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Chapter One
Beginnings
During the last year of his reign over the Roman province of Judea, King Herod the Great (73-4 B.C.E.) erected a magnificent statue of a golden eagle above the main gate of the temple in Jerusalem. In a dramatic act of defiance, two religious teachers, Judas and Matthias, along with forty of their students, went to the temple and pulled down the golden eagle. They were arrested and tried before King Herod. "Who ordered you?" the king demanded. "The law of our fathers," they confidently replied. "And why so exultant," Herod asked, "when you will shortly be put to death?" As the teachers explained, they had defied the king's authority, even under threat of execution, "Because after our death we shall enjoy greater felicity." If they were faithful to their ancestral religion, they asserted, they would be rewarded after death. At the conclusion of their trial, Herod had the teachers and their students executed by burning them alive.
Christianity began in the first-century Roman provinces of Galilee and Judea. There Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, and was executed. The incident of the golden eagle illustrates some of the characteristic features of religion in the time and place of Christian beginnings. Religion operated in different spheres — political, priestly, and popular — which intersected in the emergence of Christianity. First, political religion, which was ultimately located in the extensive power and administrative scope of the Roman Empire, was also localized in the province of Judea through the rule of King Herod. Under imperial authority, Herod not only ruled Judea as a Roman surrogate, but healso engaged in ceremonial projects — constructing a theater in Jerusalem, building an amphitheater outside the city, holding athletic contests — that were all familiar forms of Roman imperial religion. When he placed the statue of the golden eagle at the gates of the temple as a votive offering to the divine Caesar, Herod indicated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in accommodating the city of Jerusalem to the religion of the empire.
Second, a priestly religion was dedicated to maintaining the religious life of the temple. Throughout the ancient world, priests and other attendants at temples officiated at the sacrifices, feasts, and festivals that enacted a regular cycle of religious ritual. In Jerusalem, an organized priesthood was responsible for preserving the temple as a sacred spacethe center of the world — by observing a ritual cycle of sacrifices and festivals. According to Judas and Matthias, however, the priests had conspired with Herod to defile the purity of that sacred space by introducing an alien symbol of a foreign imperial religion into it. Not only symbolizing Jerusalem's political domination by Rome, therefore, the golden eagle represented a violation of the purity of the sacred center of the city.
Third, an ancestral religion, embodied in written and oral traditions, provided popular religious resources that were in principle independent of either the political or the priestly spheres. For example, in their opposition to foreign domination and spiritual defilement, Judas and Matthias did not appeal to the Judean king or to the Jerusalem priests. Rather, they invoked the authority of the "law of our fathers," which they felt had been betrayed by both. According to these teachers, ancestral religion provided resources that could be mobilized against both political and religious injustice. In this conviction, Judas and Matthias echoed the terms in which resistance to political oppression and religious defilement had been advanced during the Maccabean revolt between 168 and 167 B.C.E. against foreign imperial rule. As one Maccabean leader had declared, "We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers" (2 Macc. 7:2). Ancestral religion, therefore, was a way of life that could be valued more than life itself. Like the Maccabees, Judas and Matthias even asserted that adherence to the ancestral law in the face of execution promised a transcendence of death in which they would "enjoy greater felicity" or experience an "everlasting renewal of life" (2 Macc. 7:9).
For the most part, however, ancestral religion did not depend upon promises of personal salvation after death. It was a way of life that was anchored in the patriarchal household, modeled on village-based society, and tied to the agricultural cycles of the land. Preserving an ancient covenant with God, ancestral religion established the terms and conditions for a life of piety and purity. However, in first-century Palestine that way of life was under enormous pressures from foreign domination, heavy taxation, and socioeconomic changes that were creating an impoverished peasantry. In response to this colonial situation, a series of movements led by bandits or brigands, by prophets or messiahs, gained popular followings for various political and religious objectives. This era of revolt against the Roman Empire, as well as against the priestly aristocracy that acted as imperial surrogates in Jerusalem, exploded in the Jewish War, which began in 66 C.E. As the culmination of that conflict, the destruction of the temple and the city by the Romans in the year 70 C.E. marked a dramatic turning point in the history of religion in the region. Out of that sudden destruction, Judaism and Christianity only gradually emerged as alternative and competing ways of being religious.
Religion of the Empire
Conquered by Roman troops in 63 B.C.E., Judea and the entire eastern Mediterranean were brought within the imperial pax Romana. The Romans set up a system of indirect rule in Judea that relied upon the compliance of the Jerusalem ruling class and priestly aristocracy. Although a small military force was stationed at Caesarea on the coast, the Roman Empire asserted its political authority primarily through the collection of tribute and taxes. In the conduct of religion, Rome required daily sacrifices for the emperor in the Jerusalem temple, but otherwise did not directly interfere in the religious life of the region. Nevertheless, certain features of the religion of the Roman Empire were unavoidable. During the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 17 B.C.E.-14 C.E.), key terms of an emerging imperial religion became part of the sacred vocabulary of the Greco-Roman world. Imperial temples, public inscriptions, and religious festivals proclaimed the "good news" (euangelion) of the deified emperor, who, as savior or son of God, had brought peace, faith, and justice into the world. Assuming the highest priestly office, that of pontifex maximus, the emperor himself became a divine being in Roman imperial religion...
