Letter to Fidel Labrador continued…
Where are we? Always a fine question
when I am writing. St James says one is
not saved by faith alone, but by works also because faith without works is
dead. St. Paul says that one is not
saved by works of the law. What’s going
on here? I have already explained my theory that St. James, the bishop of
Jerusalem is writing a fund-raising letter for the hungry Jerusalem community.
Jesus had taught that if we don’t feed the hungry and clothe the naked He will
say to us on the judgment day, “…depart from me, I never knew you.” (Matt 7:21)
I have labored mightily to show that St. Paul never says that good works are
not necessary for salvation, just that works of the Law of Moses won’t save
you. What was Paul driving at? On to the salacious Roman gossip.
The Roman emperor Claudius (ruled
41-54 AD) was the last man standing when Caligula, his nephew and most of the
other members of the family of Julius and Augustus Caesar were dead. Claudius
pretended he was an idiot and they never bothered to kill him. After the army
assassins killed crazy depraved Caligula, the palace guard realized that
without an emperor they were out of a job. They found crazy semi-depraved Uncle
Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor. The terrified senate
went along with it and it turned out that Claudius was a pretty good emperor,
except for his weakness for women of very little character. Claudius had been quite close to a Jew, Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great (the baby killer of Bethlehem fame). In fact, Agrippa was raised on the Palatine
hill in Rome in the palace of the Caesars, not to be confused with Caesar’s
Palace in Las Vegas. The emperors had the habit of inviting the children of
client kings to live with the imperial family in Rome. It was a good way to
Romanize them and to keep their families on their best behavior, that is if
they ever wanted to see Junior again, so Claudius, Caligula and Agrippa were
all chums.
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| Caesarea Maritima |
After Caligula was assassinated in 41
AD, Agrippa seems to have helped Claudius have the senate and the palace guards
agree on the accession of Claudius to the imperial purple. Claudius gave
Agrippa control of most of his grandfather Herod the Great’s territory. He also
gave part of Lebanon to Herod Agrippa’s brother Herod. (They weren’t real
original in their choice of names.) Agrippa became one of the most powerful and
consequently most dangerous kings in the Middle Eastern territory of the Roman
Empire. Herod started fortifying places and making lots of new friends in the
Middle East, which made his friend Emperor Claudius a bit nervous. Could it be
that Herod Agrippa was fomenting rebellion and taking himself a little too
seriously as a possible Jewish messiah? He was acclaimed as a god by the crowd
in the amphitheater in Caesarea on the coast of the Holy Land. The Acts of the
Apostles said for this sin of allowing himself to be hailed as a god, he was
struck down by an angel and was dead only three years after receiving the
enlarged kingdom.
What’s point of all this? Jews had
started to make Emperor Claudius nervous. They were 10 percent of the
population of the empire. There was a community of them in all the major cities
of the empire, maybe a million around Alexandria Egypt and certainly a large
number in Antioch, the third city of the empire and a sizable community in
Rome. They were well positioned to make trouble. They did in fact revolt in the
Holy Land in 66 AD and again in 132 AD, but more ominously they rose up in
Cyprus and North Africa in 115 AD. They certainly made the emperors nervous and
Claudius, despite what everyone thought, was certainly no fool. When, in 50AD
(probably) there were riots among the Jews of Rome about a certain Chrestos,
Claudius said, “Enough!” and expelled the Jews from Rome.
This fellow Chrestos was probably
Christos, the Greek word for messiah. Christianity had reached Rome early and
they were busy fighting over the whole issue of who was in the Church and who
was out. Claudius seems to have sent the whole lot packing. Paul met the exilesPriscilla and Aquila from Rome in Corinth around 50 AD and they opened a tent
making business together. From them Paul would have heard the sad story of the
Church of Rome and I suspect this gave Paul a great idea. He would get his
theological point of view in on the ground floor when things eventually opened
for Jews in Rome. His opportunity was not long in coming. (More on this later.)
Remember his point of view. God loved Greeks as well as Jews and a Greek didn’t
have to become a Jew to become a Christian.
The synagogue was a new thing at the
time of Christ. The synagogue is never mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures (the
Old Testament). It possibly developed in the Babylonian community of Jews a
couple hundred years before Christ. The religion of Israel was a domestic
religion that required three pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple per year if
possible. The prayers and blessings and dietary laws that made up the practice
of religion were up to the individual. The sacrifices necessary for purification
etc. were performed in the Jerusalem temple, but beyond that, there were no
place of religious assembly. The equation changed in Babylon. How could one
maintain the religion of Israel without the temple? Pilgrimage was pretty much
out of the question if you had to walk to Jerusalem from Babylon in Iraq. The
answer? The synagogue! It was a place where one could be an Israelite with
other Israelites -- a sort of community center.
Gradually the synagogue and the rabbis, religious teachers, came to
supplant the temple in the daily life of Jews, especially those not living in
the Holy Land. For a couple centuries the rabbis and the synagogue existed
alongside the temple and the sacrificing priests, the cohenim, the descendants
of Aaron and the tribe of Levi. When the temple was finally destroyed, all that
was left was the synagogue. It became the de facto center of what was now truly
“Jewish” life.
There were a lot of gentiles
(non-Jews) who attended synagogue. They were called the God-fearers. They had
pretty much given up on the silly religions of the ancient world. Remember the
Egyptian hippo-jackal-cow gods? The Roman and Greek gods looked more like people,
but you had to hide your kid sister from them and sometimes your kid brother.
They weren’t very nice gods. A lot of well-educated Romans and Greeks were
fascinated by the Jewish religion which spoke of one God who was reasonable and
actually interested in human beings, a reasonable moral code and a fairly
reasonable set of writings. They weren’t going to jump into the deep end of the
pool what with circumcision and no pork and temple sacrifices. They came to
synagogue and prayed and studied but nothing more. They were Jewish wannabes,
but couldn’t go the whole way, then along comes St. Paul…
Next week: More salacious ancient
Roman gossip, I promise
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