2. Christianity at Rome
2. Christianity at Rome
It is plain from the terms in which Paul addresses the Christians in Rome that the church of that city was no recent development. But when we try to ascertain something about the origin and early history of Roman Christianity, we find very little direct evidence to help us, and have to reconstruct the situation as far as possible from various literary and archaeological references.
According to Acts 2:10 the crowd of pilgrims who were present in Jerusalem for the Pentecost festival of AD 30, and heard Peter preach the gospel, included ‘visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes’. We are not told if any of these were among the three thousand who believed Peter’s message and were baptized. It may be significant that these Roman visitors are the only contingent from the continent of Europe to receive express mention among the pilgrims.
In any case, all roads led to Rome, and once Christianity had been securely established in Judea and the neighbouring territories, it was inevitable that it should be carried to Rome. Within two or three years, if not (as Foakes-Jackson thought) ‘by the autumn following the Crucifixion, it is quite as possible that Jesus was honoured in the Jewish community at Rome as that He was at Damascus’.4 The fourth-century Latin Father who is called Ambrosiaster says in the preface to his commentary on this letter that the Romans ‘had embraced the faith of Christ, albeit according to the Jewish rite, without seeing any sign of mighty works or any of the apostles’. It was evidently members of the Christian rank and file who first carried the gospel to Rome and planted it there—probably in the Jewish community of the capital.
There was a Jewish community in Rome as early as the second century BC. It was considerably augmented in consequence of Pompey’s conquest of Judea in 63 BC and his ‘triumph’ in Rome two years later, when many Jewish prisoners of war graced his procession, and were later given their freedom. In 59 BC Cicero makes reference to the size and influence of the Jewish colony in Rome.5 In AD 19 the Jews of Rome were expelled from the city by decree of the Emperor Tiberius (see p. 99), but in a few years they were back in as great numbers as ever. In the time of Claudius (AD 41–54) we have the record of another mass-expulsion of Jews from Rome. This expulsion is briefly referred to in Acts 18:2, where Paul, on his arrival in Corinth (probably in the late summer of AD 50), is said to have met ‘a Jew named Aquila, … lately come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome’. The date of this edict of expulsion is uncertain, although Orosius may well be right in placing it in AD 49.6 Other references to it appear in ancient literature, the most interesting of which is a remark by Suetonius in his Life of Claudius (25.2), that Claudius ‘expelled the Jews from Rome because they were constantly rioting at the instigation of Chrestus (impulsore Chresto)’. This Chrestus may conceivably have been a Jewish agitator in Rome at the time; but the way in which Suetonius introduces his name makes it much more likely that the rioting was a sequel to the introduction of Christianity into the Jewish community of the capital. Suetonius, writing some seventy years later, may have known a contemporary record of the expulsion order which mentioned Chrestus as the leader of one of the parties involved, and inferred that he was actually in Rome at the time. He would know that Chrestus (a variant Gentile spelling of Christus) was the founder of the Christians, whom he elsewhere describes as ‘a pernicious and baneful class of people’,7 and it would seem quite a reasonable inference to him that Chrestus had taken an active part in stirring up these riots.
Priscilla and Aquila appear to have been Christians before they met Paul, and were probably members of the original Roman group of believers in Jesus. We do not know where or when they first heard the gospel; Paul himself never suggests that they were his children in the faith. We may be sure that the original group of believers in Rome consisted predominantly, if not entirely, of Jewish Christians, whose departure and dispersal followed Claudius’s expulsion order.
The effects of the expulsion order, however, were short-lived. Before long the Jewish community was flourishing in Rome once more, and so was the Christian community. Less than three years after the death of Claudius Paul can write to the Christians of Rome and speak of their faith as a matter of universal knowledge. The expulsion edict would have lapsed with Claudius’s death (AD 54), if not indeed earlier.8 But in AD 57 the Christians in Rome included not only Jewish but Gentile believers. Some of the latter may have stayed on in the city after the expulsion of their Jewish brethren; if so, their numbers were greatly augmented by the time Jewish Christians were able to return. Paul indeed has to remind the Gentile Christians that, even if they are now in the majority, the base of the community is Jewish, and that they must not despise their Jewish brethren just because they outnumber them (Rom. 11:18).
In fact, the Jewish basis of Roman Christianity was not soon forgotten. As late as the time of Hippolytus (died AD 235) some features of Christian religious practice at Rome continued to proclaim their Jewish origin—an origin, moreover, which should be sought in sectarian or nonconformist Judaism rather than in the main stream.9
If the greetings in Romans 16:3–16 were addressed to Rome (see pp. 266–271), then we may find in them some interesting information about members of the Roman church in AD 57. The people to whom greetings are sent by name included Christians whom Paul had met in other places during his missionary activities and who were at this time resident in Rome. Some of them were very early Christians, like Andronicus and Junias (or rather Junia), who, as Paul says, were ‘in Christ’ before himself and were well known in apostolic circles and may, indeed, have been reckoned as apostles themselves (16:7). The Rufus to whom greetings are sent in 16:13 has been tentatively identified with the son of Simon of Cyrene mentioned in Mark 15:21; Paul may have known him and his mother at Syrian Antioch. Priscilla and Aquila, who had been compelled to leave Rome eight years previously, were now back in the capital, and their house was one of the meeting-places for church members there. (The fact that the basilica, the regular style of early church edifice, preserves the outline of a private Roman house, reminds us that the house-church was the regular Christian meeting in primitive times.)
By AD 57, the year in which Paul wrote to the Romans, Christianity may already have begun to make some impact in the higher reaches of Roman society. In that year Pomponia Graecina, the wife of Aulus Plautius (who conquered the province of Britain for the Roman Empire in AD 43), was tried and acquitted by a domestic court on a charge of embracing a ‘foreign superstition’, which could have been Christianity.10 But, to the majority of Romans who knew anything about it, Christianity was simply another disgusting oriental superstition, the sort of thing that the satirist Juvenal had in mind sixty years later when he complained of the way in which the sewage of the Orontes was discharging itself into the Tiber.11 (Since Antioch on the Orontes was the home of Gentile Christianity, Juvenal probably thought of Gentile Christianity as one of the ingredients in that sewage.)
When, seven years after the writing of this letter, Rome was devastated by a great fire, and the Emperor Nero looked around for scapegoats against which he could divert the popular suspicion which (quite unjustly, it may be) was directed against himself, he found them ready to hand. The Christians of Rome were unpopular—reputed to be ‘enemies of the human race’12 and credited with such vices as incest and cannibalism. In large numbers, then, they became the victims of the imperial malevolence—and it is this persecution of Christians under Nero that traditionally forms the setting for Paul’s martyrdom.
Three years after he sent this letter, Paul at last realized his hope of seeing Rome. He realized it in a way which he had not expected when he wrote. The misgivings which he expressed in the letter (15:31) about his reception in Jerusalem proved to be well founded. Not many days after his arrival in Jerusalem he was charged before the Roman governor of Judea with a serious offence against the sanctity of the temple. His trial dragged on inconclusively until Paul at last exercised his right as a Roman citizen and appealed to have his case transferred to the jurisdiction of the emperor in Rome. To Rome, then, he was sent, and after shipwreck and wintering in Malta he reached the capital early in AD 60. As he was conducted north along the Appian Way by the courier force in whose custody he was, Christians in Rome who heard of his approach walked out to meet him at points thirty or forty miles south of the city and gave him something like a triumphal escort for the remainder of his journey. The sight of these friends proved a source of great encouragement to him. For the next two years he remained in Rome, kept under guard in his private lodgings, with permission to receive visitors and to propagate the gospel at the heart of the empire.
What happened at the end of these two years is a matter of conjecture. It is not at all certain if he ever fulfilled his plan of visiting Spain and preaching the gospel there. What is reasonably certain is that, a few years later at most, he was sentenced to death at Rome as a leader of the Christians, led out of the city along the Ostian Way and beheaded at the place then called Aquae Salviae (modern Tre Fontane). His tomb lies beneath the high altar of the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura (‘St Paul Outside the Walls’).
The blood of the martyrs, however, in Tertullian’s words, proved to be seed.13 Persecution and martyrdom did not extinguish Christianity in Rome. The church in that city continued to flourish in increasing vigour and to enjoy the esteem of Christians throughout the world as a church ‘worthy of God, worthy of honour, worthy of congratulation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity, pre-eminent in love, walking in the law of Christ and bearing the Father’s name’.14