What Emperors Fear -Will Brady

One final blog in the year of 2018, folks. I'm on the verge of moving into the final semester of the Honors cycle, so pardon me while I shift into the denial phase and tell myself that I still have plenty of time before this mind-twisting ride is over... Thanks for the fun semester, everyone. I hope all of you want to stick around and keep going next year!

Now, I'm happy to say that I had a great topic for this blog. But I forgot what it was, so I'm just going to ramble and see what comes out. We mentioned in class that the Romans saw the Jews as this quaint little religious group of social misfits and generally left them alone. But we know, as demonstrated by today's readings, that they persecuted the Christian church to an extraordinarily violent degree. What changed? For the most part, Christianity was the same people worshipping the same God; and while the Jews practiced their faith with an incredibly strict law code overblown by the Pharisees and demanding violent punishments for certain crimes, the Christians made do without the Law, practicing charity far more openly and in ways that the Jews never would. We see in the Bible readings assigned that the Christians were told to respect all government authorities (something the Jews had problems with) and were called to higher standards of love and righteousness (as demonstrated in the Sermon on the Mount). The Jews would keep to themselves and despise the Romans, while the Christians expressed their love openly to all nations and ethnic groups; they remained nonviolent and respectful to Roman authorities even when sentenced to be executed, according to Pliny and Eusebius. They did, of course, insist on worshipping their one God and not the Roman polytheism or the "divine" emperors--but the Jews didn't do that, either. So what was the problem?

The problem is that Christianity spread. Christianity wasn't confined to a group of people who remained separate from everyone else whenever possible. Jews kept their faith to themselves. Christians sought to make more Christians, regardless of national borders or ethnic groups. The Christian church, in a way, was like Socrates: they were a buzzing gadfly disrupting the commonly-held beliefs of the Romans and waking them up to alternate religious possibilities. They encouraged people to reassess their faith freely and possibly change it. They threatened the Empire's ability to regulate people through religion and the power of their "divine" emperor. They had the power to disrupt the entire government, not through terrorist activities, but simply by acting Christian.

It's a shame that so many Christians today act more like Jews, keeping their faith life separate from everyone except other Christians. Even if some great persecution began in America and the majority of the church vanished overnight after recanting their faux faith (which I firmly believe is exactly what would happen), the remnant of real believers which remained would still be hard-pressed to do any notable amount of disciple-making. We're just too used to keeping this to ourselves and assuming that everyone else has already heard and/or believes--especially here in the south. The Book of Acts records an instance where people got so sick of hearing Paul preach that a group of forty men took a vow that they would not eat or drink again until they had murdered him. How great would it be if we were doing our job so well that people tried to kill us for it?

P.S. I commented on Sophia and Breanna’s posts.