What we have been observing is the second dynasty of Roman emperors—the Flavii—employing exactly the same tactic regarding Jewish traditions after conquering Judea (albeit with much more lasting effect). Just like the family of Roman monarchs who had preceded them, the Flavians utilized a foreign religion to demonstrate their divine favor and legitimacy as rulers over conquered people. It would have been strange if they did not do this given the precedent set by the first imperial dynasty, which they used as their model. Indeed, the Flavians actually co-opted elements of Greek, Egyptian and Jewish religion in various forms for their own propaganda purposes, as we have seen. The Gospels were just one part of that project, one aimed at a single, if critical, part of their diverse imperial audience.
And one so effective as a device of religious statecraft that it outlived the entire Roman Empire.
Contributing to our modern ignorance of the New Testament’s historical context, Hollywood’s retellings of the Gospels have painted the Romans as “the bad guys” who “really” killed Jesus.
Plenty of valid Christian guilt about anti-Semitism, and legitimate Jewish fear of the same, certainly motivated this Hollywood revisionism. In the wake of the Holocaust, Christian guilt finally came to a climax, and in popular retellings of the Christian story they uniformly emphasized the Romans’ role in the deaths of Jesus and the first Christian martyrs.
Such an emphasis, however, is a rewrite of the Gospel narratives.
As we have seen, over and over again, the “bad guys” in the New Testament are always the Jews. It should now be obvious why: the Gospels were Roman propaganda generated by their war with the Jews during their epical conflict in the 1st Century. Christian anti-Semitism is no coincidence. The Roman’s “New” Testament was created to veto the Jews’ “Old” Testament.
The one notable exception to Hollywood’s trend can be seen in the 2004 film by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ. His depiction of the passion narrative as it is told in the Gospels left Jewish and Christian reviewers aghast at its anti-Semitism, with Gibson replying that he was only relating what the Gospels actually say. (8)
When it comes to the portrait of the “Jews” painted by the Gospels, modern Christians are simply in a state of denial. Though recent decades have seen a rewriting of the Gospel accounts in the form of movies and books, the process of “cleaning up” the anti-Semitism in the New Testament actually began long ago.
This drift away from the anti-Semitic politics of the Gospels can, for example, be seen in the shifting perceptions of Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered Christ’s crucifixion. The Gospel stories could not be clearer: after announcing his belief in Jesus’s innocence, the Jews respond to Pilate by demanding Jesus’s execution three times, and only then does Pilate finally relent and accede to their demands. Jesus was convicted of violating Jewish law by Jewish authorities. After unsuccessfully pleading with Jesus to make a defense, any defense, Pilate symbolically washes his hands in a metaphor designed to exonerate the Roman government of his execution. The message is clear: Jesus’s message of peaceful acquiescence to Roman rule would never have led to punishment.
Matthew’s account stresses this by quoting the Jewish crowd as conveniently proclaiming, “His blood is on us and on our children!” (9) Thus is the bloody war to come justified.
We already asked it, but we must ask again: who but the Roman government would have had the motive to exonerate the Roman government? If Jesus’s appeal was to all humanity, why should the Gospels explicitly exclude Romans from any culpability in his sacrifice?
According to Matthew, even Pilate’s wife begs him not to do it: “While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him this message: ‘Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.’” (10)
Origen actually praises Pilate’s wife on this account (11), and, as “St. Procula,” Pontius Pilate’s spouse is even venerated by the Greek Orthodox Church to this day and honored on her feast day, October 27.
Pilate himself is still venerated as a saint by the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Christians in the Latin-speaking West, however, must have rejected such overt admiration of Pontius Pilate early on since they never venerated him as a saint. Over time, Pilate would become more and more the villain in Christ’s fate, as he now appears in most presentations of Christ’s Passion depicted in the West.
If not the Jews, then someone had to take the blame for the murder of Christ. Today, it is invariably the Romans, the very group specifically exonerated by the Gospels, but especially, Pilate himself.
In the wake of the Holocaust, blame had to at last be taken away from the Jewish people for political (and psychological) reasons—just as blame had to be laid at the feet of those same people by the Romans two thousand years earlier, for similar reasons.
The fate of Pilate’s reputation is just one example of the gradual reinterpretation of the original text to accommodate shifting political realities over the last two millennia.
We have seen how the Roman political ideology minted on their coins is echoed in the values stressed in the Gospels. New Testament portrayals of Roman officials, governors, and client kings show them to be uniformly sympathetic to Christians, suggesting even an official Roman sanction of Christianity at its earliest stages. Roman authorities repeatedly rescue Paul from angry mobs of Jews and provide him with protection and privileges—and some of them are Jewish aristocrats and personal friends of Titus, the very group to whom the Pauline message of “freedom” from Mosaic Law would have been most welcome.
We have seen evidence that high-ranking Romans like Epaphroditus were simultaneously personal associates of St. Paul, Flavius Josephus, and the Roman emperors Nero, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.
We have even seen evidence in the Flavian historian Josephus’s own writings that he expressed sympathy for the first leaders of the Christian movement, John and James, and that he was, by far, the first person outside Christian literature to do so. That he was a “Flavian” is undoubted. The prolific historian was, essentially, their slave (intellectually, at least) from the moment he was captured by the Romans. And therefore we must reconsider our doubts that he might be the first person to ever mention the existence of Christ outside the Bible.
The political demands of Christ and Paul were exactly those of the Roman government: peaceful obedience to Roman authority and the voluntary payment of taxes. The political values of the Gospels perfectly mirror those on Roman coins: peace on earth and good will to all men. Even the first Christians’ earliest symbols were taken directly from Flavian coins and art.
None of this evidence has ever been hidden. Most of it has been sitting in plain sight for the better part of two thousand years. It has all been seen, but it has never been believed.
Christianity is simply too pro-Roman to fit with modern misconceptions, so the world has trained its eyes away from seeing the obvious: the New Testament is imperial Roman propaganda designed for a brief political reality that has long since passed and been forgotten.
Conclusion
In the New Testament we read exhortations to obey the Roman government as the appointed agents of God, to pay one’s taxes, and even to honor the emperor himself. We also see the earliest Christian leaders laying the foundations for the authority structure of the Church, with an endorsement of Church hierarchy coming even from Jesus long before such developments seem credible. We are presented with benevolent Roman centurions, even as Paul’s mission uniformly receives official protection from Roman governors, clerks and officials—including sympathy from the Praetorian Guard of Caesar himself.