Pax Romana — the key to understanding Revelation
The book of Revelation, and the Pax Romana of ancient Rome, may seem to have nothing to do with life today. They have a great deal to do with it.
Pax Romana
Pax Romana, meaning “Roman Peace,” refers to a period from 27 BC to around 180 AD, marked by:
- few civil wars and a strong, stable empire
- high prosperity, at least for most
- flourishing art and culture
- yet also a time of sporadic persecution of Christians under Nero, Domitian, and Trajan, even though systematic empire-wide persecution didn’t begin until 250 AD, under Decius
Underneath these conditions lay a coherent, almost theological idea:
- The gods have chosen Rome.
- Rome and the emperors are the agents of the gods’ will, salvation, and presence in the world.
- The blessings of the gods — security, peace, justice, wealth, fertility, and so on — are available to everyone who submits to Rome as ruler.
- The Pax Romana is itself the longed-for “Golden Age.”
- Therefore, the emperor is worthy of worship, loyalty, and titles equal to a god’s.
But this golden age was built on violence, oppression, and forced pacification, and it was golden only for a few.
Rome propagated this vision relentlessly, through:
- poetry: Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Song for the New Age (Carmen Saeculare, 17 BC) hailed Augustus as the bringer of a golden age
- inscriptions in the readers’ own region: in the province of Asia, the Priene calendar inscription (9 BC, OGIS 458) called Augustus’s birthday “the beginning of the good news (euangelia) for the world”, and Augustus’s own record of his deeds, the Res Gestae, was carved in public in several cities of Asia Minor
- impressive processions
- games
- statues
- coins
- a constant, overwhelming cultural presence — it was the center of nearly every public activity
As a result, the Pax Romana was inescapable: present in entertainment, at work, in the marketplace, even during meals. And the whole community made sure no individual’s bad behavior cost the city the emperor’s favor.
Many cities — especially in Asia Minor, to which the letters in Revelation were sent — competed with each other to build temples honoring the emperor and the gods and to spread the Pax Romana further. In doing so, they hoped to win the emperor’s support, or at least a reduction in taxes.
Pax Romana and Christians
For Christians living under this system, several serious problems arose:
- Jesus was their emperor — king of kings — especially since the gospels themselves were written as euangelion, the proclamation of a new emperor’s reign.
- They received their provision from Jesus, not from the emperor.
- Some of the activities woven into Pax Romana civic life ran directly against their beliefs — above all the trade-guild banquets honouring the guild’s patron god, with meat offered to idols and often sexual immorality, which every tradesman was expected to attend (Rev 2:14, 20).
- The very means Rome used to “pacify” the empire could not be reconciled with Christian conviction.
- They were branded intolerant for insisting there was only one God, in an empire that comfortably accepted any number of additional gods.
Outward conformity was the easy path.
That left Christians with essentially three choices:
- Deny the faith completely, since you can only serve one master — Jesus or the emperor, not both.
- Live out the faith fully, risking social and economic isolation, ruin, imprisonment, and even death.
- Conform outwardly — confessing the emperor with the mouth — while remaining inwardly faithful to Jesus, confessing him with the heart. The cost of this option is that it makes the faith hypocritical.
That third option has proven compelling to many people across history, and it’s a major theme running through Revelation. Because Revelation is an apocalypse, it allows only two options — all for God or all against him, no comfortable middle ground. In that sense, the whole book functions as counter-propaganda against the Pax Romana.
Christians and Jews
The Jews were another source of conflict. Rome let them keep their faith, and for a while the Christians, seen as a Jewish sect, sheltered under that protection. When Domitian had the Jewish tax collected harshly, synagogues had good reason to tell the authorities that the Christians were not Jews at all — which left them facing the emperor cult (Suetonius, Domitian 12.2). How Revelation handles this tension, and why it still treats the church as part of Israel, is the subject of Israel and the church.
Take away
Here are some questions for reflection:
- How is the Pax Romana being articulated today? What happens when someone disagrees?
- Who or what do you see as the source of your good life? From whom or what do you expect the solution to your problems, or direction for your life?
- How do you react when this conflicts with being “politically correct”?
- How do you treat people who disagree with you? Do you ever put pressure on them?
- Do you feel the need to pretend in certain areas of your life? Why? What would happen if you didn’t pretend?
- If you were in a situation where your personal opinion/belief would cost you a lot, would you still stand up for it? To what extent? What would you do in practice?