Suffering and Glory

The Church from the Apostles to Constantine

Patrick Whitworth

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781910519912
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Patrick Whitworth tells the story of the growth of the early Christian community. Eschewing speculation, he provides a clear narrative interspersed with pithy accounts of the most significant Christian teachers in the period which culminated in the advent of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine.

It is a story that is particularly relevant at a time when Christendom is a fading memory and the Christian community is struggling to discover where the Spirit is leading in a global culture.

— Richard Chartres, Former Bishop of London

A rapid, detailed and accurate narrative, full of picturesque scenes drawn directly from contemporary witnesses to the rise of Christianity in the Roman world. Whitworth writes with admiring passion, but does not disguise the human peculiarities and frailties of the protagonists. At all times we are aware of the importance of locality, and the shifts in Christian thought and practice are seen to result from changing relations to the ambient culture, a leading cause of which was the success of the church itself.

— Mark Edwards,Professor of Early Christian Studies, University of Oxford

Part One: The Apostolic Age

Chapter 1

The Roman Empire and Judea in the Age of Augustus

By any stretch of the imagination the story of the growth of the Christian faith from the birth of Jesus, in an obscure part of the Roman Empire, to becoming the faith of the Emperor Constantine and the religion of the Empire is unparalleled in human history. But it is even more exceptional when we consider, in this book, how utterly weak and vulnerable the church was for most of that time: suffering, during these years, intense persecution for long periods of time, and beset continually by false teaching and dissension. The threats of persecution, Gnosticism and then Arianism might well have extinguished the church’s witness in the Roman world, but it was able to call upon the courage of an Ignatius or a Polycarp, as well as on the resolute and lucid explanations of the faith by the likes of Irenaeus, Tertullian or Athanasius, to burnish and defend its message of grace, forgiveness and salvation to humankind. These leaders are comparatively well known, but they led a noble army of women and men of whom we know next to nothing, but whose faith prevailed in the most severe testing. Judging by the Catacombs in Rome, this army of saints was sizeable, faithful and brave. The story began in the unlikeliest of ways in a stable or inn in Bethlehem, in or around 4 BC, where the infant Jesus was threatened from birth by the local king, but was welcomed and worshipped by shepherds and Magi alike. This is the story of what happened to belief in Jesus Christ from that time on, and the impact it had on the world.

Jesus was born in or close to 4 BC, and into a world that had been shaped by Augustus Caesar (27 BC–14 AD). Herod also died in 4 BC, but was alive at the time of the birth of Jesus (see Matthew 2:2). The massacre of the innocents commanded by Herod was of children aged two years and younger (Matthew 2:16), and presumably the birth of Jesus occurred some months before Herod gave this command, in which case Jesus’ birth would have been at least several months before the death of Herod in 4 BC. Furthermore, it is commonly accepted that the Magi may have arrived in Bethlehem several months after the birth of Jesus. Their arrival precipitated Joseph and Mary’s flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:13).

Adding all these facts and projections together, it is not too far-fetched to suppose that the special conjunction of the stars in 7 BC, which may have triggered the Magi’s search for a new king, also gives us an approximate date for Jesus’ birth. The Magi could well have been Zoroastrian stargazers or astrologers, and their study of the stars was the evidential reason for their mysterious and enthralling journey.1

Seemingly contradictory evidence for the date of Jesus’s birth is then given by the careful historian Luke, who places the birth after a decree by the Provincial Governor of Syria, Quirinius, who gave an order that the population of Judea should register for taxation in their hometowns (Luke 2:2). From other sources, we know that Quirinius did this in AD 6 after Herod’s son Archelaus had been deposed and Syria’s governor now directly administered Judea. From these sources we know that Quirinius called for a census for purposes of taxation in AD 6,2 but if this was the census referred to by Luke it would mean that it did not take place until Herod had been dead for ten years.

In interpreting this inconsistency between Matthew’s account, which places Jesus’ birth date firmly in Herod the Great’s reign, and Luke’s account, which is dated by classical sources to AD 6, it is likely that either the census, which had taken place earlier, was wrongly attributed to Quirinius, or that there was an earlier census which had taken place, but which, in the public mind (from which Luke may have gained his facts), had become associated with Quirinius, a man greatly despised by the Jewish population once direct rule over Judea had been established from Syria.

It is thus more likely that Jesus was born around 5/6 BC. His crucifixion took place under Pilate’s prefecture, which was from AD 26–36. If Jesus was in his early thirties when crucified, the crucifixion would have taken place in the earlier part of Pilate’s unhappy prefecture. Whatever the precise dating, what we may be sure about is that the world that Jesus was born into had been powerfully shaped by Augustus and Herod and by the interlocking and often conflicting cultures of the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds. Both Augustus and Herod are mentioned in the narratives of Christ’s birth; they and their successors were to shape the Apostolic Age to come.

In 5 BC, Augustus had been Princeps or Augustus for 22 years. In January 27 BC, the Senate had sought a new title (cognomen) to express the authority (auctoritas) of Octavian (Augustus’ birth name). Debates took place in the Senate in Rome between 13 and 16 January that year, both praising Octavian Caesar for his achievements and seeking a suitable title for him. The word which had to be avoided at all costs was “King”, for Rome had turned its back on monarchy after the Tarquins, when in 509 BC their cousin, another Brutus, made the people swear a collective oath that “they would never allow again a single man to reign in Rome”.3 The tradition of the republic, pursued thereafter, remained singularly powerful in the Roman mind, however much Julius Caesar, or previously Sulla, may have suborned it.

A kind of power dance was performed between the Senate and Augustus, in which he was offered ever more powerful titles, much like his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, but which he ostentatiously rejected; only to be offered an equal or greater power, but under a different name. Not for him the titles Dictator or King; he wanted something else. Eventually Senator Plancus, a one-time supporter of Mark Antony, proposed that the title Augustus be given to Octavian. Henceforward, he would be titled Imperator Caesar Augustus divi filius. No one had been given such a title before, not even his great uncle Julius Caesar. There was more than a hint of the divine about the phrase divi filius (son of God) and a sense of seeking the divine will for Rome, as stated by one of her earliest and most revered poets, Ennius.4

These titles displayed the almost unassailable authority Augustus had gained in the years since the assassination of Julius Caesar by Brutus and Cassius during the Ides of March in 44 BC. Augustus was to reign supreme for a further 41 years till AD 14, by which time he was 76 years old. His sheer longevity in power made his era unique: his age was to Rome what the Victorian age was to Britain, although Augustus’ power, unlike that of the British constitutional monarch, was untrammelled.

Augustus’s rise to power was partly due to his name and family, partly due to good fortune, and partly due to his calculating use of violence and terror to avenge the death of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar. He was the warlord turned eminence grise, the avenging instrument of Mars turned embodiment of the State. But at first his ascendancy was anything but certain. By 44 BC, the events of the previous years had left Rome deeply shaken, facing another period of bloodletting, civil war and uncertainty.

Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar’s career was meteoric. He combined extraordinary talent, personal magnetism and charm, brilliance as a general, and utter ruthlessness as a commander with political ambition second to none. Added to this was his lineage, which was of the most purple, linked to an eloquence that never deserted him. He had taken a course of rhetoric from Apollonius Molon of Rhodes, “the greatest living exponent of the art”,5 was both hard—sleeping with his troops in Gaul on frozen ground,6 and flamboyant, the biggest dandy in town when flaunting his power and bribing his way to the top. He practically seized the honorific post of pontifex maximus through bribes.7

From the spring of 58 BC, Julius Caesar had had three governorships: one of the northern part of Italy, a second of the Balkans and lastly of southern Gaul. For ten years he was to be both Governor of these vast provinces and Magistrate of Rome, one of the city’s chief offices,8 amassing in the process very great wealth and unlimited freedom of action. His campaigns were on a devastating scale, involving, it is thought, the loss of life of a million men.9 From the Mediterranean in the south to the Rhine in the north, and from the Alps to Britain, countless tribes had been broken on his sword, but he was not at the end of his ambition. The money he had at his disposal from his campaigns in Gaul was almost as great as the state treasury itself. Suetonius tells us that Caesar exacted an annual tribute of 40 million sesterces.10 Yet men of equal talent and wealth, Pompey and Crassus, blocked his path to the very top. He looked now for a second consulship, the premier position in the Roman hierarchy, held with one other consul in what was called the cursus honorum, the Roman political pecking order of the Republic’s offices of state, or the racetrack to the top.11

The two other powerful figures in the firmament of Roman power were Pompey and Crassus. In 67 BC, Pompey, then only 23 and a kind of Roman Alexander the Great, had been given a command that embraced the entire Mediterranean. Pompey proceeded to conquer present-day Turkey, and, having defeated King Mithradates VI, took his Pontic Kingdom, which included Armenia (extended in those days to include much of present-day Turkey), and also secured the eastern Mediterranean seaboard and the country of Syria.

Pompey also extended Roman power forcibly into Israel itself. When a civil war developed between the sons of Queen Alexandra Salome, the Hasmonean ruler of Jerusalem, Pompey eventually intervened on the side of Hyrcanus II after Salome’s death. After a siege, Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BC. He entered the Temple and violated the Holy of Holies. He then incorporated Judea into the Empire. Later, in 40 BC, Herod the Great secured from Augustus the right to rule Judea as a client ruler of Rome.

Pompey, like Caesar, had hugely extended the power of the Empire, and together with Crassus and Caesar, sought to dominate Rome. Yet in 50 BC, Crassus, immensely wealthy, but not as victorious militarily as either Pompey or Caesar, sought fame by going to fight a campaign against the Parthians on the eastern edge of the Empire. The Parthians ruled an empire which was a successor to the Persians and which stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Tigris and beyond. Their methods of warfare were anathema to those following the infantry tactics of Rome. Their lightly clad horsemen, swift in advance and retreat, wheeled and darted like their lethal arrows. They were effeminate and unpredictable in comparison with Rome’s well-toned masculinity with its cumbersome columns, but were nevertheless deadly and effective.12 Thus, in 53 BC, on a baking plain in Mesopotamia near the border town of Carrhae, Crassus and his legions were wiped out. Three legions were annihilated, the Eagles—silver representations of the holy bird of Jupiter—were seized and Crassus himself was killed. It was to be one of the worst defeats for the Roman army until Augustus’s overconfident commander, Publius Quinctilius Varus, lost three legions in the bogs and woods of Germany between the Elbe and the Rhine in AD 9.13 Crassus’s loss was a body blow to Rome, a grievous shock, but it also left only two imperators in the field, both with their sights set on complete authority. In December 50 BC, one of the consuls went to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, and, presenting him with a sword, charged him to wield it against Caesar in the interests of the Republic.

Caesar was not prepared to back off, however, and on 10 January 49 BC, together with his legions, he crossed the Rubicon, a small river south of the Alps. For the next four years there was civil war, with its almost infinite cost to the Republic. Cicero could scarcely choose between the two: “I am fond of Curio, a Tribune in support of Caesar, I wish to see Caesar honoured in the manner which is his due, and as for Pompey, I would lay down my life for him—all the same, what really counts with me is the Republic itself”.14 Cicero was committed to the res publica, but unsure how to discern what was best in the conjunction of such warring parties. It was a dilemma faced by many, but the lives of thousands would now be ground down between the millstones of the ambition of these two men. Pompey, cast as the defender of the Republic, left Rome and crossed over to Epirus in central Greece, where he gathered his forces and waited for Caesar.

The battle took place on 8 August 48 BC at Pharsalus in central Greece. Pompey was reluctant to engage Caesar, but the senators with him wanted a fast and crushing victory. Despite much smaller forces, Caesar’s superior tactics and hardened legionnaires proved decisive in victory. Pompey was defeated and put to flight. This left Caesar in control of the Empire, but it was a tragic victory.

Looking at the defeated legions at Pharsalus, Caesar reportedly said, “They brought this on themselves. They would have condemned me regardless of all my victories—me Gaius Caesar—had I not appealed to my army for help”.15 But the cries of the Roman wounded and the piles of the Roman dead told another story: a story of fratricide, of civil war and of the bitterest grief. To the remnant of Pompey’s army, Caesar showed his celebrated clemency, and in particular to Marcus Brutus, the much-admired senator and ally of Pompey. But although Brutus was spared, he was never to be reconciled. It would be less than four years before he and Cassius plunged their knives into Caesar for betraying the Republic and taking to himself powers that no Roman should possess.

Pompey fled first to Mytilene to meet his wife Cornelia and then on to Egypt, where a renegade Roman on the beach at Alexandria ignominiously murdered him, with the full consent of Ptolemy XIII, who stood watching. “Pompey, drawing his toga over his face with both hands, endured them all [the stab wounds], nor did he say or do anything unworthy, only gave a faint groan”.16 When Caesar arrived in pursuit of Pompey, and was given Pompey’s pickled head, he wept. It was no fit end for a great Roman general who had received three Triumphs from his compatriots. Caesar despised the Ptolemies, but nevertheless found consolation in the bed of Cleopatra and in giving her a son, Caesarion.

After a brief respite in Egypt with the allurements of the Nile and Cleopatra, civil war continued...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Map of the Roman Empire in the age of Augustus
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One: The Apostolic Age
• Part Two: Defence, Definition and Exploration
• Part Three: Reform and Revolution
• Chapter 12: Conclusion
• Chronology
• Dramatis Personae
• Map of Constantinople after its foundation by Constantine
• Genealogy of the Imperial Family
• Genealogy of the family of Herod the Great
• Notes
• Bibliography