Early Christianity

Pilate also wrote a placard and put it on the cross; it read,

‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’ Many of the Jews

read this placard, for the place where Jesus was crucified

was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin,

and in Greek.

(John19.19–20; cf. Matthew27.37;

Mark15.26;Luke23.38)

Such passages are a reminder that Christianity originated in a
world dominated by the political power of Rome. In early Chris-
tian literature, the empire and its institutions are omnipresent,
punctuating not only Jesus’ life, but also that of the religious
movement that recognized him as the Messiah. The common
images of early Christianity that we surveyed at the beginning
of chapter 4 testify to this ubiquitous Roman presence: the
crucified Jesus and Christians facing lions in the arena were
consequences, after all, of early Christianity’s collision with the
imperial authorities.
In this chapter I want to explore the interrelationship
between early Christianity and the institutions of the Roman
empire. We have already considered some aspects of this ques-
tion when we looked at Paul’s missionary journeys (chapter 4).
Yet what perhaps characterized imperial Rome’s dealings with
emerging Christianity more than anything else were the sporadic
persecutions to which Christians were subjected. Eusebius of
Caesarea’s positive view that God had permitted the establish-
ment of the Roman empire to facilitate the spread of the gospel
message (p. 39) would seem, on the face of it, to be one that
persecuted Christians in the centuries before Constantine would
have been unlikely to share. I will begin, therefore, with a survey
of persecutions in the pre-Constantinian period, elucidating some
of the problems of interpretation that they present. Then I will
examine some reasons why Christians might have felt alienated
from the society and institutions of the Roman empire. This does
not tell the whole story, however, so my next section will explore
how and why some early Christians, even before Constantine’s

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