“Deliberations in Jerusalem, Riots in Rome”
No one knows when the church of Rome was started or the circumstances of its founding. Later Catholic claims that Peter founded the church are clearly apocryphal. Peter was most likely still in Judea when the church was planted.
Rome had the second largest Jewish population in the world at the time the church began on the day of Pentecost. And Acts 2:10 tells us that pilgrims from Rome were among those who heard the first Christian sermon on the day of Pentecost. It seems probable that the gospel made its way to Rome through these pilgrims. Those who heard and rejected the message would nevertheless have a story to tell when they returned home. If there were believers among them, then their presence is perhaps the best explanation for founding of the Church of Rome. And if these returning pilgrims are indeed the ones responsible for the founding of the church, then the Church of Rome can at least claim a direct line to Peter through them since he preached the sermon that resulted in their conversion on the Day of Pentecost.
It would also be ironic in light of its later history if the Church of Rome was founded by Jews. But given the origins of the Christian faith, Christian anti-Semitism is an ongoing irony.
Like all of the churches of the first decade of the Christian era, the Church of Rome would have been a Jewish church. Even a cursory reading of the first 15 chapters of the book of Acts will reveal that the first Christians were Jewish men and women who viewed the church as an exclusive Jewish institution. All the churches they started until the conversion of Cornelius were exclusively Jewish; and they were incredulous when they heard that Peter had baptized the first Gentile converts.
In Acts we learn that the first persecution resulted in many of the Jewish believers in Jerusalem fleeing to places as far away as Cyprus, Cyrene, and Antioch. But Luke tells us they were careful to preach the gospel only to their fellow Jews. But after a church had been planted in Antioch something happened that was destined to change the church forever. It was in Antioch that Jewish believers began to proclaim the gospel to their Gentile neighbors. The response was phenomenal. Multitudes came to faith. Interestingly, it was the believers of this now racially diverse church who were first called Christians.
We do not know when the same thing began to happen in Rome, but by the time Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, it, like Antioch, had become a racially mixed church. Though I don’t know when the Roman outreach to the Gentiles began, I have an educated guess. I think it probably started somewhere around the year 49 AD.
49 AD was an important year in the history of Christianity. It was the year of the Jerusalem council (Acts 15). The leader of the church did not come together to determine whether or not the church was the New Israel, but to decide whether or not Gentiles should be required to become members of Old Israel. The thing that brought events to a head was the conversion of Gentiles as Gentiles, both in Antioch (where the controversy first flared) and in the cities Paul and Barnabas evangelized during their first missionary journey.
In reading Luke’s account of Paul’s first missionary journey we discover that the Jewish Christians in Judea were not the only ones upset about the conversion of the Gentiles. We don’t normally think of Judaism as a missionary religion, and yet in the formative days of the church Judaism competed openly with the church for Gentile converts. The Jewish literature on anti-Semitism takes note of this rivalry and suggests that this rivalry between the two faiths that may have been partly responsible for the growth of Christian anti-Semitism. There may be something to this observation, but in the early years this rivalry led to persecution of the weaker of the two faiths, Christianity.
In every stop during the first missionary journey Paul’s success at converting Gentiles led to Jewish jealousy, hostility, and in several cases, violence. In every city Paul began his ministry in the local synagogue, preaching primarily to Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles (today we would call them, seekers). Invariably, when the Gentiles responded to the gospel - and invited their friends to come and see - there was hostility from the Jewish community.
I want to suggest that the problem the Jews of Asia Minor had with Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles was not that the was converting them. They too wanted to convert the Gentiles. Nor was the claim that Jesus was the Messiah a problem. Perhaps he was. There was some openness to this idea. The problem the Jewish establishment had with Paul’s ministry was that he was converting Gentiles without requiring them to become Jews first. To teach that Jesus was the Messiah was one thing–a Jew could teach this and still be a Jew–but to teach that Gentiles could be acceptable to God without submitting to circumcision and without being taught to observe the Law….well, that was another thing entirely.
The council of 49 AD settled the matter among believing Jews (Gentile converts observed the deliberations, but they did not participate). Some people mistakenly think that the Jerusalem council set aside the law for all Christians, but a careful reading shows that this was not the case. The decision of the apostles and elders was that there would be two tracks within the church, one for Jews another for Gentiles. The Gentiles would not be required to observe the Law, but Jewish believers would continue to do so.
Meanwhile the Jews in Rome were rioting. Tacitus informs us that this was not an isolated event. They had apparently done this on more than one occasion. The source of this rioting was “one Chrestus.” Most take this as a reference to Christ, and the majority of historians believe that there was rioting in Rome, as there had been in other cities, between the Jews who believed in Jesus and those who did not.
The Emperor Claudius finally put an end to the fighting by expelling the Jews from Rome. This expulsion is mentioned by Tacitus, Suetonius, and the 5th century Christian historian, Orosius. We also have confirmation of it in the book of Acts. It was this expulsion of Jews that brought Aquila and Priscilla to Corinth. Assuming that the traditional understanding of expulsion of the Jews from Rome is the correct one, the relevance to the development of Christian anti-Semitism is obvious. First of all, there would have been resentment on the part of many in the church because the Jewish community had made themselves enemies of the gospel. There would also have been resentment because the expulsion would have robbed the Church of Rome of its Jewish leadership and members.
The loss of individuals of the quality of Aquila and Priscilla would have been an enormous blow to any church; but more importantly for our purposes, at the same moment in which the church in Jerusalem was deciding what to do with Gentile converts, the Church of Rome was becoming a church of Gentile converts. Depending on how thorough the expulsion was, the Church of Rome may have been - at least for a few years - the only completely Gentile church in the world.
For the record, the results would have been the same even if the rioting among the Jews was not over Jesus. Whatever the cause, Claudius’ actions created the world’s first Gentile church in the most important city in the world, Rome. And, if the traditional view of the cause of the rioting and expulsion is correct, it would have been a Gentile church with a great deal of anger against the unbelieving Jews who they would have viewed–I believe correctly–as the cause of the problem. Add in the fact that Alexandrian anti-Jewish propaganda was already thriving in the city, and you have the ingredients for the birth of Christian anti-Semitism. The fact that it first surfaced there can be seen in Paul’s response to it in the 9th, 10th, and 11th chapters of Romans.
Posted in Anti-Semitism, Bible, Theology
