We have seen that religious manipulation and fraud were flagrantly practiced by governments during this period of ancient history, as illustrated by the creation of the god Serapis.
Miraculous healings were staged by the Emperor Vespasian at the temple of Serapis, and a Jewish captive foresaw a general’s ascension to the imperial throne. Both obvious fabrications were key elements of Flavian propaganda.
The wide range of Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish portents, miracles, and prophecies the Flavian dynasty advertised on their way to the throne indicate the unprecedented level of religious manipulation they employed to validate their legitimacy as Roman rulers. No Roman leader before or after would claim to have performed actual miracles as did Vespasian—much less healing miracles identical to Christ’s in the Gospels, which are known to have been written during the Flavian’s rule.
Blatant politically-motivated fraud like Ptolemy’s fabrication of the god Serapis set a bold precedent that the Romans readily adopted as a tool of statecraft. That the Romans applied to such state projects the same efficiency and organization that they applied to all public works and civil engineering projects is entirely predictable.
If the conventional assumption that the Roman government was hostile to Christianity is true, we must expect some of that hostility to be expressed somewhere in the New Testament. And yet not a single Roman governor finds fault with a Christian in the Gospels to justify this reputation for “persecution.” Should we not see even one Roman official treating Paul unfairly or even one of Paul’s guards abusing him? Why, instead, is every appearance of Roman centurions or government officials described so favorably—in the Bible?
Conversely, shouldn’t Josephus, who worked for the Flavians, show at least some Roman disapproval when he mentions Jesus, James or John the Baptist? He works for the Flavians. Scholars attempting to grapple with the Testimonium of Josephus exhibit a blind spot to this fact. Even if his text was augmented and enhanced, Josephus seems to have been unreservedly sympathetic to other figures in the New Testament. Blotting out one reference does not explain away the others.
We have seen various translators of the New Testament grappling with how Agrippa II could sympathize with Paul’s message. Knowing that Agrippa II was a friend of Josephus and Titus, they have tortured and tweaked his words over and over instead of seeking to explain their implications.
Again, the eternal “problem” for beleaguered scholars is the same: high-ranking Romans simply could not sympathize with Christianity, or vice versa, at such an incipient stage.
Christianity urges complete obedience to authority, paying taxes, going the extra mile for the Romans, universal inclusion, making peace, etc. Seen as a form of moral idealism, these ideas are never suspected of being part of a political agenda promoted by Roman governors and their client kings, all of whom are shown in a positive light in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. And yet the teachings of the Gospels are never recognized as expressing the same Flavian agenda that is expressed by the Flavian’s own hagiographer, Josephus.
Like the paradox of Jesus’s proclamation that his Glorious Second Coming would arrive precisely when the Roman army leveled the Temple under Titus, and Josephus’s own claim that his imperial master was the Jewish Messiah—in order to solve all of these “problems” all we really need to do is stop resisting history and accept it at face value. If agents of the Roman state authored the Gospels, then what other evidence could we expect but precisely the evidence that we have?
The Romans recognized that it would be impossible to eliminate Jewish devotion to their god or persuade them to relinquish their hope in a messiah who would deliver them. Rather than attempting to destroy their enemies’ ideas completely, it is perfectly logical that they would attempt to rechannel their culture into a pro-Roman direction, combining an ideological assault with their military assault. Romans are known to have employed highly sophisticated intelligence gathering, “psy-ops,” agent provocateurs and propaganda as an integral part of their military operations.
Romans were self-conscious about the religious changes they brought to their empire, and they were pragmatic about the public purpose religion served. The Roman government was quite accomplished at setting up elaborately organized and funded cults to celebrate emperors as gods, having already done so for three previous Caesars. As we have seen, their ideology was lavishly celebrated on their coinage, often the one form of archeological evidence that survives the passage of time and the meddling of revisionists. We have seen how those coins preserve a catalog of virtues reflected in the New Testament.
The Emperor Claudius wrote a treatise on the religious changes that had occurred during the reign of Augustus. Like all the works of Claudius, this work did not survive the long period of time when only Christian monks copied and thus preserved (or didn’t) the great literature of antiquity. And yet, presumably, one of the important topics Claudius addressed in his writings was the arrival of the imperial cult in its first form, the cult of the Divine Julius, which would serve as a model and foundation for all future imperial administrations.
In what is probably the clearest example of the Romans’ elaborately organized and funded manipulations of religion for political ends, the Roman Senate officially deified the Caesars Julius, Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, and Titus by the end of the 1st Century. Yet, while it is common for contemporaries to dismiss the authentic piety and sincere devotion these political gods inspired, this is merely a modern prejudice. Indeed, the imperial cult, in its effort to ground the legitimacy of the Roman monarchy in divine favor, was the direct precedent for the Christian belief in the “Divine Right of Kings,” which was used to validate the authority of European monarchs until the 17th Century king, Louis XIV.
The Romans endured because they were relatively flexible as a society willing to add to their citizens and senators political elites from an ever-widening circle of conquered territories. They absorbed rather than destroyed the cultures of the nations they conquered. The first great example was their adoption of the culture and religion of the Greek kingdoms which they had started to conquer. Ironically, in their conquest of the Greeks, Romans were employing a political tactic they had adopted from Greek conquerors like Alexander, welcoming the religious ideas of Hellenized cultures and readily identifying Greek gods with their own deities.
This practice is vividly revealed in the cult of the Divine Julius Caesar, who claimed descent from Aeneas, a Trojan hero of the most ancient Greek epic, The Iliad. Aeneas was not only a Trojan prince, but a son of the goddess Aphrodite (adopted and identified as their own “Venus” by the Romans). The Julian family claimed that after the fall of Troy, Aeneas led a group of Trojans to the shores of central Italy where he established the Latin tribe that was a progenitor of ancient Rome. The Julians thus claimed to be descendants of Aeneas’s son, “Iulus”—making them living descendants of the Greek goddess of love herself.
Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, by Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807)
The first dynasty of Roman emperors thus blatantly used foreign religion to establish the legitimacy of their rule over their newly conquered subjects. This is how the Romans conducted war.