Jesus in a Roman World
Rome could count you. In the years when Caesar Augustus ruled, his clerks tallied more than 4,000,000 Roman citizens — about as many people as live in Los Angeles today, every one written down by hand, without a single machine. In Jerusalem, the Jewish religious capital in Judea, the historian Josephus records the temple priests could slaughter a quarter-million lambs in a single springtime Passover observance. A government that can number a city of millions and butcher a quarter-million animals in a day looks unstoppable. Yet the deepest danger to it all began as something very small.
Key Terms
- Breviarium Totius Imperii
- The Latin handbook Roman officials used to record citizens, tax revenues, and how many soldiers each client king could field.
- Bethlehem
- The ancestral town a Roman census forced Joseph to travel to, a town Jewish writings had already named for a promised king.
- Joseph the Carpenter
- A craftsman from Galilee who walked about 90 miles to his family’s ancestral town with his pregnant wife Mary to register for Rome’s census.
- John Hyrcanus
- A Judean leader who marched an army to Mount Gerizim in 111 BC and tore down the Samaritan temple there.
- Mount Gerizim
- The mountain where a Samaritan temple stood until a Judean army destroyed it in 111 BC.
- Samaritan Woman at the Well
- The person Jesus stopped to speak with openly in Samaria, a public exchange that crossed a line the southern elite had drawn.
- Imperial Cult
- Rome’s state religion, which worshiped the emperor as a god and gave him titles like Savior and Son of God.
- Evangelion
- The Greek word for the good news of peace announced across the empire whenever an emperor won a war.
- The Yeast Parable
- Jesus’s image for the Kingdom of Heaven: a small pinch worked into 3 measures of flour until the whole loaf rose.
- Passover
- The annual Jewish festival that swelled Jerusalem past bursting, when the Law required an unblemished lamb chosen on the 10th of Nisan and slaughtered on the 14th.
- Lamb Selection Day
- The 10th of Nisan, the day households chose their unblemished lambs and the same day Jesus timed his ride into Jerusalem.
- Roman Triumph
- The grand parade in which a victorious general rode through the streets in a chariot, the very display Jesus’s donkey ride mocked.
- Caiaphas
- The high priest who watched Jesus’s growing movement and saw a danger to the Temple’s survival.
- Pontius Pilate
- The Roman governor who could find no real crime in Jesus but sentenced him to crucifixion rather than risk a riot at the festival.
- Coponius
- The first Roman prefect placed over Judea after Rome annexed it directly as a province in AD 6.
- Sanhedrin
- The ruling council of priests and scholars in Jerusalem who guarded the Temple’s purity rules and watched the borders for anything that might pollute them.
- The Golden Mean
- Aristotle’s idea that every virtue sits as a balanced middle point between two faults — one of having too little, one of having too much.
- Aramaic
- The language Galileans spoke, with a thick country accent that let a person from Jerusalem pick them out in a single sentence.
- Kingdom of Heaven
- The kingdom Jesus described as running by upside-down rules: the greatest person was the servant, and a child — who held no legal standing under Roman or Judean law — was named the model citizen.
- Judea
- The region ruled directly through Roman governors whom Rome could appoint and remove at will.