Document Type
Article
Abstract
(Excerpt)
Much of what we know about the relations of first-century AD “Christians” and the authorities of the Roman Empire, as well as the relationship between Jews of this time, is derived from the writings of Paul the Apostle through his various Letters. Moreover, historical research has uncovered a significant amount of information on this subject; yet, so-called Pauline scholarship is central to our understanding of these intricate relationships. Paul occupies a special place in the history and shaping of the Church for numerous reasons. He is loved and hated with equal vigor and he is certainly responsible more than any other early Christian apostle, or otherwise, for removing the Church from the constraints of Judaism. But, of course, not even Paul can be understood without an excellent account of Roman law at the time and how it was applied in practice. Our accounts, in this Article, of the position of the Pauline Churches within the law of the Roman Empire and its society are derived from his letters—this author has made every effort to employ only the undisputed ones; the Acts of the Apostles written by Luke and contained within the canon of the New Testament; some historical sources, whether written by contemporaries of Paul or sometime thereafter; as well as our knowledge of Roman law at the time. The historical sources are well-known to historians and those theologians with an interest in early Christianity. Their scarcity tends to demonstrate how little interest there was in the early Church by the non-Christian public during its relatively “quiet” years, as well as confirm that when Christians came to the forefront through the persecutions, the blood of its martyrs became its seeds.
The thesis of this author is that despite the existence of a developed Roman criminal law of the first century AD, the legal attitude of the Roman Empire and its institutions, whether judicial or otherwise, was shaped by extra-legal elements. Certainly, however, with few exceptions, every act of persecution against church members did rest on some form of offense, as did the charges brought against them. To this end, we investigate the relationship between the predecessor of the Church as an institution, Judaism, with Roman law and thereafter the distinct relationship between the early adherents to Christianity and established Judaism. Was this latter relationship the most determining factor as to the position of Christianity in the eyes of imperial power and hence Roman law? Moreover, we are interested in understanding the mentality of Roman society against what they saw as a new and strange religious cult that wished not to be sociable or inclusive. A lack of common understanding between the two certainly grew into resentment and contempt, but again this turned out to be a good lesson for the Church, as it discovered that if it wanted its message to be ecumenical, it had to reach out and explain where it had come from and what it was aiming to achieve. Thus, the era of the Apologists dawned in the second century AD. Finally, we take the view that the disciplinary system of the early Pauline Churches was a normative system whose aim was to bypass the official channels of Roman law, without however intending to breach it in any way.
It should be stated the scholarship generally agrees about the accuracy of the historical account of the New Testament, and even Biblical scholars have looked to these—and other—sources to forge an understanding of the type of citizenship that the followers of Christ enjoyed in the Empire. This Article could possibly be written from three different perspectives. The first is from the point of view of early Jewish history and its abundance of sources. However, the author does not possess the linguistic and historical expertise to access this rich body of scholarship. The second perspective is that of Roman law. While a significant degree of references to Roman law and its first-century history are made in this Article, it is assumed that the historicity of the New Testament sources is accurate. The third approach is a combination of Christian theology and history with a sufficient degree of historical accounts of the time. This latter approach is preferred here, even if somewhat narrow in scope.