What, then, was the Roman Empire like the first century CE, when those Christian stories announced the miraculous birth of a divine child as the advent of the kingdom of God over against that kingdom of Rome? What was the Roman Empire like when Matthew announced that Jesus was the newborn Davidic Messiah and that, in him, God had appointed a new “King of the Jews” instead of that Rome-appointed Herod the Great (2:2)? And what was the Roman Empire like when Luke rejoiced that Jesus was the newborn Son of God and that, in him, God had “shown strength with his arm…scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts…brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly…filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (1:51–53)?
Rome had established a very successful method for avoiding royal tyranny. Let there be no more kings, it said, but two aristocratic consuls chosen to govern together and only for one year. That system was powerful enough to defeat the troops and war elephants—more terrifying than tactical—of Hannibal and Carthage. But then something went terribly, terribly wrong. Athens had invented a democracy, but learned that you could have a democracy or an empire, but not both at the same time for long. Rome was now about to relearn that lesson. It had invented a republic, but was now to learn that you could have a republic or an empire, but not both at the same time for long.
One consul went west to conquer and loot Gaul. The other went east to conquer and loot Syria. And why thereafter should they cooperate or abdicate their power? As consuls became warlords, Rome was locked in its worst nightmare, civil war with battle-hardened legions on both sides. Rome had avoided tyranny only to obtain anarchy. First, Julius Caesar against Pompey; next, Caesar’s adherents against Caesar’s assassins; and, finally, Octavian, backed by Italy, against Mark Antony, backed by Egypt. After twenty years of civil war, it looked as if the Roman Empire was destroying itself and ruining much of the Mediterranean world in the process of its own destruction.
Then, on a calm Mediterranean day, September 2, 31 BCE, it all ended out in the Ionian Sea off Cape Actium in northwestern Greece. It was the last great naval battle of antiquity, and never had so much been gained for so many by so little. With their forces sapped by a summer of disease, desertion, and despair, Antony and Cleopatra fled to double suicide at Alexandria, leaving their troops to survive and surrender as best they could.
The victorious Octavian, grandnephew and adopted son of the deified Julius Caesar, would soon be entitled in Latin Augustus, the “One Who Is Divine,” or in Greek Sebastos, the “One Who Is to Be Worshiped” (from sebomai, “to worship”). At Priene, just off the mid-Aegean coast of Turkey, for example, a temple’s fallen lintel records its Greek dedication to THE AUTOCRAT CAESAR, THE SON OF GOD, THE GOD SEBASTOS.
The civil wars were over, and Rome had died as an imperial republic only to reinvent itself as an imperial monarchy. And it held that imperial power strongly, firmly, and lengthily over very many centuries. But how?
We know from historical sociology that imperial power is something like a giant hawser holding the empire-as-ship to the earth-as-dock. And that hawser has four separate but interwoven strands of power—military, economic, political, and ideological power. It was not any one alone, but the full integration of those four types of power that constituted Roman strength. In what follows we spend the most space on Rome’s ideological power, because those who celebrated the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke lacked any vestige of military, economic, or political power. They came with ideology against ideology or, more accurately, with theology against theology, so our emphasis here is on Roman imperial theology.
Military power is the monopoly or control of force and violence. That was based, of course, on the legions and, at the time of Jesus’s birth, Rome had twenty-eight of them, each composed of five to six thousand fighting engineers. Their first job was conquest, but that included building an infrastructure on which their control depended—so all-weather ports, roads, and bridges came first. When the historian Josephus itemized a legionary’s pack in his Jewish War, he cited only two items for war, but seven for construction.
Economic power is the monopoly or control of labor and production. Once that all-weather military infrastructure was in place, it could also be used for trade and commerce. Furthermore, the legions were not centralized as a strategic reserve near Rome, but stretched along the frontiers and paid there in cash. So the contact zones of the frontier were slowly but steadily monetized and eventually planted with veterans. That has been correctly described as a legionary economy. Afterward, and very soon, came cities, temples, and statues, aqueducts, baths, and amphitheaters.
Political power is the monopoly or control of organization and institution. Think about this absurdity. In the waning years of the nineteenth century, at the height of the British Empire, a Tory Member of Parliament declares that a brilliant Indian barrister would make a great prime minister of England. Why absurd? Racism, of course. But for Rome the equivalent was utterly possible. Once a “barbarian” province was properly Romanized, some of its higher aristocrats could become members of the Senate, and one of them could even become emperor.
Ideological power is the monopoly or control of meaning and interpretation. We begin by looking ahead. The titles of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus were: Divine, Son of God, God, God from God, Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, and Savior of the World. To use any of them of the newborn Jesus would be either low lampoon or high treason. And, since empires always know their opponents, Rome was not laughing. But for now, what did those titles mean as applied to Caesar Augustus? Without knowing that we will never understand what they meant when transferred by some Jews to Jesus.
The Greco-Roman tradition knew of immortal gods and goddesses (a deus or a dea) who controlled the world—although in some competition with one another. But it also recognized humans who became divine (a divus or a diva), individuals who were deified, but only for extraordinary or transcendental service to the world. As the Augustan poet Horace noted in his Epistles, that normally happened after their death, but “upon you [Augustus], however, while still living among us, we already bestow divine honors, set up altars to swear by in your name, and confess that nobody like you will arise hereafter or has ever arisen before now” (2.1). The human Augustus was divinity incarnate.
If you look back to that long afternoon off Cape Actium, you can see what Horace meant. After almost a hundred years of social unrest and twenty years of interminable civil war, Octavian, the Augustus-to-be, had saved the Roman Empire and brought peace to the Mediterranean. Imagine a great simultaneous sigh of sincere relief around that Roman lake, a thanks be to God, as it were, but since Octavian had done it, was he not God? Was he not Savior of the World? And that almost instant upgrade from Son of God—son, that is, of the already divine Julius Caesar—to God in his own right was not just because of Augustus’s personality or even character, but because of his program. What, then, was Augustus’s proclaimed program for the new and improved Roman Empire? You can see it clearly announced after Actium.
Immediately after that battle and even before pursuing his fleeing enemies to Alexandria, Octavian ordered a new Victory City, a Nicopolis, to be created in commemoration of his triumph. No surprise there. But also, in a striking equation of his own and Rome’s destiny, he turned his camp into sacred ground and ordered a memorial atop the tent site from which he went forth to battle that September morning. Along the open front of its three-sided portico, he placed a tithe of the three hundred or so bronze attack rams from the prows of the defeated fleet. And above it he inscribed in tall Latin letters—many still extant on site—the dedication that summarized for him the heart of Roman imperial theology. He offered religious thanks to the war god, Mars, and the sea god, Neptune, for the war he had fought, for the victory he had obtained, and for the peace that had ensued.
And there you have the four successive elements of Roman imperial theology—religion, war, victory, peace. You worship the gods, you go to war w
ith their assistance, you are victorious with their help, and you obtain peace from their generosity. And the key phrase from that monument is: “Victory [with] peace secured on land and sea.” For Augustus and for Rome it was always about peace, but always about peace through victory, peace through war, peace through violence.
It is vital to understand Augustus’s program of peace through victory, because it is presumed in the counterprogram of those Christmas stories and by the gospels to which they are the parabolic overtures. But is there any other program for earth besides peace through victory? We move now to answer that question and to consider an alternative vision for peace on earth.
THE ESCHATOLOGICAL KINGDOM OF GOD
The adjective eschatological (from the Greek eschata, or “last things”) is a term in biblical scholarship referring to God’s vision for that fifth or final kingdom of earth, for how the world would be run if God were its direct ruler (we might ask what a divine budget would look like). The eschaton denotes earth’s last and final kingdom, or, in other words, the kingdom of God.
Eschatology is not, of course, about the destruction of the earth, but about its transfiguration, not about the end of the world, but about the end of evil, injustice, violence—and imperialism. Think of the eschaton as the Great Divine Cleanup of the World. And to consider this eschatological kingdom of God we begin, as with the imperial kingdom of Rome above, in the middle of the second century BCE.
Earlier in that century the situation in tiny Israel was even more than usually dangerous. The Greco-Syrian monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes ruled one of the three major segments of Alexander’s vast empire, which had once stretched from the plains of Macedonia to the mountains of India. But, by the early 160s BCE, in an attempt to integrate Israel fully into his realm and to eliminate any faith-based opposition to that program, he launched a religious persecution against Judaism itself. Some Jews responded with very successful military resistance, and you can read their story in 1 Maccabees (a book in the Roman Catholic but not the Protestant version of the Christian Bible). But other Jews thought that the fundamental problem was not about Israel and Syria, but about God and empire, and you can read about their response in the book of Daniel (a book in both those canons).
The author of the latter book created an imaginary Jewish seer named Daniel living in a fictional Mesopotamian situation over three hundred years earlier than the factual Syrian situation of the early 160s BCE, when the book was actually written. We focus on one specific chapter in it.
Daniel 7 begins with a dream vision in which there is, once again, a sequence of four great empires—those of Babylonia, Medea, Persia, and Macedonia. But those imperial powers are described not as human forces arising from the orderly land, but as feral animals arising from the disorderly ocean: “I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another,” and “these four great beasts [are] four kings [that] shall arise out of the earth” (7:2–3, 17). These are Daniel’s four empires:
Babylonian Empire: “The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings.” (7:4)
Medean Empire: “Another beast appeared, a second one, that looked like a bear.” (7:5)
Persian Empire: “After this, as I watched, another appeared, like a leopard.” (7:6)
Macedonian Empire: “After this I saw in the visions by night a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that preceded it.” (7:7)
That fourth empire is more fearful than all those earlier ones put together, and no beast image could do it justice. Nothing had ever struck the East like the serried ranks of Macedonian pikes as Alexander invented annihilation rather than mere victory as the purpose of battle.
The Greco-Syrian empire of the 160s BCE is not even counted as another empire. It is but a subempire of Alexander’s. It is only one of the horns of that Macedonian beast. It is, indeed, only “a little horn” (7:8). But then comes Daniel’s vision of the fifth, final, and climactic empire of earth, the eschatological kingdom of God.
At a great trial held in heaven, God condemned all those past empires including that Syrian subempire. In the trial, “the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.” At the judgment, “their dominion was taken away” (7:10–12). All empires, and with them imperialism itself, are condemned by divine judgment. But what replaced them as the fifth and final kingdom or empire of earth? Each of those four empires was symbolized as a single beast from the depths. The fifth and final kingdom is also symbolized, but as a human being from the heights. As they were “like” eagle, bear, leopard, and some ultra-animal, it is “like a son of man,” that is, “like a human being.” (In English “humankind” often appears chauvinistically as “mankind.” Similarly, in Semitic languages “human being” often appears chauvinistically as “man” or “son of man.”) What is at stake in Daniel is this: the first four empires are inhuman beasts; only the fifth and final empire is truly human.
The vision of the world’s climactic kingdom is given twice, first to that symbolic humanlike one and thence to all those incorporated within that personification. It must be emphasized that just as those individual beastlike ones represent and contain an entire community, so also here, the individual humanlike one represents and contains an entire community. “To him” means “to the people of the holy ones of the Most High”:
“To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.” (7:14)
“The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them.”(7:27)
You will notice two aspects of that climax. The fifth and final kingdom, the kingdom of God, is here a glorious future option—it is given in heaven to “one like a human being” (literally: “one like a son of man”) to be brought down to earth for all. But neither is Daniel’s final kingdom specified in any great detail.
So there is still this question: how exactly is the alleged final and eschatological kingdom of God different from the final and imperial kingdom of Rome? Each claimed to be divinely decreed, eternally mandated, and transcendentally guaranteed. Each claimed to be universal and everlasting, to be unlimited across time and space. What then was the difference between them?
To pursue that crucial question we come down a century and a half to look at a Jewish text from the age of Augustus, a text contemporary with the birth of Jesus. Here you can see most clearly how God’s eschatological kingdom differs from all those imperial empires—including Rome itself. The text is from one of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles, a series of fictional prophecies that Judaism and then Christianity borrowed from Rome and then used rather fiercely against that very tradition:
The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together. (2.319–24)
For that ultimate vision, by the way, the model was not democracy, but family. God is like the Father who must provide equally for all the family of the earth—equally, meaning enough for everyone always.
We can now see that the fundamental difference between those divergent visions of earth’s final kingdom is not about ends, but about means. The imperial kingdom of Rome—and this may indeed apply to any other empire as well—had as its program peace through victory. The eschatological kingdom of God has as its program peace through justice. Both inte
nd peace—one by violence, the other by nonviolence. And still those tectonic plates grind against one another.
Finally, two major questions arise from that vision of God’s eschatological kingdom, of God’s Great Cleanup of the World, of God’s visionary program of peace through justice. First, what would God do to the Gentiles, the non-Jews, on that great day of transformation? Second, would God use some mediator or manager, some vicar or viceroy, to establish that transformation?
THE FATE OF THE GENTILES
First, then, what about the Gentiles? This is not an indication of Jewish chauvinism or xenophobia. The Gentiles were the gentes, the nations, and those that homeland Jews knew best and intended most were the great empires that had always oppressed them. So this was the question. When the great day for the earth’s divine transformation arrived, what would God do with the current great empire of that time? If it happened in the first century, for instance, what would God do with the Romans? The Bible—both the preceding Jewish scriptures and the later Christian scriptures—gave two diametrically opposed answers to this very basic question.
One answer was extermination in a Great Final Battle at the symbolic place of Mt. Megiddo—the Hebrew term is Har Megiddo, whence our English term “Armageddon” in that last book of the Christine Bible, the Apocalypse or Revelation. According to Micah, God would simply destroy the current great empire:
In anger and wrath I will execute vengeance on the nations that did not obey…. Then my enemy will see, and shame will cover her who said to me, “Where is the Lord your God?” My eyes will see her downfall; now she will be trodden down like the mire of the streets…. The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might; they shall lay their hands on their mouths; their ears shall be deaf; they shall lick dust like a snake, like the crawling things of the earth; they shall come trembling out of their fortresses; they shall turn in dread to the Lord our God, and they shall stand in fear of you. (Mic. 5:15; 7:10, 16–17)
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