Continued from last week…
In our last exciting episode,
the emperor Diocletian was doing his level best to exterminate Christianity,
which had taken root in a surprising 10% of the empire’s population. Even more
alarmingly it had found a home among a few members of the imperial household
which ran the empire, and in the army. Then it all changed. In 303 AD, the
followers of Jesus were being rounded up and executed. In 313 AD, just ten
years later, Christianity was not only made legal, but was actually given
favored status. How had it happened? Simple: a vision. More about that later.
In 235 AD things fell apart for
the Roman Empire. Emperor Alexander Severus
was assassinated by his own troops, the generals fought for the imperial throne
for the next 50 years, plague broke out, and there was general economic
downturn and a dangerous devaluing of the currency. The coinage got so bad that
the government wouldn’t even accept its own money as payment for taxes. Taxes
were paid in kind. A town would be assessed so many bushels of wheat, so many
military boots, so many swords etc. If the local officials couldn’t come up
with the taxes that their towns or districts had been assessed, they would be
sold into slavery to pay the bill! It got so bad that local officials would
pack up their wagons and families and cross the border to join the barbarians
outside the empire’s boundaries.
At one point, the empire broke
into four parts. For our purposes the most interesting chaos happened in 270 AD
when Zenobia (her real name)
regent of the city of Palmyra, in Syria, invaded the Roman Empire. She
controlled Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt for three years, after which the
Romans captured her and put an end to her and to her rebellion. The Jews hadn’t
been much trouble in more than a hundred years, and weren’t trouble now, but
somehow the taint of being Semitic, like the Palmyrenes and Zenobia, raised
suspicions. The Jews seemed more comfortable with the Persian and Aramaic
speaking peoples of the east, many of whom were followers of Zoroaster or the
prophet Mani both of which religions were essentially monotheistic. The Jews in
the neighborhood had not risen up as far as I have been able to find out, but
the Romans were not very forgiving nor very forgetting rulers.
After a half century of
disaster, the emperor Diocletian, already mentioned, came to the imperial
throne. He realized that the empire was just too big to govern. He divided it
into two administrative sections east and west and appointed a co-emperor for the
east and two assistant emperors, one east, one west. Things calmed down a bit
and as I mentioned, he was busy blaming the Christians for the mess the empire
was in. He retired in 305 and was followed by the short lived Constantius, who
died a year later and was followed by his son, Constantine.
Constantine was a tough soldier and he wanted the whole enchilada. He took to
the field and waged war on his rival, Maxentius. He marched his
troops toward Rome down the Flaminian road, where, in northern Italy, he went
from victory to victory. When he arrived just north of Rome, things didn’t look
so good. Maxentius, Constantine’s chief rival had twice as many soldiers as
Constantine and was safe behind the city walls of Rome.
Then Constantine had a vision.
He later told the historian, Bishop Eusebius, that he saw a cross over the sun
and the Greek words “En toutō níka,” or “in hoc signo vinces,” in Latin, which means “In this
sign, you shall conquer.” He didn’t understand the meaning of the vision, but
the next night he had a dream in which Jesus of Nazareth spoke to him and said
that he should use the sign against his enemies. Constantine had his soldiers
paint it on their shield to replace the Roman eagle, at least that’s what
Constantine told Eusebius. Maxentius had a revelation of his own. He went to
see the keepers of the Sibylline
Books, Rome's own collection of
prophetic utterances. The keepers prophesied that, “the enemy of the Romans”
would die in the coming battle. It was the old gods against Christ. Maxentius
suffered a complete defeat at the Battle of the
Milvian Bridge, on October 28, 312. By the way, in the heat of battle he
fell off the bridge and drowned.
Now Constantine was the
undisputed ruler of Rome and the western empire. He shared power with only one
other - Licinius. He and
Licinius met to confer in 313 in Milan. Constantine would rule the west,
Licinius the east and for good measure Licinius would marry Constantine’s
sister, Constantia. By the way, they issued something called the Edict of Milan which
guaranteed complete freedom of religion in the whole empire. Property and real estate
taken from Christians during the persecutions of Diocletian were to be
returned. Things deteriorated, you know how in-laws can be. It seems that
Licinius had reopened the persecution of Christians. Over the course of the
next ten years hostility between Licinius and Constantine ended with Licinius
defeat and execution. Constantine went
on to advance the cause of Christianity and the stabilization of the empire
which included moving the capital from Rome to a new Rome built in the east.
The renewed empire was to last in one form or another for almost a thousand
years until it finally fell to the Turks in 1453 and became Istanbul (formerly
Constantinople).
A lot of cynics like me think,
“Of course. A vision. How convenient.”
But if you look a little more closely, Christianity was very unpopular
with the great majority of Romans. The Roman senate, aristocracy and military
were largely hostile to Christianity. Remember, Diocletian had spent years
ridding the military and the government of Christians. It seems quite
reasonable that Constantine adopted Christianity out of real conviction, not
for political advantage. He himself was not baptized until he lay on his
deathbed in 337, some 25 years after his vision, but he advanced the cause of
Christianity with government perks and huge building projects, especially in
Rome, Jerusalem and his new capital, Constantinople.
A new age of religious tolerance
and prosperity had dawned. Sort of. Over the next century Christianity became
known as “the religion of the Romans.” The Messiah of Israel became the Christ
of Rome. To be a Roman was to be a Christian. The old religion was gradually
and often violently suppressed. Heresy was now a crime against the state, not
just a religious offense, and the Jews?
The position of that tolerated sect of the rabbinic Pharisees, now
universally called “the Judeans” (Jews), was less certain. The long standing
theological debate between the sect of the Nazarenes and the Rabbinic Pharisees
had become a political problem. As early as Constantine things started to
change. Constantine declared that Jews were
forbidden to own Christian slaves or to circumcise
any slaves they did own. One feels a very cold wind blowing.
Nest week: the cold wind gets windier and hotter.
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