In Issue X (1990) of The Italic Way, we explored the Italic connections in the Bible.  In particular how ancient Italians, as Roman officials, were involved in the birth of Christianity.

We are all familiar with Emperor Caesar Augustus calling for a census and Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus to the cross, but the New Testament isn’t as anti-Roman as you would think.  Roman centurions (equivalent to an Army captain) are often the heroes in the early Church.  It was a centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant who was too ill to leave his home:  “but say in a word, and my servant shall be healed.”  That same centurion had his men build a synagogue for local Jews (Luke, 7:1-7), an amazing act by an army of occupation.  It was a Roman centurion, Cornelius of the “Italian Cohort” who was the first gentile to be converted to the new religion.

It is important to understand that Jesus and his followers were not welcomed by the Jewish establishment.  They were subjected to abuse and plots, the worst being when Jesus was finally turned over to Pilate for sedition.  Up to that time, the Romans were a buffer between mainstream Jews and Jesus.  In many cases, the Roman soldiery favored the upstarts.  There was a resentment toward Judeans for their obsessive dietary habits – where to get good Italian pork sausage? – their aversion to Roman images of the emperor, the eagle, or the she-wolf, and their intolerance of Greco-Roman gods.  The Jewish historian Josephus around that time filled a book with how bad Roman-Jewish relations were.  It seemed that every month a new Jewish prophet would arrive in Jerusalem and stir up disorder which the Romans had to quell, often violently.  At times, Roman soldiers flipped the crowds a bare ass or genitalia from the parapets of Fortress Antonia (Roman headquarters in Jerusalem) to disdain protestors.  So, to Romans, the pacifist Nazarene (“render unto Caesar…”) was a welcome relief.

Of course, everything turn ugly when Pilate was stuck with the task of judging Jesus.  We only have the Christian version of what took place, and it clearly blames the Jewish priests for engineering the crucifixion.  By the time Jesus was delivered over to Pilate the indictment by the Judean authorities was changed from blasphemy (a religious crime that Pilate didn’t care a whit about) to sedition (very much a Roman concern).  Hence the sign the Romans mockingly posted on his cross: INRI (translation: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).  

Jewish historian Flavius Josephus writes of Jesus, sixty years after his execution, in glowing terms.  However, most scholars believe that later Christian translators cooked that entry.   One Roman source that mentions Jesus is Tacitus (16:44), who wrote decades after the crucifixion. He mentions the execution by Pilate but has nothing good to say about Jesus or Christians.   The other Roman source is Suetonius who described how Emperor Claudius (AD 41-54) expelled Jews and ‘Judeo-Christians’ from Rome, “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus (sic), he expelled them from Rome”. (No, Christ was not alive or in Rome at this time.)

Another Roman centurion who was key to the whole crucifixion is unnamed.  Normally, it took days for a victim to die on the cross unless the Romans “mercifully” broke his legs to hasten death.  Jesus had been suffering for only six hours when Joseph of Arimathea requested the body.  Pilate couldn’t believe that Jesus was dead already and his legs intact, so he sent the centurion to the cross to verify death (Mark 15:44).  He speared Jesus and found no blood. It was by this centurion’s report that the body was released.

In his movie Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson confronts the suspicion that Jesus survived the cross.  In a gory cinema recreation, Jesus is subjected to scourging by Roman soldiers prior to crucifixion that few men could survive.  By the time Jesus was sent to Golgotha he was a bloody mess and his head pierced with a crown of thorns.  In short, he was a dead man walking. 

For those who still doubt, the ultimate witnesses were the apostles and family of Jesus.  These men and women not only confirmed his death on the cross and resurrection but willingly gave their lives to spread the word.

This is what Christian faith is all about. -JLM