Roman Religion and Early Christianity

Roman religion was not a system of exclusive belief in the way Christianity or Judaism was. It was a set of practices - rituals, festivals, sacrifices, and obligations - that maintained the relationship between the Roman state and its gods (the pax deorum, or peace of the gods). Romans were generally tolerant of foreign religions, including the many mystery cults and philosophical schools that circulated through the empire, as long as these did not interfere with the civic religious obligations that bound the community together. The problem Christianity eventually created was not primarily that Romans found its beliefs objectionable - it was that Christians refused to participate in the civic religious practices that everyone else observed.

Judaism had a special status in Roman law as a religio licita - a permitted religion. Jews were exempted from the requirement to sacrifice to Roman gods and to the imperial cult, in recognition of the antiquity of their tradition and their long history of political accommodation to Rome. Early Christianity benefited from this status as long as it was perceived as a form of Judaism. As the distinction between the two communities became clearer - particularly after the Jewish revolt of 66-70 CE and increasingly after the Council of Jamnia - Christians lost the protection of Jewish exemption status without having established a recognized legal identity of their own.

The imperial cult - the worship of the emperor as divine - was the most direct point of conflict between Roman religion and Christianity. Emperor worship was not uniform across the empire; in the east it was more developed and more enthusiastically promoted than in Rome itself. In the Roman province of Asia (western Turkey), where the seven churches of Revelation were located, imperial cult temples were prominent features of civic life, and participation in imperial cult activities was expected of civic-minded citizens. The refusal of Christians to offer even token reverence to the emperor was not merely a theological position - it was perceived as a political act, a rejection of the social bonds that held the community together.

The book of Revelation is the New Testament's most extended engagement with this conflict. Written to seven churches in the province of Asia during a period of heightened tension with Rome - probably during the reign of Domitian (81-96 CE) - Revelation uses the symbolic language of apocalyptic literature to make a claim that its original readers would have understood immediately: the beast who demands worship is Rome, or specifically the emperor, and the choice between the mark of the beast and the seal of God is the choice between compliance with imperial religious demands and faithfulness to the God of Israel. The book's message is political theology in the most literal sense - a claim about who is truly Lord of history, addressed to communities for whom that question had immediate and potentially fatal practical consequences.