other words, Jesus would represent the “true” realization of the project
otherwise identified with Augustus. Similarly, regarding Luke 2:10–11,
Brown writes: “I shall point out below that Luke derived the titles ‘Saviour,
Messiah, Lord’ from the early Christian kerygma, as indicated by his use of
them in Acts; but here [in Luke 2:10–11] he has recast them into a solemn
formula imitative of imperial proclamation” (1977, 416n. 23; emphasis mine).
Fighting fire with fire the evangelist may be, but the result of this is often
simply more fire.
Other aspects of Luke 1–2 echo the fourth eclogue of the Roman impe-
rial poet Virgil (see R.E. Brown 1977, 564–70). This poem was an eschato-
logical hymn of hope, promptly proven premature, which heralded the end
of the hundred years of civil war that had so crippled the Roman republic
during the first century BCE. Written under the consulship of Asinius Pol-
lio (40 BCE), whose mediation helped to forge the Peace of Brundisium,
ostensibly reconciling Octavian (Augustus) and Mark Antony, the com-
peting heirs of Julius Caesar, Virgil’s fourth eclogue describes the arrival of
the anticipated new age, embodied in the figure of “the boy about to be born,
under whom the race of iron will cease and a golden race will spring up over
the whole world...He will receive divine life...And he will rule over a world
made peaceful by the virtues of his father” (Ecl.4.8–9, 15, 17; cf. also Ecl.
4.53–39 and Luke 2:25–32; Janzen 2000, 87–89; Erdmann 1932).
It makes little difference to my thesis whether we conclude that Luke
actually knew Virgil’s poem or that both Virgil and Luke employed the
same or a similar (Semitic) tradition of messianic prophecy in their respec-
tive compositions. It does matter, however, that early readers of the gospel
of Luke would have heard in the evangelist’s narrative of Jesus’ birth a
declamation like Virgil’s poem. It is clear that early Christians soon read Vir-
gil’s poem as a declamation like Luke’s birth narrative. According to R.E.
Brown: “The earliest attestation of the Christian messianic interpretation
of the Fourth Eclogue seems to be in Lactantius’s Divinae InstitutionesVII 24;
PL 6:810, written ca.313. The interpretation was [subsequently] popular-
ized in Constantine’s Oratio ad sanctorum coetum19–21; PL 8:455ff” (R.E.
Brown 1977, 564n. 1). Lactantius was likely not the first Christian to have
read Virgil’s poem in this way.
Most important, however, is simply the fact that Luke’s description of
Jesus’ birth—for the sake of argument, let us say that originally it was
meant to register an absolute alternative to the rule of Augustus; nonethe-
less, notice how it fits so easily within the tradition of Roman imperial
writing: specifically, works celebrating the person and res gestaeof a given
emperor. Indeed, the more clearly Luke in his description of Jesus’ birth is
Why Christianity Succeeded (in) the Roman Empire 261