Stephen Webb writes: As a (near) lifelong bureaucrat, I always have an interest in, and a certain fellow feeling with, past colleagues facing challenges. And being a Roman military or civil leader confronted with Jesus or his disciples must have been an exasperating experience, given an added edge by the constant looming fear of public disorder.
Whether you have any faith or not, the New Testament writings are a fascinating historical source, and were written in many cases by authors who claimed to have been eye witnesses (eg John), or those who claimed a combination of personal experience and significant research among eye witnesses (eg Luke, Acts). So the stories of the early Christians confronting Roman rulers of various descriptions give a unique insight into the Roman empire at the next level down from the Imperial court which is the main focus of ancient historians. It is all the more interesting to see how the NT accounts tally with other information we have on the people concerned, and the hints the NT furnishes about the preoccupations of the Roman ruling class in what they generally saw as a troublesome part of the Empire.
Starting at the lowest rank, there are five stories of interactions with Roman centurions. This means that the New Testament provides a clearer picture of actual individuals of this rank than any other historical source (of which there is very little except epitaphs and a few fleeting references in historical writers).
As the name suggests, a centurion typically commanded about 100 men. It was the highest rank that an ordinary soldier might hope to reach, and the lowest rank that a noble would start in the Roman army. So in modern British army terms it might be seen as something like a combination between a Regimental Sergeant Major and a captain. It feels to me that most of those referred to in the gospels probably fall into the former category, with the probable exception of Julius the centurion who accompanied Paul to Rome and seems to have been working as a courier for important messages.
Centurions in the New Testament come across surprisingly well. We have two cases of centurions who were in the ‘god fearing’ category – non Jews who were clearly committed to the Jewish faith and following its precepts without fully joining (apparently quite a sizeable group at the time). One send word to Jesus to heal a sick slave via Jewish elders who assure Jesus ‘he is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people and it is he who built our synagogue for us’ (Luke 7,4; see also Matthew 8:9).
Similarly in Acts, Peter while travelling through Caesarea receives a message that ‘Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and god fearing man who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation, was directed by a holy angel to send to you to come to his house’ (Acts 10:22).
We don’t know the name or anything else about the centurion who oversaw Christ’s crucifixion, just that Luke records him seeing the three hours of darkness across the land and witnessing Christ’s last words at which he ‘praised God and said “surely this was a righteous man”’ (Luke 23:45).
Centurions are called upon reasonably frequently in Acts given the turmoil that often surrounds the apostles’ preaching. One rescues Paul from being scourged when told Paul is in fact a Roman citizen (Acts 25:26). Another, Julius, is tasked to guard Paul on the way to Rome, and ‘treats Paul kindly’. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he ignores Paul’s prophesy of doom if the voyage proceeds, but once the ship is indeed hit by a storm, Paul comforts the passengers and crew again prophesying no loss of life. When the sailors nonetheless seek to abandon the ship, Paul advises Julius to prevent them leaving. When the ship is finally wrecked at Malta, Julius prevents the soldiers killing the prisoners to ensure they do not escape ‘wishing to save Paul’ (Acts 27:1-44).
Throughout, you cannot failed to be impressed by the sense of presence and natural authority these men exercise. Julius’ control over panic stricken soldiers fearing their own death if prisoners escape is one example. The attitude is strikingly demonstrated in the words the unnamed centurion sends to Jesus who is on his way to the centurion’s house to heal his slave (and at risk of making himself impure by the act of entering)
“only speak the word and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me, and I say to one ‘go’ and he goes and to another ‘come’ and he comes, and to my slave ‘do this’ and the slave does it’ (Matthew 8:8-9).
If the centurions speak to the natural authority and the professional esprit of an army at its peak, the more senior Roman officials are a decidedly more mixed bag. They have higher status and rewards, but also face great risks. Being a provincial proconsul (in provinces allocated by the Senate) or legate/procurator (if appointed by the Emperor) was no longer as lucrative now emperors were seeking to curb corruption. Recall in disgrace was an ever present danger, and public disorder probably what was feared most.
It is important to remember how thinly policed the Roman empire was. For all the complaints about the hollowing out of the UK armed forces, the total 150,000 full time servicemen now is not that far from the 250-300,000 the Romans had to police the entire empire – nearly all of Europe, much of the Middle East and the entire Mediterranean basin. For all the quality of Roman roads, moving legions to flashpoints was a lengthy process, and the borders had the absolute priority for troops. So having to move troops to supposedly pacified areas to quell trouble would be hugely unwelcome.
This meant managing crowds and avoiding rioting or revolt would have been one of the main duties of a ruler – as shown in Acts not only by the various Roman officials but the alarmed local magistrates in Ephesus and Philippi as trouble spreads (Acts 19 and 16 respectively). This might also be why procurators were often kept in place for a considerable time to get to know their provinces, as both Pilate and Felix seem to have been.
When Paul is attacked at the Temple, he is rescued by the ‘tribune’ in charge of the ca 600 troops stationed in Jerusalem, Claudius Lysias. Lysias is surprised Paul can speak Greek, and immediately wonders if he is the subversive who led recent unrest. On being reassured, he agrees to let Paul address the crowd. Paul’s speech is highly provocative, and leads to more unrest. Lysias is enraged by this, and orders Paul to be scourged – only at that point does Paul reveal he is a Roman citizen and therefore should not even have been bound still less subjected to a scourging (the riot at Jerusalem and Paul before Felix and Festus is covered in Acts 21-25). This is where Lysias’ own intermediate status becomes clear – he is amazed that Paul is a Roman citizen (who represented maybe 1-3% of the population in the East) and was born a citizen, while Lysias had purchased his own citizenship.
Given the temple incident, the disturbance at the Sanhedrin meeting and the 40 men swearing an oath to assassinate Paul (given they clearly didn’t succeed, I have always wondered if they starved to death, or if someone released them from their vow), Lysias clearly cannot wait to get rid of Paul, sending him to his boss the procurator Felix who was based at Caesarea. Lysias has to devote more than a third of the Jerusalem garrison travelling through the night to accomplish this. Lysias’ accompanying letter always amuses me as an example of bureaucratic back covering. He describes the Temple incident in a classic ‘true without being the whole truth’ way.
‘Claudius Lysias to his Excellency the governor Felix, greetings. This man was seized by the Jews and was about to be killed by them, but when I had learned that he was a Roman citizen, I came with the guard and rescued him’.
Felix was the brother of Pallas, the freedman (freed slave) who rose to be one of the emperor Claudius’ top bureaucrats, and retained this role under Nero. Tacitus, who particularly despised freedmen, said Festus ‘wielded the power of a tyrant with the temperament of a slave’. Josephus, the Jewish historian, claimed Felix had ordered the assassination of a previous high priest who had criticised his rule.
As soon as Paul arrives, Felix clearly hopes he can get rid of him, asking which province he comes from. Unfortunately Cilicia was perhaps too far to send him off to be judged there. Felix is almost immediately confronted with a delegation from the current high priest calling for Paul to be condemned. He listens to both sides (though Acts says he is already familiar with ‘the way’, (Christian teaching). There is a striking contrast between the flattery of the high priest’s delegation ‘because of you we have long enjoyed peace, and reforms have been made for this people because of your foresight’ and the reserve of Paul ‘I cheerfully make my defence knowing that for many years you have been a judge over this nation’. Felix is clearly in no hurry to make a decision one way or another. First he puts it off until Lysias has arrived – but ends up spinning out the whole process for the remaining two years of his term.
Acts suggests he is looking for a bribe, The text also suggests he is impressed by Paul, keen to hear his teaching but alarmed by the talk of ‘justice, self control and the coming judgement’ to which he replies ‘go away for the present, when I have the opportunity I will send for you’. Passages like this make me wonder if the author of Acts has a, somewhat dark, sense of humour.
Felix’s successor Porcius Festus had a much better contemporary reputation. He held another hearing between Paul’s Jewish accusers and Paul to much the same end. You can almost hear his relief when Paul claims his right to appeal to Caesar ‘You have appealed to the emperor, to the emperor you will go’
Festus soon becomes aware, however, of a faintly ridiculous situation he has got himself into. Festus discusses the case with Agrippa and you can hear the puzzlement in his voice ‘they had certain points of disagreement with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus who had died, but whom Paul asserted to be alive. Since I was at a loss how to investigate these questions…’ In Paul’s presence, before Agrippa, Festus notes ‘I have nothing definite to write to our sovereign about him…for it seems unreasonable to send a prisoner without indicating the charges against him”.
In listening to Paul’s explanation of his conversion, Festus exclaims ‘you are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning is driving you insane!” One wonders what he finally wrote – given the length of stay Paul had in Rome, his case clearly wasn’t seen as any priority there either (and as Paul seems to have been paying for his own upkeep during a prolonged period of house arrest, there was no fiscal reason for the authorities to hurry up either).
There is quite a contrast between the behaviour of Roman officials in Judaea facing unrest among the Jews and some of the other proconsuls in more peaceable areas who came across Paul and the Christians. Acts claims that Sergius Paulus, proconsul of Cyprus ‘an intelligent man.. wanted to hear the word of God’. He witnesses Paul temporarily blinding the sorcerer Elymas, and ‘when the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was astonished at the teaching about the Lord’ (Acts 13:12).
In stark contrast is Gallio, proconsul of Achaia. Achaia (Greece) was a sophisticated place – Athens playing the part of a finishing school for aristocratic Romans and people throughout the Greek world. Gallio was the most high born of any of the Romans we meet in the New Testament. He was the older brother of the philosopher Seneca, the future emperor’s tutor at this point. Gallio at Corinth also witnesses an argument between Jews and Christians culminating in him sending them all packing ‘since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I do not wish to be a judge of these matters’. Even after the official of the synagogue was beaten up, ‘Gallio cared for none of these things’ (Act 18:14-17; other translations from the NIV except the final comment about Gallio, where I just like the King James version).
Finally there is Pontius Pilate – in some ways a trickier case. For me at least there is an incongruity between the readings some have of the NT texts and what we know about Pilate’s character. Not many go as far as the Egyptian and Ethiopian Copts for whom Pilate is a saint – admittedly this is on the basis of legends of a subsequent conversion.
But others stress the degree to which Pilate is clear that Jesus is innocent, does not want to have him crucified, and debates the nature of truth at Jesus’ trial –‘what is truth?’. He is condemned for weakness more than malice. But this is in stark contrast to Pilate’s general reputation for brutality – the Galileans ‘whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices’ (Luke 13:1) in Jesus’ words, and a series of other violent incidents recorded by Jewish historians like Josephus and Philo.
All the indications are that Pilate was a hard and wily operator, who had succeeded in forging a strong relationship with the Temple priests that had made his ten year prefecture of a troublesome province relatively successful so far. The unrest sparked by Jesus’ teachings threatened this order, and potentially his tenure. At the same time, Pilate was undoubtedly aware of the spurious nature of the charges being levied – typically when Christians were being denounced to the Romans, the focus was on their status as potential rebels, while before Jewish courts the emphasis was on blasphemy.
Pilate no doubt understood Jesus’ characterisation as a rebel against Caesar was ridiculous. He obviously markedly disliked being asked to do others’ dirty work for them. He probably cared as little as Gallio for the names and doctrines, ‘what is truth’ has the ring of a cynical bureaucrat about it. He had Jesus scourged as a compromise, and when that failed, was forced to relent and agree to crucifixion. The ‘Titulus’ on the cross ‘Jesus Christ King of the Jews’ was probably Pilate’s spiteful response to those who had demanded the sentence and manipulated him into executing it. When they protested ‘it should say he claimed to be King of the Jews’, you can almost hear the sneer in Pilate’s voice ‘what I have written, I have written’ (mostly from John 18–19).
Pilate had got away with it for now, though was shortly afterwards recalled to Rome and dismissed after another brutal suppression of an armed group of Samaritans at Mount Gerizim; though Tiberius died before Pilate’s case could be heard, and he probably went into quiet retirement. He might have looked back and felt his treatment was rather unfair – certainly from the Roman point of view he was as effective a governor as many, certainly better than Felix.
The early Church emphasised the scale of the persecution they suffered – because ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’. Certainly at this early stage, all the indications are that Christians were just another nuisance facing magistrates, many of whom would probably rather be at home.
(The image at top is ‘Christ and the Centurion‘ by Paolo Cagliari, 1571).
Stephen Webb is Head of Government Reform and Home Affairs at Policy Exchange, and a former senior civil servant in NIO, Home Office, and the Cabinet Office.
This article was original posted on Stephen’s substack, Wallenstein’s Camp, and is reproduced here with permission.
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This is fascinating; thank you.
Ah yes, Pilot. Is not his reputation and the trial of Jesus brought together by the influence of his wife at the trial.
So much for the reality of beurocracy.
Where was/is God in it all? His Providence? His working in and through it all?
Looks like the co-pilot was in charge that day
Thanks for this.
Reading the latter part of Acts you do get the impression that Paul was absolute nightmare, or quick-witted and cunning debater, depending on your perspective. It’s only when they’re about to flog him does Paul tell them he’s a Roman citizen, and even then in the form of asking them if this is completely legal. Even when he’s making ostensibly the most serious point – effectively on trial for his life in front of Agrippa, and asked whether he thinks Agrippa should convert – he answers the point directly, but ends cracking a joke: “I pray to God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains.” (Acts 26:29). His treatment of the Chief Priest Ananias is quite funny – rebuking him, and then when the Sanhedrin are outraged that he insulted the priest, says (in front of the Romans) that he didn’t realise and would never deliberately insult “the ruler of your people” (Acts 23:5). You imagine that would have shifted the power dynamics in the room quite quickly. And I can’t quite shake the idea that Paul is very deliberate when he name-drops Ananias of Damascus, who’s very devout, and highly respected, and stands beside him when he’s blind and restores his sight telling him that God has chosen him to witness to the Gentiles. Are we (and the crowd) supposed to draw the contrast with Ananias the Chief Priest?
He’s also very adept at shifting the debate onto his terms. The crowd in Jerusalem is originally incensed that he might have brought Greeks into the Temple (although he didn’t). But once he’s in the Sanhedrin, Paul says this is really about believing in the resurrection or not, and splits the Pharisees from the Sadducees. At the trial before Felix, Paul argues that if they want to accuse of being a troublemaker in Asia they need an accuser from Asia (they don’t have one). When Festus thinks he’s got the answer – this is a Jewish problem and Paul should go to a Jewish court – Paul invokes his citizenship again, and appeals to Caesar. Effectively what Paul has done is turn his prison into a bodyguard. We know the Romans in Jerusalem were so concerned the Jewish authorities would kill them then had a cavalry escort to get him to Caesarea. So the last thing Paul wants is to actually be set free: with 40 assassins after him he’d be dead before sundown. With an appeal to Caesar he has to be guarded and escorted to Rome, and it doesn’t hurt that the Roman authorities would have been infuriated with the Jewish authorities and Sanhedrin for putting them in this mess.
You’d almost think he was following some instruction or other, like ‘Be wise as serpents, but innocent as doves…’!
Yes indeed, everybody goes on about the great rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome, but Paul won most arguments easily and Jesus won all of his in two or three hits of the ball at most.
He reminds me a bit of Sir Thomas More. And similarly the disciples and apostles clearly had a sense from the Spirit when to argue against persecution and when simply to accept it and even welcome it. A difficult line to get right, which I often think about when thinking of the story of Peter fleeing Rome and seeing a vision of Christ ‘Domine Quo Vadis’.
I often wonder that the witnesses and believers in the Roman army might have been a spearhead, pre-evangelism force, here in Britain prior to the arrival of the clerics.
Query “feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of eace”,
how we walk may open a door to the gospel being received by a hearer[?]
I often think that the Jewish dispersion prepared the way for the Gospel to prosper in the “Barbarian” nations.
From my reading of those nations they certainly had a high moral code amongst them, much higher than Roman moralities.
Was there a Jewish influence in their code? A preparation again for the clerics; and significant in the approach to a beaten Roman defense of the city and under imminent threat of being sacked by the Barbarian army .
The then Pope in his “high priest” regalia gaining a reprieve for the city impacted their discussions.
I think that God prepares His way for the furtherance of His Gospel.
Young’s Literal Translation of Isa.45 v 8
Drop, ye heavens, from above, And clouds do cause righteousness to flow, Earth opened, and they are fruitful, Salvation and righteousness spring up together, I, Jehovah, have prepared it.
I suspect there was a bigger Jewish diaspora (or at least Jewish-interested) than we tend to think. There was a big enough Jewish community around the eastern Mediterranean with a shaky grasp of Hebrew to justify the translation of the Septuagint a couple of centuries before Christ. Paul was Jewish but also a Roman citizen from Tarsus. The early Church kept getting into fights with Jewish communities around the Mediterranean, so those communities were reasonably numerous. There’s the Ethiopian eunuch who travels to worship at Jerusalem. And in the accounts of Paul’s trials we learn that the Roman governor Felix has a Jewish wife – Drusilla.
A quick online search suggests:
Total Jewish population of the Empire: up to 7m (which is an extraordinary 14% of the population of the Empire)
Diaspora: 4–5m (65 to 75%)
Israel: 1 to 2m.
According to Philo, there were one million in Alexandria. Other major centres were Babylon, Rome, and the cities of Asia (Turkey).
So the Jewish population of Alexandria could have been comparable to that of Israel. (Btw, that is why it is misleading to talk of Jesus as a ‘refugee’ in Matt 2).
And also btw, the global Jewish population today is only double that.
Yes, I was going to post some details – although I think 14% of the empire’s population is much too high for the first century. But even 5-7% would be significant. It’s important to note that Jews outnumbered Christians well into the second and maybe third century. We have to bear this in mind in understanding the controversies between Christians and Jews then, who had the true interpretation of the Scriptures. It’s all there in Athanasius’ ‘De Verbi Incarnatione’ from the first half of the 4th century.
Interesting. To give it some context of what those sort of numbers look like, in US today black/African-Americans make up ~12% of the population.
Presumably most of them in the Diaspora would have been urban dwellers and not working the land, since many had emigrated to work in trade and the urban crafts, as well as medicine and the literate professions. In Israel, of course, the majority would have agricultural workers, a point reflected in Jesus’ parables and the condemnation of exploitation of farm workers in the Letter of James. The much later history of the Jews in Europe has them as overwhelmingly a city dwelling people who lived outside the land-based feudal system and had instead a direct relation with the monarch as ‘servi camerae’ – an early instance of the anomalous or special status of the Jews in Christendom. As ‘servi camerae’ Jews were also the rulers’ first port of call when needing to borrow money.
Well, here’s the interesting thing. Luke appears to be writing more for gentiles and perhaps for those *not* in the land of Israel. And guess what? He has way more economic parables than Mark and Matthew. And his focus in Acts is precisely on mission in cities. So that all makes sense…
‘would have *been agricultural workers’. It could be interesting to know the working background of the Jews who fought the Romans so fiercely in AD 66-72. Did they beat their ploughshares into swords?
Yes, a quiz question I set in a Parish event recently was what is the modern state furthest from Jerusalem whose inhabitants are recorded as being present at Peter and the apostles’ speech at Pentecost? The answer is Iran/Tajikistan (‘Parthia’)- it’s amazing just how far people came for the festivals. And I think that was why Jerusalem was so full when the Romans later besieged it
Tacitus praised the Germanic peoples for their superior morality and manliness, in his Germania, although he had an obvious agenda to point out that things had been better under the Republic than the Emperors.
Some really interesting insights. Thank you
Isn’t it?!
The number of British civil servants and soldiers in India during the days of the Raj was spectactularly small compared to the Indian population. Most empires are run on a shoestring.
It was when legions had to be diverted to put down the Great Pannonian/Illyrian Revolt of AD6-9 that Armin, son of the chief of a quelled German tribe and a hostage educated in Rome in order to be later put in place as a puppet ruler, led an ambush against the Roman governor to whom he was No.2 in Germania. His short-lived Germanic federation took down three Roman legions in the autumn of AD9, probably around the time of Jesus’ Barmitzvah (given that Jesus Christ appears to have been born in, er, 4BC). It is a dark and powerful tale that has echoed down German history ever since. Luther claimed to be doing spiritually what Armin did physically: getting Rome off the Germans’ backs. A site for the battle was proposed by Theodor Mommsen in the 19th century and was verified in the late 20th, at the Kalkriese Berg a few miles north of Osnabrück.
The governor of Germania who died in the battle had earlier been governor of Syria, which included the Holy Land; he restored order after fighting broke out among Jewish factions to succeed Herod the Great once Herod died, and he ordered the crucifixion of 2000 militant fighters (states Josephus).
Qunitli Vare, redde legiones!
* legiones redde. (‘Give me back my legions!’)
The Romans took their revenge, but the northern boundaries of the empire were then established: the Rhine and the Danube. And that also established one of the essential divisions and dynamics of European history to this day (confirmed eight centuries later by the grandsons of Charlemagne in the Oaths of Strasbourg), the separation of Europe into Romance and Germanic worlds (although Latin would remain central to the religious and educational worlds of Germany and Poland).
When the Romans came back in AD15 they eliminated all significant resistance between the Rhine and the Elbe, 200 miles further east. But Emperor Tiberius ordered the legions back to the Rhine and, after that, Rome made only punitive raids east of the Rhine. Perhaps Tiberius, who had campaigned in Germania, decided the area was not worth colonising. Or perhaps he was growing jealous of his general Germanicus’s successes there (hints Tacitus; Germanicus, who was named after his father’s successful campaigning there a few decades earlier, might have been poisoned in AD19 on Tiberius’s orders).
We cannot say whether Armin’s victory had a big effect on European history, because we don’t know how Rome would have behaved towards Germania if Armin had never acted.
Augustus received Varus’s severed head in a basket, and I remember reading in Suetonius that each year on the anniversary he banged his head against a doorpost and murmured “Quintili Vare, Legiones Redde!” I wondered whose head Suetonius meant.
Yes, Pilate’s wife’s role gives a sort of reflected compassion that falls on Pilate too, possibly unfairly. On providence, certainly the early fathers thought ‘pax romana’ was providential – Christ came at a time of unprecedented peace, allowing the message to spread along trade routes etc.
How about extending this topic to the empires of the Old Testament?
Could start with Esther, perhaps, though others are available. Covenants and their nature and purposes loom large. Exile and deliverance in redemptive history, even in the midst of questionable, objectionable, morals and extant ethics and law?
I would recommend Charles Kingsley’s excellent series of lectures
“The Romans and the Teutons”; it might still be available free to download on Amazon Books. Shalom.
On Pilate see this piece from my blog some years ago
https://stevesfreechurchblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/46/
Pointing out the importance of the way Pilate found Jesus innocent even if he then fell to political pressures to execute an innocent person; and the implications for Christian views of Church/state relations…..
(Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong but…)
Before the Jewish revolt there was no Roman legion in Judea, but there was one in Syria that some of the Biblical Roman soldiers may have come from. The Roman military in Judea was mostly auxiliaries (non Roman soldiers who fought for Rome) so I think it’s probable that these God fearing Centurions were actually Jewish or Jewishish and not actually Roman at all.
Acts 10:1 is explicit he was an italian. So it follows many or most were not. good point
Steve
Maybe. I don’t think even that case is particularly clear. From “the Italian cohort” doesn’t mean he was Italian and Italian doesn’t mean he was a Roman citizen or part of a legion.
However I don’t think it matters hugely, the point of that passage was his conversion to Christianity, not his citizenship