The Pax Romana

The Pax Romana - the Roman Peace - refers to the roughly 200-year period from the reign of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE) through the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180 CE) during which the Roman Empire maintained relative internal peace and stability across its vast territories. The term is somewhat misleading - the peace was enforced by military power, punctuated by periodic revolts and border conflicts, and experienced very differently by different peoples within the empire. But compared to the centuries of continuous warfare that preceded it, the Roman world of the 1st century CE offered conditions of relative stability, mobility, and communication that the early church used to remarkable effect.

Roman roads are the most tangible symbol of what the Pax Romana made possible. The Roman road network eventually covered more than 250,000 miles, connecting every major city in the empire with paved, maintained roads that could be traveled at speeds impossible in the pre-Roman world. These roads were built primarily for military purposes, but they served commerce, communication, and eventually missionary travel equally well. When Paul traveled from Antioch to Corinth to Rome, he traveled on Roman roads and Roman sea lanes. The Acts of the Apostles reads, in part, as a travel narrative along the Roman road network - and the spread of the early church follows that network with striking fidelity.

The common language provided by Greek - maintained as the language of educated commerce and culture throughout the eastern empire even as Latin dominated the west - meant that a letter written in Corinth could be read in Ephesus, Colossae, Rome, and Antioch without translation. Paul wrote in Greek to communities he had often never visited, confident that the language would reach them. The Septuagint gave these communities access to the Hebrew scriptures in the same language. The linguistic unity of the eastern Mediterranean world was the direct result of Alexander's conquests and Roman maintenance of Greek as the common tongue - and it made the rapid spread of a new religious movement across the empire logistically possible in a way it would not have been in a more linguistically fragmented world.

There is a deep irony in the relationship between Roman power and Christian origins. The empire that executed Jesus, that persecuted the early church, that eventually demanded emperor worship as a test of political loyalty - this same empire provided the roads, the language, the relative peace, and the legal framework within which Christianity spread. Early Christian thinkers like Origen and later Augustine reflected on this irony, seeing in the providential timing of Christ's birth at the height of Roman order a divine preparation of the conditions for the gospel's spread. Whether or not one accepts that theological interpretation, the historical fact is undeniable: the Pax Romana was the context within which Christianity became a world religion.