An Ephesian interlude (6): a reflection for Day 14 of Lent

 

“While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.” (Acts 17.16-17)

     One of the ways the emperor of Rome expected his subjects to demonstrate their allegiance to him was to worship his “genius” or his “spirit” (represented by his image, i.e., statue).^[1]  Two years after his death in 44 B.C., the Roman senate had voted in favour of granting Julius Caesar “apotheosis”, i.e., he was proclaimed to have ascended to join the Roman pantheon as a god.  As a result, shrines were constructed for the worship of “the divine Julius Caesar”; this also meant that his adopted son and heir, Octavian[2] was hailed as “the son of a god” (this was inscribed on the coins bearing his image, along with his other titles of “lord” and “saviour”).  Every successor to the throne of Rome would perpetuate this tradition.  Emperor worship was especially fervent in the eastern part of the empire, and there were temples and statues of the emperors everywhere.  Indeed, five of the seven cities in “Asia” to whose churches John of Patmos sent letters (cf. Rev. 2—3) had temples dedicated to the cult of the emperor.  The expectation was that faithful subjects of the empire would burn incense in front of the images of the emperor as a sign of both their loyalty to the emperor’s person and to the imperial order.  There was one world – the world of Rome – and Caesar was its Lord.

     We have solid historical evidence that emperor worship was indeed the occasion of the first persecution of Christians by the imperial authorities outside of the city of Rome itself.^[3]  In his voluminous surviving correspondence with the emperor Trajan, Pliny the Younger – Governor of Bithynia (110-113), a neighbouring province to Asia – wrote about how he interrogated two female slaves named Perpetua and Felicitas who had been accused of being Christians (an “offense” which was not yet part of the “criminal code”), and when they had refused to curse Christ and offer incense to the emperor’s image (Pliny’s litmus test for imperial loyalty), they had been sentenced to death in the arena.  Pliny inquired of Trajan what policy he should adopt towards Christians, and was advised not to seek them out, but if ever those brought in for questioning refused to “recant”, he should apply the capital sentence, as refusal to conform to the cult of the emperor was considered to be seditious.^[4]

     “John”, the author of Revelation and an early follower of Jesus, had been exiled to the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea, off the western coast of the province of Asia.  John had been banished from Roman society “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1.9).  John was a member of the Jewish diaspora in the eastern end of the Roman empire^[5], and, like his compatriots in Judaea a couple of centuries previous, he faced pressure to conform to pagan conventions.  For John to ascribe divine honours to the emperor would be a betrayal of both his Jewish monotheism (based on “the word of God”, i.e., the Scriptures) and his “testimony” to Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and Lord (“ruler of the kings of the earth”: Rev. 1.5).  John encourages his readers to remain steadfast in their resistance to the pressure to conform to imperial conventions, mentions one Christian by name – Antipas, a member of the church in Pergamum – who had recently been martyred (Rev. 2.13) and predicts a widespread persecution soon to come (cf. Rev. 2.10; 3.10; 6.9-11; 7.9-14). 

     True to his “underhanded” literary strategy, Luke never portrays Paul exhorting people to stop offering sacrifice to Caesar.  However, what he does show Paul doing – quite often – in Acts is critiquing idolatry (which included emperor-worship: Ac. 14.14-15; 17.22-25, 29).  Also, every time Paul founded a community who worshipped Jesus as Lord, he was undermining imperial pretensions to divinity and absolute power.  As far as Paul was concerned, all rulers – pagan though they may be – were (called to be) servants of justice, and ultimately, were servants of the one true Creator-God (cf. Rom. 13.1-7).  There is one world – the Creator’s – and Jesus is its Lord.  Amen.

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[1] The line between the worship of the emperor’s “spirit” and worship of the emperor himself as a living god was so thin as to be often imperceptible, especially in the eastern parts of the empire (e.g. province of Asia), where the worship of imperial rulers was an accepted and longstanding part of the culture.

[2] aka “Augustus”, the first to succeed in consolidating power over the empire in one person, which was the reason Caesar had been assassinated.

[3] The emperor Nero (reign: 54—68) had blamed the Christians of Rome for the Great Fire of AD 64, and subsequently killed many of the city’s Christians, including, according to tradition, the apostles Peter and Paul.

[4] Compare Paul’s drawn-out legal process in Acts chapters 21-28.

[5] The Roman empire of the first century AD encompassed the Mediterranean Sea, referred to at this time as “a Roman lake”.  The province of Judaea had been annexed in 63 B.C. and was ruled alternately by either Roman governors (e.g. Pontus Pilate) or client kings of the Herodian family (Herod the Great, whose reign coincided with that of Augustus, was an Idumean warlord who fought for Rome against the Parthians and had been granted the title “King of the Jews”).