In his God & Empire, John Dominic Crossan talks about how the Gospels’ portrayal of everything about Jesus’s birth is designed to underscore his status as both royal and divine. That’s probably a familiar point, but what I learned from his book was that much of the Christian imagery surrounding the birth of Jesus was already in circulation within Roman sources. It makes sense, I suppose, that the available concepts of <royal> and <divine> were situated within the empire’s hierarchy. Octavian was frequently characterized as a king, human and divine at once, son of the gods, etc. But it goes further. Crossan translates a contemporaneous inscription:
The eternal and immortal nature of
everything has bestowed upon mankind the greatest good with extraordinary benefactions
by bringing Caesar Augustus in our blessed time the father of his own country,
divine Rome, and ancestral Zeus, Savior
of the common race of men, whose providence has not only fulfilled but actually
exceeded the prayers of all. For land and
sea are at Peace and the cities
flourish with good order, concord, and prosperity. (God & Empire, p. 108)
Here Octavian is praised as creator, long awaited answer to
prayers, and savior of the whole world (land and sea). Crossan explains that “the phrase ‘peace on
land and sea’ became almost an Augustan mantra at the heart of Roman imperial
theology. The only question, of course,
was whether peace on earth was to be established as Augustus’s peace through
victory or Jesus’s peace through justice.”
Crossan notes that Jesus grew up just a few miles from
Sepphoris. Around the time Jesus was
probably born, Josephus records a small rebellion in Sepphoris, which was brutally
suppressed by Roman authorities. Here’s
Crossan’s conjecture about the aftermath:
Those who survived would have lost
everything. I speculate, therefore, that
the major stories Jesus would have heard while growing up in Nazareth would
have been about “the year the Romans came.”
I push the speculation a little further: At some chosen moment in Jesus’s
youth, did Mary bring him up to the top of the Nazareth ridge, point out
Sepphoris, and talk about “the Year of the Romans”? From all such talk, what
did the young Jesus decide about God, Rome, resistance, and violence?