might lead a Jewish revolt, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate ordered his crucifixion in Jerusalem in 30 C.E.

Jesus’s followers reported that they had seen him in person after his death, proclaiming that God had raised him from the dead. They convinced a few other Jews that he would soon return to judge the world and begin God’s kingdom. At this time, his closest disciples, the twelve Apostles (Greek for “messengers”), still considered themselves faithful Jews and continued to follow the commandments of Jewish law. Their leader was Peter, who won acclaim as the greatest miracle worker of the Apostles, an ambassador to Jews interested in the Jesus movement, and the most important messenger proclaiming Jesus’s teachings in the imperial capital. The later Christian church called him the first bishop of Rome.

Catacomb Painting of Christ as the Good Shepherd

Catacombs (tunnels with underground rooms) cut deep into soft rock outside major cities in the Roman Empire served as meeting places and burial chambers for Jews and Christians. Rome had 340 miles of catacombs. This painting from the catacomb at Rome named after Priscilla, who was probably a Christian from the first century C.E., shows Jesus as the Good Shepherd (John 10:10–11). He is carrying an animal back to the flock, symbolizing his role as savior; he is dressed in the traditional fashion for a Roman man on a special occasion. Catacomb paintings such as this one were the earliest form of Christian art. (Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, Italy / photograph by Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.)

A turning point came with the conversion of Paul of Tarsus (c. 10–65 C.E.), a pious Jew and a Roman citizen who had violently opposed Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. A spiritual vision on the road to Damascus in Syria, which Paul interpreted as a divine revelation, inspired him to become a follower of Jesus as the Messiah, or Christ—a Christian, as members of the movement came to be known. Paul taught that accepting Jesus as divine and his crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of humanity was the only way of becoming righteous in the eyes of God. In this way alone could one expect to attain salvation in the new world to come. Paul’s mission opened the way for Christianity to become a new religion separate from Judaism.

Seeking converts outside Judaea, Paul traveled to preach to Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) who had adopted some Jewish practices in Asia Minor (today Turkey), Syria, and Greece. Although he stressed the necessity of ethical behavior as defined by Jewish tradition, especially the rejection of sexual immorality and polytheism, Paul also taught that converts did not have to live strictly according to Jewish law. To make conversion easier, he did not require male converts to undergo the Jewish initiation rite of circumcision. He also told his congregations that they did not have to observe Jewish dietary restrictions or festivals. These teachings generated tensions with Jewish authorities in Jerusalem as well as with followers of Jesus living there, who still believed that Christians had to follow Jewish law. Roman authorities arrested Paul as a troublemaker and executed him in 65 C.E.

Hatred of Roman rule provoked Jews to revolt in 66 C.E. After crushing the rebels in 70 C.E., the Roman emperor Titus destroyed the Jerusalem temple and sold most of the city’s population into slavery. Following this catastrophe, which cost Jews their religious center, Christianity began to separate more and more clearly from Judaism. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple created a crisis for Judaism that eventually led to a reorientation of its teachings and interpretations through Jewish oral law being committed to writing.

Paul’s importance in early Christianity shows in the number of letters—thirteen—attributed to him among the twenty-seven Christian writings that were eventually put together as the New Testament. Christians came to regard the New Testament as having equal authority with the Jewish Bible, which they then called the Old Testament. Since teachers like Paul preached mainly in the cities, congregations of Christians sprang up in urban areas. In early Christianity, women in some locations could be leaders—such as Lydia, a businesswoman who founded the congregation in Philippi in Greece—but many men, including Paul, opposed women’s leadership.