jun 1, 47 - ***Jewish/Roman Relations

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As far as religion--Ehrman talks about this in your textbook, so I won't go into a lot of detail--but the common Hollywood idea that the Romans were kind of oppressive of other religions, or the Christians, is just that, a Hollywood idea. The Romans actually were very tolerant of local religions. They didn't care what gods you worshipped. The Romans actually were very pious in the sense that they believed that whatever land they were in, they should provide sacrifices and honors for the local gods, especially the important ones. So the Romans would honor local gods, other people's gods. Every people was allowed to use their own gods. Jews, for example, since the time of Julius Caesar, who befriended the Jews because they helped him out politically a lot, he gave them certain privileges. Jews didn't have to--they could observe the Sabbath, they didn't have to do things on the Sabbath that they didn't want to. They didn't have to serve in the army. They got to observe their own religions. They weren't expected to sacrifice, either to the emperor or to other gods.
So the Romans, basically, were very tolerant. When they weren't tolerant was when some religious group or club started looking like they might be rebellious. If they started looking like insurrection would happen, the Romans didn't do it. So the Romans, for example, outlawed volunteer fire departments, in local places, because they were afraid that volunteer fire departments could be a place where locals, especially maybe lower-class locals, could get together and then start gossiping about what they could do to cause trouble for the Romans. So the Romans were only concerned about religions when it looked like those religions were going to cause political problems.
As we'll see next time, Jews fell into the system in many different ways. Sometimes they were relatively happy clients of the Romans. Sometimes they were subversive enemies of the Roman order. As I said, they were officially recognized by the Romans, but this caused problems for Jews sometimes. In Alexandria, the local Egyptian population resented the Jews because they were recognized as a legal ethnicity in Alexandria, and they weren't given complete privileges of the Greeks in--Alexandria was a Greek city. So they were Greek speaking, maybe people of Greek descent. But if they had fully adopted Greek customs, they were considered Greeks.
The Jews were not considered Greeks, but at least they were higher in status in Alexandrian law than local Egyptians. The Egyptians were the lowest in the city. So the local Egyptians resented the Jews, because the Jews were recognized as their own ethnicity and given some privileges. So this is why you sometimes had Jews getting in trouble with local groups and had violence with Jews in different places. And sure enough, pogroms arise in places. Local people would attack the Jews, or the Jews would try to set up an extra big meeting house for themselves, and it would cause local problems. But these were not problems brought on by the Romans, these were local problems, and part of it was precisely because the Jews had been recognized by the Romans as having a special status in some places, and this caused some kind of local resentment.
As we'll see, though, the very fact that the Romans had allowed this one universal empire, that had been created by Alexander originally, and with a Greek veneer, and they allowed the West to stay Latin and the East to stay Greek, and they melded these two different things--all of this was one of the reasons that Christianity was able to spread at this time in the way it did. In fact, you might even think that had Jesus come and had Paul lived, had they tried to spread this new group, this new movement, at a time 500 years before this, or 500 years afterwards, it may have never happened. Because it was precisely because of this one world, run by the Romans and maintained by the Romans, that allowed the spread of Christianity, to a great extent, both ideologically and thought-wise, as well as simply physically.

Yale New Testament pg. 38

There was also conflict within Judaism. I've tried to emphasize that. Jews weren't all agreed about how to respond to the things, the politics and the cultures around them. Jews conflicted with Jews over how to adapt to Greek and Roman domination and culture. Political, social, religious, linguistic, cultural issues were all affected in some way.

The difference--the important thing, though, is Jews had an ideology that supported imperial pretensions. Go back and read the first few Psalms, where God says, "To my anointed one," and here he's either talking to King David or whoever is supposed to be sitting on King David's throne, "You are the King of the world. I will make all the nations flow to Jerusalem, all of them will come and worship Me in this holy place." The Psalms are full of language that implied that whoever is in control in Jerusalem is the king of world, and yet the Jews looked around themselves and they're going, we haven't had anybody who approached that in centuries. The Jews had an ideology of empire and world domination embedded in their scripture, and yet their social and political situation was just the opposite, and it's in that maelstrom of Jewish ideology not fitting reality, that Jesus is born.

Yale New Testament pg. 52

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