Christmas's war on empire

And a modest proposal for ending it

During this week's cold snap, I settled in to read Pliny the Younger's Complete Letters. Pliny’s something of a stylist—an okay speech writer, but a good correspondent with his friends and superiors.

Maybe I settled in too much, though, or maybe the letters, written between 97 and 112 C.E., proved a bit dated. Anyway, I fell into a long winter's nap. Then out on the stoop there arose such a clatter: the FedEx guy rang and I signed for a letter. Pliny again, and after all these years. It seems that the Complete Letters weren't.

Here's the missing missive, another one from "Gaius Pliny to the emperor Trajan" and dated 111 C.E. It’s about Christmas, or I guess proto-Christmas. I've taken the liberty of inserting footnotes to help make greater sense of it.

More about those Christians, my lord. Apparently, some write. The deaconesses I mentioned in my last correspondence volunteered the existence of two works attributed to a "Luke." Perhaps "volunteered" is a touch euphemistic: as you know, I had the women tortured.¹ Anyway, I find Luke's writing treasonous, particularly as it concerns Christ's birth.

As you’ll see from his works, which I’ve attached, Luke never attacks the Empire directly. But who does these days? You may recall my caution before the Senate a decade ago: even I had to clarify that my Panegyric to you was not, in fact, disguised calumny.²

Baby Jesus steals Augustus’s title of “Savior”

Instead of a direct attack, Luke’s Christ trolls the Empire by appropriating from its greatest emperor, present company excepted. Jesus was born during Augustus's principate, and this newborn adopts all of Augustus's titles. Luke in his nativity story has the effrontery to call Jesus "savior.” The Hebrew God sends Jesus as a savior for all mankind, according to angels appearing to shepherds at Jesus's birth: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.³

“Savior,” as my lord knows, is a term the Empire has used to describe Augustus in many ways and places long before Jesus was born. One decree honors Augustus's birthday and describes him as "savior of the universal race of humans."⁴ Many decrees in Augustus's day recognize Providence in providing Augustus to the world, "labeling him as a savior who exceeded the hopes of all previous benefactors."⁵ Our inscriptions advertise Augustus's full title as “Emperor Caesar Augustus, Savior and Benefactor.”⁶ Why, then, do the Jews need another savior, and one, like Augustus, for the entire world?

Luke’s angels also say that Jesus's birth is "good news"⁷—can you believe the temerity? Augustus's birthday has been celebrated as good news long before Jesus came along: the birthday "of the god [Augustus] has marked the beginning of the good news through him for the world."⁸

Like Augustus, Jesus claims to be God’s son . . . and the Lord

But with "savior" and "good news" I'm just getting started, my lord. Like Caesar, Jesus is God's son. Just as Augustus and every emperor since has been deified, known as a god and as God's son,⁹ so also is Luke's Jesus. Luke says that an angel tells Jesus's mother that "the holy child to be born will be called Son of God.”¹⁰ However, an inscription in Tarsus is representative of many other inscriptions erected during Augustus's reign: "Emperor Caesar, son of God, Augustus, the Tarsian people" honor.¹¹

The most direct challenge to my lord, of course, is Luke’s claim that Jesus is Lord. The angels inform the shepherds that hours-old Jesus is “the Messiah, the Lord.”¹² The closest Luke comes to acknowledging this implied challenge to my lord’s predecessor is in his second writing, where he has people in Thessalonica put two and two together. When Saul of Tarsus (a rabbi-turned-Christian you may know about) tells the town that Jesus is Messiah,¹³ the people there say that the Christians “have turned the world upside down.”¹⁴ The Christians do this, the townspeople say, because the Christians “flout the emperor’s laws, and assert there is a rival king, Jesus.”¹⁵ Maybe Luke thinks that he is distancing himself from the accusation of advancing a rival to Caesar by putting the accusation—or should I say obvious observation—in the mouths of those he calls “lewd fellows of the baser sort.”¹⁶ But neither Luke as narrator nor Saul in the narrative denies that Jesus’s kingship rivals the sovereignty of Caesar.¹⁷

Like Augustus, Jesus will bring peace on earth

Jesus, this king, is also to bring "peace to all in whom he delights," the angels tell the shepherds.¹⁸ There is no lasting peace, of course, but the Pax Romana, which reached its perfection during Augustus's principate. None of us today were alive to suffer through the civic division and civil war that made so many people despair for Rome's honor and even its survival during the last years of the republic. As my lord knows, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar as world saviors changed what world peace even means. The republic's notion of "peace" had involved agreements between former belligerents. These efforts at kinship didn't last long; better the Empire's true peace through world domination. As Augustus himself said, "All land and sea was at peace under the Romans," and "under the Romans" is, happily, the operative phrase.¹⁹

Of course, Rome isn’t the only source for Jesus’s titles. The Christians, including Luke, cite references to Jewish scriptures for Jesus’s claims regarding "savior," "son of God," “Lord,” "good news," and "peace" to the entire world, but they know full well through our extensive public relations efforts that Augustus was known by all of these titles and for all of these attributes before Jesus was ever wrapped in swaddling cloths.

Frankly, the Christians' mockery of Augustus through Luke’s claims about Christ makes my patriotic blood boil. I see the wisdom of your decision to prohibit the formation of assemblies in our province's volatile cities.²⁰ The Christians' alternative, seditious poleis are both religious and political in nature, just as the titles Luke gives to Christ are both religious and political. These assemblies, though they try to ignore us, amount to direct challenges to Rome. The most civilized approach to Christians is your policy of executing them unless they renounce Christ and worship your statue. Of course, I continue to follow this policy on Christians as governor of Bithynia-Pontus.²¹

Jesus’s birth challenges Rome’s direct rule

But I haven't gotten to the most pernicious aspect of Luke's nativity story. Luke has Jesus born during the first moments of Rome's direct rule over Judea. His family has to travel to Bethlehem to comply with the census that Sulpicius Quirinius decrees.²² In other words, Luke informs Judea that Jesus amounts to the immediate political answer to the Empire. I don't presume to educate you about Herod's removal and the Jews' reaction to Quirinius's census during Augustus’s principate. But to assist you in recalling it, I'll go over the essentials: the Jews thought the census violated their sovereignty, and of course no people like taxation by occupying forces, which the Jews knew to be the next step after this kind of census.²³ Because Luke has Jesus's parents travel to Bethlehem to be counted, we look like idiots to the Jewish readers of his first work. Why? Because our heavy-handed census hands Jesus the fulfillment of an important Jewish scripture about the Messiah: he would come from the little town of Bethlehem.

The trip to Bethlehem makes Jesus a different kind of political Messiah

Jesus’s trip in utero to Bethlehem also provides Luke with a means of associating Jesus with the Jewish messianic movement that sprang up so often until Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Quirinius's census resulted in resistance by a would-be messiah, Judas the Galilean. The Empire crushed the resistance, of course, but Luke has a prominent rabbi, Gamaliel, cite Judas’s resistance to warn the Jewish Council not to take the Empire's part in executing Jesus's followers. Jesus's messianic movement might be different than Judas's movement, Gamaliel suggests, and the Council in executing its members might be found "fighting against God."²⁴

So there's the distinction the family's simple trip to Bethlehem makes: unlike Judas's movement against the census, Jesus's kingdom-of-God movement doesn't resist the Empire. Instead, it just ignores the Empire as best it can and acts like Jesus is already king of the world.²⁵

In Luke, Rome’s and Israel’s golden ages collide

Luke's concept of Jesus’s messiahship brings me to a broader perspective on Luke's work. Luke suggests that Jesus's kingdom is ushering in a golden age, the fulfillment of prophecy that all of history as recounted in the Hebrew scriptures and elsewhere has waited for. Before Jesus's birth, for instance, the angel tells his mother that "there will be no end" to Jesus's kingdom of peace.²⁶

Does this sound familiar, my lord? Luke's breathtaking assertions about the unending reign of the as-yet-unborn Jesus mimic Virgil's assertions about the fulfillment of prophecy through Augustus. Virgil's Aeneid presents centuries of history as a single, though complicated history that culminates in an unending golden age beginning with "Augustus Caesar, son of a god," the absolute ruler who, with Julius’s help before him, replaces the Roman Republic with the Empire.²⁷

But while our true Roman golden age is anchored by a powerful ruler on earth—currently you, my lord—these Christians assert that the true golden age is anchored by a powerful ruler in heaven. Jesus’s reign, Christians claim, is just as present as yours but far longer in duration, and Christians point to their own public assemblies and love feasts as proof of Jesus’s reign. Christ’s reign is counter to the Empire because Christ's reign is administered not by one high person on earth but by, as Christians hope, the many lowly on earth. Jesus mother Mary sings of it when she is pregnant with Jesus: God “has brought down monarchs from their thrones, and raised on high the lowly."²⁸

The Christians call this golden age of justice “new creation,” and they claim to be its harbingers, just as the infant Jesus was. Their assemblies provide defeated peoples with a political and religious alternative to Rome’s true golden age.

Luke's nativity story and its ramifications, therefore, are extremely subversive to the Empire.

A modest proposal for containing Christmas

As I wrote in my last letter, my lord, I think that "the infection of this superstition," though widespread, can likely be "halted and corrected."²⁹ But if I’m wrong and Christianity grows much larger, then the Empire must adopt a solution as drastic as the problem. I believe that the Empire must share power with the Christians. This solution at first may seem worse than the problem, but grant me leave to explain myself.

Under my proposal, the Empire gradually would have to give up the worship of its gods—even the worship of its emperors. However, the church would have to give up its claim to the kingdom of God in public spaces. In essence, the Empire would worship Christ, but Christ would surrender his earthly rule to Caesar.

Christianity's current alternative religious and political communities would no longer compete with Rome's religious and political empire. The Christian assemblies would become only religious meetings, and Christ’s rule would encompass only something like a Platonic heaven that never comes to earth. Christianity and its current alternative governments administered by Christ through the poor and women (including the two deaconesses I consigned to torture) and slaves—and who knows who else—would finally become tamed and civilized—respectable, even.

We would therefore trade our current separation between two opposing theopolitical poleis for a separation between earthly power and heavenly religion. Christians would abandon Christ’s claim to the public realm.

Happily, because so much of Luke's critique against the Empire is necessarily indirect, the political implications of his nativity story would fade away from people's view once the Christian assemblies surrendered public space. When you read Luke’s narrative, my lord, without considering its direct and indirect references to the Empire, I think you’ll discover something sweet about the story's physical setting—the shed, the shepherds, the angels, and especially the baby in the manger. It all could still speak of a permanent golden age, but one that exists only in people’s hearts and in heaven. With that essential adjustment, I would even foresee our empire celebrating Christ’s birthday much as we celebrate Augustus’s birthday today.

I still hope that none of this must come to pass. But if it does, I hope it doesn't happen in our day. Although sharing power with the Christians would hardly end the Empire, it comforts me to see the world continuing to benefit from your personal, absolute rule. And from a more selfish perspective, I can't imagine what could replace my heartfelt worship of your image.

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography. The longer footnotes refer to works not referenced in the manuscript.

1. Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Pliny the Younger: Complete Letters, trans. Patrick G. Walsh, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 278-79 (X.96).

2. Drew J. Strait makes the point that the conventions necessitated by the Roman Empire’s treason laws required Pliny to make the following assurances in his Panegyric: “There is no risk that when I speak of [Trajan’s] civility, he thinks his arrogance is being reproached; his profligacy, when I talk of his frugality; his cruelty, when I speak of his clemency; his greed, when I speak of his generosity; his malice, when I speak of his kindness; his lust, when I speak of his self-control; his laziness, when I speak of his work; his cowardice, when I speak of his courage.” Strait, “Alternative Global Imaginary,” 185, 201.

Many theologians now understand that the Gospels were written in part as what James C. Scott calls “hidden transcripts.” See, for instance, Warren Carter, “Matthew and Empire,” in Empire in the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall, McMaster New Testament Studies Series 10 (H. H. Bingham Colloquium in New Testament, Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 90–119.

3. Luke 2:11 KJV.

4. Stanley E. Porter, “Paul Confronts Caesar with the Good News,” in Empire in the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall, McMaster New Testament Studies Series 10 (H. H. Bingham Colloquium in New Testament, Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 164–96, 170.

5. Porter, 170; Fitzmyer, Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 394. One particular inscription proclaims that Providence "sent him as a savior." Porter, 177.

6. Craig A. Evans, “King Jesus and His Ambassadors: Empire and Luke-Acts,” in Empire in the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall, McMaster New Testament Studies Series 10 (H. H. Bingham Colloquium in New Testament, Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 120–39, 127.

7. Luke 2:10.

8. Fitzmyer, 394. See also Stanley E. Porter's citation to an edict with a "citation of the beginning of good news occurring with [Augustus's] birthday." Porter, 170.

9. Fitzmyer, 394.

10. Luke 1:35 NNAS.

11. Porter, 171.

12. Luke 2:11 REB.

13. Acts 17:3 REB.

14. Acts 17:1-6 KJV.

15. Acts 17:7 REB.

16. Acts 17: 5 KJV.

17. Acts 17:1-9.

18. Luke 2:14 NNAS.

19. Strait, 194. N.T. Wright describes the Roman Empire's formula for peace as "send in the legions, crush opposition, establish local elites as intermediary rulers, crucify rebels, levy taxes, proclaim ‘peace and security.'" Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), 257. Paul, of course, attacks Rome's notion of "peace and security" in 1 Thessalonians 5:3. See Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 3 & 4), 1291.

20. Gaius Plinius, 254-55 (X.34), cited in Wright, 1508n85.

21. Gaius Plinius, 278-79 (X.96-97).

22. Luke 2:1-7.

23. Elliott, Liberating Paul, 150.

24. Acts 5:33-39 REB.

25. Luke in Acts makes the same distinction another way. When the disciples ask Jesus after his resurrection if God will now restore Israel's kingdom, he tells them to be his witnesses—to live as he lived. Reading between Luke's lines, N.T. Wright sees that Jesus isn't avoiding his disciples' question. He's just answering it with the unusual means by which Israel's kingdom would be restored. Acts 1:6-8; Wright, How God Became King, 247-48.

26. Luke 1:33 KJV.

27. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), 305-9. Wright summarizes the political point of the Aeneid's prophecies: "Anyone like Brutus or Cassius who might suppose that a sole ruler was out of the question for proud, traditional Roman republicans must learn that the Julian family had all along been carrying the seeds of this moment of monarchical glory." 309.

28. Luke 1:52 REB.

29. Gaius Plinius, 279 (X.96).