The Roman Army and the Expansion of the Gospel

Alexander Kyrychenko

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110374759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Although Roman centurions appear at crucial stages in the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, the significance of the centurion's office for the development of Luke's story has not been adequately researched. To fill in that void, this study engages the relevant Greco-Roman and Jewish sources that reflect on the image of the Roman military and applies the findings to the analysis of the role of the Roman centurion in the narrative of Luke-Acts. It argues that contemporary evidence reveals a common perception of the Roman centurion as a principal representative of the Roman imperial power, and that Luke-Acts employs centurions in the role of prototypical Gentile believers in anticipation of the Christian mission to the Empire.
Chapter 1 outlines the current state of the question. Chapter 2 surveys the background data, including the place of the centurion in the Roman military organization, the role of the Roman army as the basis of the ruling power, the army's function in the life of the civilian community, Luke's military terminology, and the Roman military regiments in Luke-Acts. Chapter 3 reviews Greco-Roman writings, including Polybius, Julius Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Appian, Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch, Suetonius, Plautus, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Petronius, Quintilian, Epictetus, Juvenal, Fronto, Apuleius, as well as non-literary evidence. Chapter 4 engages the Jewish witnesses, including 1 Maccabees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmudic sources, and non-literary sources. Chapter 5 examines the relevant accounts of Luke-Acts, focusing on Luke 7: 1–10 and Acts 10: 1–11: 18. The Conclusion reviews the findings of the study and summarizes the results.

1 Introduction

1.1 The Prominence of Centurions in Luke-Acts and the Current State of the Study

Centurions appear numerous times in the narrative of Luke-Acts, often at crucial stages of the development of Luke’s story. The centurion of Luke 7:1 – 10 presents a unique example of faith in Jesus. The centurion of Luke 23:47 declares the crucified Jesus as

, affirming both his innocence and his righteousness. The centurion of Acts 10:1 – 11:18 plays a key role in the birth of the first Gentile Christian church—a seminal event in the Christian mission to Gentiles, dominating the rest of the book. Centurions of Acts 21 – 23 aid Paul, the missionary to Gentiles, in Jerusalem and protect him on his way to Caesarea. Finally, the centurion of Acts 27 expresses friendliness to Paul, saves his life during the sea voyage, and delivers him to Rome, thus ensuring the safe arrival of the missionary and his gospel to the capital of the Roman world.

Although these accounts have received much attention from New Testament scholarship, the implications of the fact that these characters were centurions have not been examined. This neglect reflects a general lack of research pertaining to the Roman military within New Testament scholarship, which routinely resorts to citing monographs originally published over three quarters of a century ago.¹ Not only do these works lack the benefit of more recent research in Roman military history, but they also tend to be more concerned with the historicity of Luke’s account rather than with the narrative function of the military figures in his two-volume work.²

Few attempts have been made to investigate the literary function of the Roman military within Luke-Acts. Vernon Robbins approaches the centurion stories of Luke 7 and Acts 10 from the perspective of the Roman Empire in the East as an appropriate workplace for Christian missionaries.³ In Robbins’s view, Luke aims at persuading his readers that the Roman Empire and Christianity are two powers that work symbiotically—Roman law allows Christians to advance the task initiated by Jesus, whereas Christianity in turn benefits the Roman Empire.⁴ According to Robbins, in Luke’s account the stories of Luke 7 and Acts 10 employ the figure of the centurion to exemplify the manner in which these structures work together. With the healing of his slave, the centurion of Luke 7 accepts the power structure of Jesus’s realm, which sets the stage for further expansion of the power of God to the domain of the Roman leaders. The story of the centurion of Acts 10 reveals this symbiotic relation of two power structures more fully. As this book will show, Robbins is correct in approaching the centurion episodes in the context of the Christian mission theme of Luke-Acts. However, the brief nature of his study, which does not engage relevant primary sources dealing with the Roman military, does not allow Robbins fully to explicate the role of the centurions in the narrative of Luke-Acts.

A short article by T. R. Hobbs proposes considering the Gospel references to the military from the perspective of the army as an institution of the first-century Mediterranean world. In his study, Hobbs aims at utilizing social scientific concepts in order to reconstruct the way the original readers might have perceived the soldiers’ activity in the settings created by the writers of the Gospel texts.⁵ Although Hobbs intends to go further than merely historical assessment of the soldiers’ roles and to analyze the texts as literary creations by their authors, he does not address the nuances of authorial intent in dealing with these texts. This results from Hobbs’s apparent unwillingness to appreciate the degree of authorial awareness of the military situation applicable to the context of these writings and, subsequently, the degree that awareness contributed to the authorial construction of the narrative and creation of the literary characters .⁶ For instance, Hobbs deliberately overlooks the distinction between Roman and non-Roman soldiers in the sources because he deems such distinction to be “of no great consequence.”⁷ This results in his inability to appreciate Luke’s intent to lessen the degree of the Roman soldiers’ involvement in the Passion of the Christ by transferring the scene of Jesus’s mistreatment by the soldiers from the Roman praetorium to the court of Herod Antipas. Such lack of attention to details and to Luke’s intention in reporting such details in the text results in Hobbs’s misjudgment of the role of the military in the Gospel in general.⁸

A recent Ph.D. dissertation by Laurena Ann Brink aims at evaluating the literary characterization of solders in Luke’s works.⁹ In her study, Brink addresses two questions: “How did Luke portray military characters within his two volumes ? and Why did Luke present them as he does?”¹⁰ By way of applying the methods of redaction criticism and a literary analysis of the narrative, Brink argues that Luke utilizes Greco-Roman stereotypes as a basis of his portrayal of the soldiers and contradicts those stereotypes, upsetting expectations of the reader.¹¹ According to Brink, Luke’s portrayal of soldiers contrary to the reader’s expectations provokes “his audience to recognize that even a soldier possesses the possibilities of conversion and commitment.” Brink argues that Luke’s depiction of the Roman military “functions as a parabolic exemplum of true disciples.”¹² A major flaw of this approach is the need to argue that there was one common set of stereotypes known and accepted by Luke and his intended audience, and that it presented soldiers in a negative way. As I will show, this approach does not do justice to the different ways that the sources portray Roman soldiers and centurions. The need to argue for a common set of negative stereotypes guides Brink’s selection of the primary sources and her treatment of the evidence. Although her treatment of the sources is usually fair, she sometimes over-interprets them in order to advance her argument that they present the military negatively. An adequate assessment of the literary function of the Roman military in general, and centurions in particular, in the narrative of Luke-Acts still remains to be done and is the goal of this book.

Roman military historians have treated the subject of the Roman army extensively. Beginning with Theodor Mommsen, scholars considered the development of the Roman army within the larger context of the Roman imperial system.¹³ Following Alfred von Domaszewski’s seminal Die Rangordnung des römischen Heeres, a number of studies focused on the matters of Roman army structure, recruitment, composition, functions, and other issues pertaining to the army as a military institution.¹⁴ Numerous works specifically addressed the Roman military presence in Judaea.¹⁵ Some of the authors considered the Roman imperial army within the larger context of society, exploring th...

Table of contents

• Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Luke-Acts in the Roman Military Setting
• 3 The Image of the Roman Soldier in Greco-Roman Sources
• 4 The Image of the Roman Soldier in Jewish Sources
• 5 The Roman Military in Luke-Acts
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Primary Sources