Caesar and Christ

[The following is Episode 6 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            In the centuries between 1600 and 1200 B.C., two great conflicts occurred that would be forever remembered among civilizations and peoples up to modern times, their sagas being told and retold in dramas, plays, poems, and religious texts written in many languages, and recited in many lands.  The Hebrews, under their leader Moses, would defeat the powerful Egyptian empire in a bold slave revolt that gave them a new beginning, and a new destiny.  And the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, Menelaeus, Odysseus, and others, would bring down the kingdom of Troy, a rival sea power that dared to offend the honor of their people.  But each of these victories resulted in new challenges, new trials and tribulations that had to be faced in order to ensure a complete and lasting success.  Moses led his people through the desert for forty years before bringing them to their homeland, and almost none of those who had left Egypt with him would live to cross the River Jordan into that land.  Odysseus would lead his own men through strange and hostile waters for ten years before returning to his own homeland of Ithaca, and, like Moses, none of those who began the journey in his company would survive to join him there.  Moses was guided and protected by the desert God of the Hebrews; Odysseus relied upon the support of the Greek goddess, Athena.  And while two great nations would spring from the victors in these conflicts, Israel and Greece, the losers, too, would remain to make a mark upon history.  Egypt continued to be a great power for centuries after the Hebrew slave revolt.  But the survivors that fled from the ruins of fallen Troy would create a new kingdom in a distant land, a kingdom so powerful that it would rise to conquer the Greeks, the Israelites, and the Egyptians alike.  The name of this new empire, mightier than any that had risen before it, was Rome.

            According to Roman legend, it was Aeneas, a prince of Troy’s royal family, who founded its kingdom.  Aeneas, like the Greek hero Achilles, had a mortal father and a goddess for a mother.  His mother was none other than Aphrodite, one of the principal goddesses of the Greek and Trojan pantheon.  Aeneas had fought bravely in the Trojan War, but after the fall of Troy, as the invading Greek armies ransacked the city, he fled with his son and aged father.  Like Odysseus, and Moses, Aeneas and his comrades endured much wandering before arriving at what would become their home, on the shores of Italy, and like these other two heroes, he faced conflict with hostile adversaries even after he arrived.  After defeating his principal enemy, a native king, Aeneas married the daughter of another king, of Latium, and through her fathered the Roman race.  Rome itself was believed to have been founded centuries later, in 753 B.C., by Romulus and Remus, twin sons of the virgin princess Rhea Silvia, a descendent of Aeneas.  Her father had been a king, who had been deposed by his evil younger brother Amulius.  Amulius had tried to eliminate any future rivals by forcing Rhea, the king’s only daughter, to become a priestess, but when she fathered twin sons with the god Mars, Amulius was forced to resort to more desperate measures.  He tried to have his infant nephews murdered by having them thrown in a basket into the Tiber River.  The boys were saved, nursed, and protected by a she-wolf, until they were discovered by a shepherd and brought up by his wife.  When they reached manhood, they confronted and overpowered their evil uncle, and restored the throne to their grandfather.  The brothers then left to found a new city of their own, Rome, and after the death of Remus, Romulus became its sole ruler.  And according to legend, Romulus was eventually carried up to heaven by his father, the god Mars, and was himself worshiped as a god by later generations.

Romulus and Remus Reared by a She-Wolf

            Seven kings ruled Rome over a period of about two and half centuries, beginning with the legendary Romulus and ending with Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, a tyrant who was overthrown in 510 B.C.  After this revolution, the Romans began a social experiment that would result in one of the most memorable and glorious ages in history, the rise of the republic.  In a previous episode, we encountered similar experiments that had been undertaken by the Greeks, in Athens, Sparta, and other city-states.  Solon and other reformers had established democracy, or rule by the people, as the form of government for Athens.  Now one very interesting question – but one that is very rarely asked, even today . . . especially today – is what the difference is between a democracy and a republic.  We Americans have a Democrat Party and a Republican Party, and may believe that they are fundamentally – or at least superficially – different in their philosophies and platforms, but most of us don’t see a particular link between the name “Democrat” or “Republican” and what makes each party stand for what it does.  Are these merely different names for the same thing?  “Democracy” means, in its literal translation from the Greek, “rule by the people”, while “republic”, on the other hand, literally translated from its Latin roots means, “the public thing”.  The Greek philosopher Plato wrote a classic book on politics, the title of which is generally translated into English as “The Republic.”  Ironically, in this book, Plato suggests that the most perfect form of government would not be one ruled by the people, or a democracy as his fellow Athenians knew it, but rather one ruled by those most capable of leading – a kind of dominant caste made up of “philosopher-kings”.

The Roman Senate

            Whether the Romans had something like Plato’s ideal in mind when they created their “republic” is not clear – probably the most important thing on their minds at the time was to prevent the rise of future tyrants like the one they just deposed.  We’ll see in a moment that if this was their goal it was eventually doomed to fail, but not before the republic produced centuries of greatness for Rome.  In place of a king, the new republic was headed by two chief executives - or consuls, as they were eventually called - that were chosen annually by their peers.  The two leaders were advised by a council of elders, known as the senate, an institution that had survived from the earlier age of kings.  While the formal power of the senate was limited, its members held office for life, and their advice was highly respected.  But while this new form of government was more democratic than the one that had been overthrown, in its earliest years its effectiveness was marred by a deep social division that had existed among the Romans for centuries.  There were two classes of free citizens in Rome: patricians and plebeians.  The patricians, aristocratic land-holders, enjoyed both wealth and privilege, while the plebeians rarely had wealth, and were completely excluded from participating in political affairs.  This eventually led to violent dissension between the two classes, until the plebeians successfully gained rights and privileges comparable to the patricians.  In part because of this struggle, new offices were created that exercised special powers in the government, including two quaestors to help the consuls manage financial affairs, two censors responsible for overseeing moral issues, and a number of tribunes whose function was to protect and represent the rights and interests of the plebeians.  In 445 B.C., intermarriage between patricians and plebeians was recognized by law, and in 367 B.C., Rome’s highest office, the consulship, was opened to the plebeian class.  Within the next one hundred years, the political distinctions between the two classes had all but disappeared, and the republic became truly democratic.  And yet, while these formal class distinctions disappeared, there continued to be a conspicuous rift between rich aristocrats, who could now be found among both patricians and plebeians, and the poorer general population, who came to be known as the populares.  This growing gap between rich and poor would contribute to the eventual downfall of the Roman republic.

            But while the republic was evolving, Rome itself was growing, mainly through a series of wars with neighboring Italian peoples.  Rome’s strategy for growth was as cunning as it was effective, relying upon coalitions and alliances among friendly neighbors, which were directed against those who were less friendly or openly hostile.  Those who cooperated with Rome were granted full or partial citizenship, while those who resisted faced conquest.  By 264 B.C., the entire Italian peninsula was under Roman control.  With Italy in check, the growing Republic turned its attentions outward, entering into a struggle with Carthage, a great seafaring nation on the coast of Africa that had control of the Mediterranean.  The war would last for more than sixty years, and would nearly lead to disaster for Rome as the brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal led an invading land army – with 26,000 troops and 60 elephants - across the Alps from the north.  But the tide of battle turned when the Roman general Scipio Africanus invaded Carthage with an army of his own, forcing Hannibal to return to face him.  Hannibal was defeated, and Carthage surrendered.  Sixty years later, the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage itself, burning it down and salting the earth so that nothing could grow in its soil, because they could no longer even tolerate the existence of this former powerful enemy and continuing potential rival.  Meanwhile, other great powers fell under the outward-directed onslaught of the Roman legions.  The Macedonians, under King Philip V and later his son Perseus, heirs to Alexander the Great, fought and were defeated by Rome’s forces, and in their wake much of Greece also succumbed to Roman domination.  The province of Spain became an occupied territory, and much of what had been the empire of King Antiochus III of Syria was surrendered to Rome after his defeat at the hands of its armies.

Hannibal's Army

            But Rome’s growth as a world power actually had a pernicious effect on its own people.  With victory and conquest came the influx of wealth, and slaves.  The upper class became richer, and their new opulent lifestyles led to arrogance, greed, and a decline of the simple Roman virtues that had once been the core and foundation of this society.  And there was no “trickle down” effect from the affluent down to the common laborers.  In fact, with slave labor now abundant, the peasant farmers found that they could not compete with the large, sprawling agricultural estates owned by the aristocrats and manned by free labor.  As smaller farms disappeared, the working class dwindled, and in its wake was a mob of poor, unemployed, angry and disillusioned citizens.  It was inevitable that despair would give way to violence, and the threat of outright civil war between rich and poor.  Attempts to resolve the problem through political and social reform failed.  Two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, both met their deaths when, as tribunes, they attempted to alleviate the condition of the poor by passing laws that would help restore small farms and create jobs for the masses.  As the specter of a complete social breakdown grew more ominous, and as it became clear that the problem could not be solved through the mechanism of government, another faction entered the fray, the military.

Marius and his Republican Legion

            As a result of Rome’s continuing wars of expansion, a new, professional class of soldiers came into being, led by powerful generals who enjoyed the complete loyalty of their troops.  The generals offered Rome’s citizens security from foreign invasion, the maintenance of internal order, and the promise of the wealth of spoils gained in war, or lifetime employment, or both, to those who had the privilege of serving in their armies.  It was natural that Rome should turn to these men in times of distress, even when the cause of this distress was not from a foreign enemy.  And in this deeply divided society, with a wealthy but increasingly nervous class on the one hand, and a desperate and impoverished one on the other, each viewing the other with hatred, fear, and suspicion, it was also natural that each class would seek to find its own champion in one of the generals.  The first champion of the popular class was Marius, the first champion of the aristocrats, Sulla, and these two generals would divide their time between fighting external enemies and competing with each other for control of Rome.  For a time, Marius and his army held sway, and, along with a political ally, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, would rule Rome with a reign of terror, massacring senators and members of the wealthy class who had opposed them.  But after Marius’s death, Sulla returned with his troops, taking control of the city, declaring himself dictator, and publishing his own list of enemies and outlaws.  Sulla’s tactics, while less violent than those of Marius, were just as pernicious: one of his methods of vengeance was the confiscation of an enemy’s lands, which would then be made a reward for faithful service to his soldiers – who generally made very poor farmers – or abandoned outright.  As a consequence, Rome, which had once had a thriving agricultural economy, became dependent on grain imports from foreign countries to survive.

            By the time of Sulla’s death, the Roman republic had become a sham, and the government was under the control of the powerful, whether this power came from military might, wealth, or the ability to sway the masses.  In 59 B.C., might, wealth, and ingenuity were each personified in three men who together would rule Rome as a triumvirate: Pompey the Great, renowned for clearing the Mediterranean Sea of pirates and for his conquests of lands in the east, including Syria and Judea, Crassus, an immensely wealthy man who gained his fame in putting down a slave rebellion led by the gladiator Spartacus, and a young, ambitious, clever, and immensely popular politician named Julius Caesar.  These three continued to pretend that they were lawfully holding political office, first with Caesar serving as consul, and later Pompey and Crassus, and each, when not in Rome, having military commands over foreign provinces, at the head of large armies.  Caesar used his army with great success, conquering the land of the Gauls, in Western Europe, but Crassus proved to be less skillful in managing an army than he was in managing his wealth.  In a military campaign against the Parthians, in the east, his army was badly defeated, and Crassus was killed.  The alliance between Caesar and Pompey, which had always been an uneasy one, now broke down.  When the Roman senate, under Pompey’s leadership as sole consul, ordered Caesar to either disband his armies or be declared a public enemy, Caesar turned his armies toward Rome, crossing a small stream called the Rubicon that had been the lawful boundary of his province, while uttering that immortal line, “The die is cast”.  In addition to the great military skill that he had acquired during his wars in Gaul, Caesar still had the wiles of a clever politician, and as his armies advanced through Italy, the moderation that he showed to all who fell under their sway won him new allies.  Entire legions of soldiers joined his cause, and many cities willingly opened their gates upon his approach.  When the two opposing armies joined in battle on the plains of Pharsalus, in eastern Greece, Pompey’s armies were crushed, and Pompey himself fled to Egypt, with Caesar in pursuit.  Pompey died in Egypt, but at the hands of an assassin, not Caesar’s, leaving Caesar as the uncrowned king of the Roman world.

Julius Caesar

            The rest of Caesar’s story, of his romance with Cleopatra, his death at the hands of Brutus, Cassius, and other senators, and the avenging of his murder by Marc Antony, his friend, Marcus Lepidus, a former lieutenant, and Gaius Octavius, his grand-nephew, is well chronicled in the histories and dramas of later centuries.  During the short time that he had ruled, he had been a benevolent dictator, perhaps even an enlightened one, but his rule did seal the doom of the Roman Republic.  The new governing triumvirate of Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius would also break down, and in its wake only one man would remain to hold the reins of power.  This was Caesar’s nephew Octavius, later given the honorary title of Augustus by a senate that still pretended to hold the reigns of power over an imaginary republic.  Augustus Caesar also maintained this fiction, allowing all of the old republican offices to remain, but tacitly keeping all of the most important powers to himself.  He called himself “Imperator” – or “emperor” in our language - but in his time the word was much less ostentatious – or odious  - meaning only that he was commander-in-chief of all of Rome’s legions.  Nevertheless, it was indeed an empire that Augustus and his successors controlled – a world empire that included Greece, Egypt, Europe, and a tiny province named Judea.  And it was during Augustus’s reign that a child would be born in Judea who would be destined to create a world empire of his own.

            After its conquest by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., the land of Palestine continued to be controlled by foreign powers, beginning with Alexander’s Macedonians, followed by the Egyptians, and then the Syrians.  When the Syrian king, Antiochus IV, attempted to destroy the Jewish religion in 168 B.C., the people revolted and regained their independence under the leadership of the Maccabees.  But the successors of this priestly family proved to be almost as despotic as the former foreign overlords, causing a break-up of the nation into rival factions.  The Romans, under Pompey, gained control of Palestine in 63 B.C. when one of these factions appealed to him for assistance.  Palestine was made part of the Roman province of Syria, and the province was divided into separate districts for administrative purposes, including Judea, Samaria, and Galilee – three names that would be forever remembered among practitioners of the new religion that would spring up there under Roman rule.  The first governor of Judea was Herod the Great, whose father, a descendant of the Maccabees, had been a collaborator of Pompey during the Roman general’s invasion of Palestine. 

            At first, life under Roman rule was peaceful and not oppressive.  Even as it moved into its imperial phase of government, the Roman attitude towards religion continued to be one of qualified toleration.  Its subjects could freely worship any god of their choice and practice any form of religious worship, whether the religion was one that had been established in their native land, or one that was encountered either in or beyond the empire’s borders after joining the Roman family of nations.  In fact, in the Roman Empire there was a proliferation of gods, goddesses, cults, and religious practices that came from many different nations, and spread throughout the land with the movements of the peoples that practiced them.  Even the Romans themselves fell under the sway of a foreign religion – that of the Greeks – and came to identify their traditional gods with deities in the Greek pantheon.  The Roman goddess Juno was identified with Hera, Rome’s Jupiter with Zeus, Mars with Ares, and so on.  Mystery cults, originating from Greece, Persia, and other lands, also flourished.  The empire was literally a marketplace of religious ideas.  Rome’s attitude of toleration was only abandoned if it was perceived that the practitioners of a religion posed a threat to the established order.  And it was here that the Judeans eventually ran into trouble with its conquerors.

            According to the Jewish historian Josephus, who lived during the first century of the Roman empire, among the various sects that existed in Judea, three of the most significant ones were the Sadducees and Pharisees, immortalized in the New Testament, and a more mysterious and otherworldly sect known as the Essenes.  The Sadducees, while tending to adopt a more cooperative attitude to the foreign powers that ruled over Judea, were more orthodox and traditionalist in their religious attitudes.  Many of their members claimed direct descent from Zadok, King Solomon’s high priest.  They did not believe in the immortality of the soul and resurrection after death.  But it was the Sadducees who acted as temple priests, officiating over traditional religious ceremonies.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, were of a more nationalist and independent spirit, and some may have had strong sympathies with resistance movements against the foreign powers that controlled their land and its people.  However, unlike the Sadducees, they had adopted some rather untraditional beliefs, such as the resurrection of the body after death, a future day of judgment, and eternal punishment for evildoers.  The Sadducees seemed to have lived up to the bad reputation that they have been saddled with in the New Testament, with their self-righteous behavior, obstinate dogmatism, and frequent displays of contempt for others outside their circles.  But the Pharisees as a class were unfairly portrayed.  As the spiritual forefathers of the Jewish rabbi, or teacher, they were friends of open, reasoned discourse, careful study, and the search for truth.  In the days of the Maccabees, the Sadducees and Pharisees had often been in open conflict with each other, but by the time of the Roman Empire, they had settled into an uneasy coexistence.  The Essenes were a much more militant and puritanical sect, who believed in the imminent approach of the Messiah, who would usher in a final conflict between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness”.  They practiced an austere, monastic existence, living in remote, closed communities away from the cities, in the desert and on the shores of the Dead Sea.

Crassus Plundering the Temple

            The renewed strivings of the Jewish citizens of Palestine for independence had been provoked by the greed and brutality of Roman generals, governors, and soldiers who occupied the land.  Crassus, the Roman general who had been part of the first triumvirate with Caesar and Pompeii, may have gained much of his wealth by looting Jerusalem’s temple treasures.  And thousands of Jewish farmers were driven into ruin because of the empire’s heavy taxes.  Those who could not pay were often compelled to sell members of their own family into slavery.  And those who dared to resist faced that most odious Roman punishment, crucifixion.  It was from the ranks of the dispossessed farmers that a new breed of Jewish revolutionary was born, the Zealot, or Sicarii.  Their numbers grew to the thousands, forming a permanent guerilla band that harassed the Roman armies and kept the land in a permanent state of turmoil.  Most of the Judeans, of course, did not choose the path of violent resistance, but in the face of a growing struggle with what was perceived to be an evil empire, the messianic spirit grew among the masses, and with it, that belief – already held by the Essenes – that a new age was about to come into being, in the wake of one final, apocalyptic war.  And with this belief, there was the hope, and often the expectation, that a deliverer would appear to lead the ranks of the just in this final conflict.

            And it was in the midst of these troubled times that Jesus of Nazareth was born, that central figure of the Christian faith, who would spend his short life preaching, healing the sick, and gathering a band of devoted followers who would carry on his inspiring message of hope, redemption, and universal love long after he had departed.  We are of course back once again in uncomfortable territory as we attempt to look at the origins and influence of Christianity with the eye of an impartial and detached observer, because Christianity continues to be a dominant force in our culture and civilization, and has been for nearly two thousand years.  But just as we did with the Jewish Tanakh (Christian Old Testament), we have to say from the start that the Christian New Testament, in the version that survives today, is not without its contradictions and inconsistencies.  We are provided, for example, with two genealogies of Jesus, one from the gospel of Matthew, the other from the gospel of Luke, which are supposed to demonstrate that he is a direct descendant of King David, in accordance with earlier biblical prophecies about the Messiah.  And while the thoroughness of these genealogies is not unimpressive – the one in Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Adam – they are inconsistent with each other.  Even worse, they trace the link to King David through Joseph, but as the gospels tell us, Joseph was not even Jesus' actual father.  The accounts of his birth in Matthew and Luke also differ in the details.  In Matthew’s version, Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt, after Joseph is warned in a vision that Herod intends to kill the child, but according to Luke, the couple returned directly to Nazareth, where the child was brought up.  But when it is remembered that the earliest gospel was probably written forty years after Jesus’ crucifixion, we can perhaps forgive some discrepancies in the tales of his life.

Jesus Giving the Sermon on the Mount

            And what was the message and mission of Jesus during his lifetime?  He railed against religious hypocrisy, pride, and an excessive adherence to the letter of the law, if it is being violated in spirit.  He said that the two greatest commandments were to love God with all one’s heart, and to love one’s neighbor – even if that neighbor is a stranger or enemy.  He cautioned against the snares of wealth, and pride, and getting caught up in the mundane cares of this life.  In his parables, he compared the blessed to a crop yielding a good harvest, or servants enriching their master through the skillful management of his investments, while the wicked were plants that had failed to sprout, or servants who had failed to increase the wealth that had been left in their care by the master.  His teachings and his parables portray a loving God, capable of forgiveness, but also committed to justice.  Each human being has an opportunity to serve God, and provide an abundant return to the Creator by following Christ and obeying his teachings, but for those who reject this offer, God in turn will reject them in the final day of reckoning.

            But to understand how the legacy of Jesus and his teachings led to modern Christianity, we must understand the persons who tried to shape that legacy, and principal among these were two who, while both claiming to have seen a personal vision of Christ, had never been his followers during his lifetime.  One of these was James, who is identified as the brother of Jesus in the New Testament.  Now this in itself became something of a problem for latter-day Christians, after Mary’s role as the virgin mother of God grew in importance.  To many Christians, it is unacceptable to believe that Mary ever had conjugal relations with her husband – that her virginity was permanent – and that Jesus could never have had natural siblings.  James is explained away as a cousin, a half-brother, or perhaps just a very close friend.  And it is probably for this reason that James has become something of a shadowy figure in modern Christianity, although in the book of Acts and in the epistles it is clear that his role as a leader of the new movement was initially a pivotal one.  James was a member of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, and in his eyes the followers of Jesus were still Jews.  Some have suggested that the Jerusalem Christians may have even been part of the resistance movement against Rome, and point out that a name like Simon Zelotes, one of the original apostles, hints at a revolutionary undertone.  But while James and his supporters may well have been sympathetic to the enemies of Rome, it is doubtful that they were ever anything but pacifists.  Their hope was in the kingdom of God to come, when the wrongs of this world would be righted, and evil conquered for all time.  James’s authority over the followers of Jesus was unquestioned in Jerusalem, but ultimately his vision would yield to that of a very powerful rival, the apostle Paul. 

                                                          Missionary Journeys of St. Paul

            Paul had been born outside of Judea, in the city of Tarsus, in the southwestern coast of what is today the country of Turkey.  It is not unlikely that during his time there he had been exposed to many of the other religions that flourished in the Roman Empire – the mystery cults, like that of Dionysus, which celebrated the death and rebirth of a god - and the Persian belief in a divine struggle between the powers of good and evil, truth and falsehood.  Paul was a Roman citizen, but by his own account a faithful Jew, trained as a Pharisee.  Like James, Paul believed in the resurrection of Jesus, in his imminent return, and in the Holy Spirit, that divine comforter bequeathed by Jesus to his followers, which empowered them to heal the sick, cast out demons, prophesize, and speak in tongues.  But in just about all other matters of faith they were diametrically opposed.    His vision of the new Christian movement was one that would include gentiles as well as Jews, even if this meant discarding many of the traditions and requirements that defined what it meant to be a Jew.  For Paul, Rome was not the enemy, and to be a faithful citizen was not a contradiction to being a good Christian.  The political struggle in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea was not his struggle.  In fact, given Rome’s policy of tolerance toward religious sects that did not embrace political opposition to the empire, it is very likely that Paul’s followers went to great lengths to set the Christian movement apart from other Jewish sects by emphasizing the Christian’s unquestioning allegiance to Rome, “giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”.  Was Paul then an agent of Rome, a collaborator with Roman authorities or perhaps their puppets among the Sadducees and other ruling families in Judea, sent to subvert this new movement, as some of his fiercest critics suggest?  Anyone who reads Paul’s writings with an unbiased eye must come away convinced that he was sincere in his religious convictions.  He may have been an opportunist, in many ways, but his ultimate end was the successful establishment of the new faith.  One senses from reading the story of his adventures, and his own epistles, that he was not always the easiest person to get along with, and that it might have been easier to love him at a distance than to like him up close.  He himself admitted that he could make a poor impression in person, and to convey his message he relied heavily on his writing, and on emissaries like Timothy and Titus to speak on his behalf to the new congregations that were forming throughout the empire.  Did Paul attempt to create a new religion out of an artificial synthesis between the Judaism of his heritage and the religions prevalent among the Greek-speaking peoples of the Roman Empire – twisting the sayings of a Galilean prophet to suit his ends?  Many of his critics would have us believe this, but Paul’s own actions and writings suggest otherwise.  He was opposed to what he perceived to be an excessive ritualism and adherence to the law in Judaism, but he just as strenuously opposed the Greek idea of initiation, passing through a series of stages or degrees to develop a better understanding of and closer connection to the divine.  For Paul, conversion was a simple, single act, that required no further stages or revelation of deeper mysteries – it was faith, not knowledge or endurance or ritual, which led to salvation.  Paul may have been pragmatic, and political, but he was also a radical.  The passion of his convictions, the power of his thought, and his eloquent defense of the simple virtues of faith, hope and charity survive in the thirteen short letters of his that are now part of the New Testament.  And his legacy is nothing short of remarkable, when one realizes that on any Sunday morning, in just about every city in the civilized world, there are at least a dozen churches or meeting places where passages from the writings of this irascible Jewish tentmaker are read out loud, expounded upon, and tapped as a source of ongoing inspiration.  That is a fame and posterity that would be beyond the wildest dreams of any writer, philosopher, poet, or prophet - of any age.

St. Paul Preaching at Athens

            But if it had been a conscious decision of Paul’s followers to try to secure the existence of the new movement by distancing themselves from the Jews, the result was less than successful, and would lead to terrible consequences.  In the eyes of the Romans, the early Christians were just another Jewish sect, and their leader, Jesus, a claimant to a crown that could only be perceived as subversive to the empire.  Only Caesar was the supreme ruler, and there could be no king of Judea who was not Caesar’s vassal.  The fact that Jesus’ brother, James, became his successor in the new movement must have made it seem even more obvious to the Romans that this was an attempt to create a new dynasty, a line of kings linked by a common family.  According to early church history, after James’s death the Romans systematically hunted down and killed every known relative of Jesus.  Clearly, this was no idle threat to them.  Meanwhile, Jerusalem fell to Roman armies, and its temple was destroyed.  While members of the new Christian faith were persecuted and martyred throughout the empire, within Palestine, the Judeans would once again see a foreign power attempt to destroy their national identity, as Roman legions decimated the land, and crushed the last remnants of revolt.  Both Jews and Christians would survive, and their respective faiths would evolve and develop in the crucible of persecution and social ostracism.  But for the Christians, the struggle would end in 313 AD, when a Roman emperor, Constantine would choose the Christian cross as his standard of battle, and accept the Christian faith as his religion.  Within a few generations, Christianity would become permanently established as the official religion of Rome.  And Rome’s emperors would be just as thorough and unforgiving in rooting out the perceived enemies or rivals of Christianity, as it had been centuries earlier in trying to root out the Christians themselves.  The Christian religion now had a church hierarchy, and an official canon of books to make up its own bible.  And by this time, any negative reference in these books to the Romans, or Roman leadership, or the abuses of the empire, had been removed.  In its place, a new villain, a new enemy had been inserted, the Jewish scribes, Pharisees and high priests, and, by implication, the Jews themselves.  Moses had created a new religion by leading a revolt against the Egyptian Empire; Christianity had secured a permanent existence not by revolting against, but by enduring the Roman Empire, and through its endurance, conquering it.  Yet for the Christians, this new Promised Land would be a blessing and a curse.  For the many that followed the simple teachings of Jesus, and the inspired verses of Paul, faith, hope, charity and a vision of a universal brotherhood realized itself in the families, farms and simple villages that abounded with the faithful.  On the other hand, the new power of the church gave free reign to the ambitious, the prejudiced, the hateful, and the ignorant, allowing them to persecute with an unbridled violence those who they branded as enemies of the elect: the pagan practitioners of the old Greek and Roman faiths, the Christian heretics, and the Jews.  But while Rome’s power was great, it was not unlimited.  At the reaches of its territory, a new power was growing in strength, threatening to bring down the empire itself.  These were the Germans: the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Saxons.  And in a remote island at the fringes of the empire, a Celtic chieftain, loyal to Rome, would find fame and immortality in taking a last stand against the German onslaught.  His name was Arthur.