Did Jesus Conquer Rome or did Rome Conquer Jesus?

The rise of Christianity and the Roman Empire’s last laugh

Photo by Oană Andrei, on Pexels

Christians interpret their religion’s history as amounting to a miraculous Christianization of the very empire that had executed Jesus and persecuted the early Christians.

Only the Holy Spirit could have initiated such a reversal of fortunes. In the first two centuries of their religion, under emperors like Nero, Aurelius, and Decius, Christians went into hiding or were imprisoned or killed for showing insufficient fealty to the Roman establishment and its gods. Then, under Constantine and Theodosius I, the Roman Empire became officially Christian.

What further proof could anyone need that the hand of God was at work in history and that the hand belonged to Jesus’s father?

But there’s an altogether different way of reading that reversal. Perhaps the Christianization of Rome was a curse not on the empire, as Edward Gibbon famously argued, but on Christianity. In that case, if there was any spiritual force at work in that part of history, maybe it was diabolical rather than benevolent.

Rome inflicted at least two great humiliations on Jews and Christians. The first was the defeat of Jews by military force towards the end of the first century CE, which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Theoretically, that war knocked Judaism out of the game of global affairs, clearing a path for something like Christianity to spread.

But Rome devastated Christians, in turn, simply by crucifying their alleged savior. Much as Democrats under Bill Clinton triangulated their policies as centrists, forcing Republicans to go further to the right to distinguish themselves from the rightward-leaning Democrats and resulting in the monstrosities of George W. Bush’s neoconservatism and Donald Trump’s MAGA populism, Rome dared Christians to rationalize the humiliating loss of their leader.

And Christians rose to the challenge by imagining that Jesus conquered death and emerged from the tomb in which he’d been placed. Not only that, but Christians came to believe that dying horrifically was part of Jesus’s messianic plan all along. Jesus wasn’t your average warrior king who would smite his enemies. No, he was a spiritual figure whose job was to serve as a scapegoat, to carry our sin burden and placate God, freeing us from punishment in a dreadful afterlife. Eventually, though, Jesus will return to conquer his enemies properly, when God will judge humanity and enforce an eternal separation of Christians from non-Christians.

These are the lengths to which Christians had to go to make sense of the catastrophic fact that the far simpler explanation of Jesus’s crucifixion is that he’d been wrong about everything: there is no God, celestial justice, or grand purpose of life, the universe, or anything else. There’s only nature in all its wild inhumanity, in contrast to the games we play in our civilized refuges in our bid to escape that underlying absurdity.

Early Christians couldn’t nobly reckon with the fact of Jesus’s execution; instead, they resorted to apologizing for their saviour’s apparent failure, providing far-fetched theological excuses for this monumental defeat of a righteous, spiritual man at the hands of an imperial machine. These Christians even scapegoated Jews, kicking them while they were down, as though Jesus’s fellow Jews had been responsible for drawing Rome’s ire.

But could the Roman Empire have carried out a trifecta against its self-righteous critics?

• Step one: destroy Judaism as a temple-based religion.

• Step two: disgrace, torture, and slay the founder of Christianity.

• Step three: co-opt the radicalized Christian movement by giving it authority over the empire, thus setting up this religion for egregious betrayals of Jesus’s countercultural ideals.

Christians see the Christianization of Rome as striking evidence that Jesus defeated the very empire that had seemed to defeat him on the cross. But that interpretation is fanciful, given the vast differences between the early Christian movement (as far as we can learn about it from the New Testament) and the later institutions of Christendom.

How could Jesus have effectively conquered Rome in the fourth century when the historical Jesus that can be discerned from the Gospel portraits would obviously have vomited at the sight of Christendom or the Church that had been made into a worldly power through a devil’s bargain with Roman emperors (whose empire had killed Jesus himself). After vomiting in reaction to the demonic irony, Jesus would have denounced all Christian officials as hypocrites, before burning Christendom to the ground.

At least, that’s a perfectly viable conjecture that casts doubt on the Christian rationalization. Assuming he was a historical figure, Jesus evidently subscribed to the Jewish anti-establishment sentiment that led to the Jewish-Roman wars. But Jesus seems to have preferred a spiritual revolution over a military revolt.

Like the Axial Age philosophers and religious reformers, Jesus wanted his followers to be morally pure, to avoid hypocrisy at all costs, because God, a transcendent reality, mattered more than any worldly success. He told his followers to leave their families behind and sell their possessions so they wouldn’t be tempted by anything that was merely material and relatively ephemeral. After all, according to Hellenistic Jewish cosmology, nature was presently being run or at least sabotaged by fallen angels like Satan, who had turned into demonic powers.

Jesus’s version of Judaism was Platonic, Gnostic, and Orphic in its basic dualism. On the one side was God and his commandments, and on the other was the illusory realm of nature in which the Roman Empire, for example, appeared triumphant in dominating the Jews, and in which the Jews’ all-powerful God Yahweh seemed absent.

The “passion” of Jesus was the enormous faith needed to overcome this dualism and Yahweh’s apparent irrelevance. It’s as though Jesus wanted his followers to will this all-powerful deity into existence, to refuse to accept the reports of their senses. Despite the worldly triumph of paganism, monotheism must be esoterically correct, and an all-powerful moral deity is secretly in charge and ready to pounce on the likes of Romans for their effrontery.

Apologists for the Romanization/secularization of Jesus’s counterculture sometimes like to point to Jesus’s famous statement on taxes as a reason for thinking Jesus approved of the existence of secular institutions and thus would have defended the worldly success of Christendom. In Mark 12:13–17, Jewish elders try to trap Jesus into saying that Jews shouldn’t pay taxes to Rome. After all, such a dangerous opinion would have triggered Roman punishment and thus disgraced Jesus as a supposed wise man (even though Jesus would end up being disgraced on the cross, after all).

Jesus responds cleverly by turning the question into one about stealing. Jesus points out that the coins bore the image of a Roman’s face on them, so paying taxes was just a matter of avoiding the sin of theft, of returning to the Romans what belonged to them. And Jesus adds that Jews should pay to God what belongs to God.

But this passage hardly entails that Jesus would have approved of the Church’s merger with the Roman Empire. On the contrary, Jesus’s statement expresses precisely the Platonic dualism that leaves no room for such a compromise. Of course, Jesus would have said Jews should pay their taxes. He also said they should leave their families and sell all their possessions to devote themselves entirely to God. If you’re giving away all your money anyway to please an otherworldly deity, why would you begrudge Rome its taxes?

The upshot of Jesus’s statement on taxes is that Jesus wanted his followers to disavow everything ungodly, including money, familial obligations, and Roman politics. He wanted his followers to obtain paradise in the afterlife by focusing entirely on God and living in spiritually pure ways, such as by loving their enemies. He said those who will inherit God’s kingdom are “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). This means they’re not just materially poor, but psychologically, inwardly so, which is to say they shouldn’t even want to succeed in material terms.

Jesus says in Matthew 12, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand…Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Jesus heals in God’s name rather than the Devil’s, so here again is the Platonic dualism.

But the implication is that the politicized, Romanized Church was precisely a house divided against itself. Worldly imperatives are at odds with Jesus’s radical ideals, so one set had to give way to the other. And the Romanized Church fell eventually to modern secularism.

Jesus’s radicalism was utterly unworkable in an organized religion, and no one understood this better than the pragmatic, industrious, empowered ancient Romans. Here, then, was the final humiliation of the Judeo-Christian challenge to the Roman Empire — and the humiliation was insidious because it was disguised as a monotheistic triumph. By adopting Christianity as its official religion, the Romans were keeping their friends close and their enemies closer. Rome was forcing Christianity to adapt to the norms of worldly politics, and even to the Satanic exigencies of the imperial project of world domination.

With his body destroyed on the cross, what could neutralize Jesus’s spirit — the risen Christ, if you like — more effectively than the Church’s politicization? There was no better pagan response to a radical purist like Jesus than to engulf the movement that spread in his name in the managerial affairs of state, forcing the so-called radicals to compromise their principles at every turn, to manage treasuries, conduct wars, and write laws — all in the context of God’s continuing delay in revealing the material world’s alleged illusoriness.

The very image of a superheroic risen Christ derived from the cult of deifying dead Roman emperors. Christians adapted that pagan practice and twisted it for satirical purposes, just as Jews had assimilated the pyramidal power structures of the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Persian societies by reimagining the august earthly king as an unearthly deity who waits in the wings to help the helpless.

Those satirical intentions got lost in translation, though, as Rome cynically co-opted Christianity, in turn, so that the Jesus movement couldn’t overthrow civilized standards on behalf of what the visionaries deemed to be God’s transcendent realm. Civilizations absorbed the Axial Age’s calls for spiritual reform, taming the anti-establishment cults.

Thus, the Christianization of Rome was also the Romanization of Jesus. What might have looked like God’s occupation of the sinful halls of worldly government was the world’s corruption of the Church. First, Rome killed Jesus the man, and then the empire killed the spirit of his message by forcing the Church to help manage the empire.

The alternative Jesus evidently had in mind was to destroy all worldly pretenses in an apocalyptic act of divine judgment. But no such ideal can be allowed to inspire terrorist revolts against flourishing societies or to encourage the masses to follow the radicals in renouncing earthly ambitions.

If Jesus was twice born, he was also twice killed, so industrious Rome had the last laugh.

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