Problems of Early Christianity

Part One

 EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Augustus Caesar and the Birth of Christ

 Some Reflections on their Contemporaneity

December 25, year 0 or else 1 (authorities differ on the point): this has been observed for centuries as the date of the birth of Jesus. The historical situation of it has been highlighted from two statements in the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew (2:1) tells us that "Jesus was born in Judaea, in the days of Herod the king..." The Gospel of Luke (2:1-5) has the information that Jesus' mother Mary, when she was "great with child" (believed to be by the Holy Ghost's "overshadowing") was taken by her husband Joseph to Bethlehem, which was "his own city", for both of them to be taxed along with "all the world" according to "a decree from Caesar Augustus", which was passed "when Cyrenius was governor of Syria".

By our present computation of the Christian era both these statements are inaccurate - except for the broad contemporaneity of Jesus and Augustus and for the fact that Jesus' birthplace Bethlehem fell within the empire - termed at that time "all the world" - of the latter whose reign covered 30 B.C.-14 A.D. by our present computation and who therefore was responsible for the appointment not only of "Cyrenius"; the Bible's name for the Roman "Quirinius", but also of Herod I to their respective posts. In two points the data of Matthew and Luke are faulty by the present calendar. Herod I has been found to have died in 4 B.C. So Jesus could not have been born after that year. The census under Quirinius, by the same calendar, took place in 6 A.D. So, if this census synchronised with the year of Jesus' birth, Jesus could not have been born before that year. A bewildering dilemma is thus created.

To avoid it we must convict Luke of a half-error. Half because the linkage of Jesus' birth with Quirinius's census is wrong and yet the linkage of this event with Quirinius's governorship of Syria could be right because a fragment of a Roman inscription discovered at Antioch has revealed that Quirinius had come as the legate of Augustus to the Near

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East once before 6 A.D. on a military assignment and had established his seat of government as well as his headquarters in Syria between 10 and 7 B.C.¹ So Jesus' birth may be dated to this interval with 7 B.C. as the latest possibility. This dating would synchronise it with Herod's reign on the one hand and "Cyrenius"'s governorship on the other. The paradox of being "before Christ" arises simply from our current confused calendar which was fixed in the sixth century by the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus ("Dionysius the Dwarf") who made a number of mistakes and miscalculations.

7 B.C. is particularly appropriate if we are to credit the legend of the unusual star which the Magi, the Wise Men of the East, are said by Matthew (2:1-2) to have followed as a guide towards the one "who is born king of the Jews". The visit of the Magi may not be history, but, as Kepler calculated in 1603, there was indeed an abnormal phenomenon in the night-sky in 7 B.C. The planets Jupiter and Saturn were in "conjunction" -that is, appeared very close to each other - in the constellation Pisces in a markedly visible manner in the sky of the Mediterranean area three times in that year: on May 29, October 3 and December 4.² On the third occasion they would seem to have dissolved into one great brilliant star.³ P. Schnabel, the German scholar, deciphering the Neo-Babylonian cuneiform writings of a famous professional institute in the ancient world, the School of Astrology at Sipper in Babylonia, found a confirmation of Kepler in a note about the position of the planets in the constellation of Pisces, carefully marking in Jupiter and Saturn over a period of five months in what would be reckoned as 7 B.C. in our calendar.⁴ As Jesus is said to have been already born before the Magi saw the impressive astral phenomenon, his birth must have preceded this phenomenon's most concentrated and brightest development - that is, it must have been sometime prior to December 4 in that year.

Such a date need not be in conflict with fact, since December 25 for Jesus' nativity is referred to in documents as Christmas Day in 354 A.D. for the first time and was evidently chosen in order to replace an old Roman festival known as Dies

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NatalisInxncti, "the birthday of the unconquered", the occasion of the winter solstice when the day's length begins to gain on the length of the night. Furthermore, there is the declaration in Luke's Gospel (2:8) about the time Jesus was born: "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night." Metereological observation has shown that during the last 2000 years in which, according to all existing information, the climate of Palestine has not changed, Bethlehem at Christmas-time would be in the grip of frost and no cattle could be in the fields in that temperature.⁵ The Jewish religious book, the Talmud, remarks that in that neighbourhood the flocks were put out to grass in March and brought in again at the beginning of November.⁶ Hence, if Luke is to be believed, Jesus must have been born not at nearly the end of December but between March and November in 7 B.C.

When Jesus was born, Augustus had been emperor for 23 years and during that time as well as after and certainly before the public ministry of Jesus which started after his baptism by John the Baptist, when "Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age" (Luke 3:23), Augustus had put his stamp upon his epoch. This stamp is commonly forgotten when we speak of the period of Jesus' birth, which is thought to be eminently memorable because of it and because of the career that followed. But this period, we may remind ourselves, is known to general history as the Augustan Age.

What is most striking as between the two illustrious contemporaries is that just as Jesus came to be called the Son of God, worshipped as divine and considered mankind's Saviour as well as the inaugurator of a new era moving towards the Kingdom of God, Augustus was heralded by poets like Virgil as the creator of a Golden Age of peace and prosperity and accepted worship from the East as a divine being and saviour of humanity. Like the virginal conception the Gospels of Matthew and Luke picture for Jesus, a supernatural birth brought about by a deity's intervention was surmised for Augustus. Whatever the travesty of the deific title in relation to

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some of his successors like Nero, Caligula and Domitian who claimed it as an inheritance from its first bearer, here was a natural spontaneous ascription by his compatriots to one felt to be of extraordinary greatness, as if sent by Heaven on a sovereign mission.

A further point of interest and significance in the comparison arises from the use of the Greek word euangelion in regard to Jesus by Paul and the other writers of the New Testament. This word, translated "Gospel" in English, connoting "Glad Tidings" or "Good News", is illuminated the most by the same term's employment in the imperial Roman cult associated with Augustus. Howard Clark Kee, in his Jesus in History: An Approach to the Study of the Gospels,⁷ writes:

"It meant an announcement of the benefits the empire enjoyed through the gracious authority of Caesar, the divinely appointed ruler of Rome. Although the fuller documentation for this meaning of euangelion comes in part from post-New Testament writers, such as Plutarch (A.D. 46?-120?) in De For-tuna Romanorum⁸ there is inscriptional evidence going back to the time of Augustus for the use of euangelion in connection with the imperial cult: 'The birthday of the god was for the world the beginning of tidings of joy [euangelion] on his account.'* Gerhard Friedrich has summarized what the term implied when associated with the saving power and person of the emperor:

* A photograph, transcription, and translation of this 9 B.C. text from Priene can be found in Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, rev. ed., trans. L.R.M. Strachan (New York: Harper & Row, n.d.), p. 366 and Figure 70. Whether the euangelion is understood to be the announcement of his birth (so Deissmann) or the fulfilment of the Sibylline prophecies about Augustus (so Eduard Norden in Deissmann, p. 366, n. 8), the analogy with the use of the term by Mark and the other evangelists is evident. The full Greek text is in Wilhelm Dittenberger, Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae [Selected Greek Inscriptions from the Orient], Vol. 2, no. 458 (reprinted, Hildesheim: Olms, 1960), lines 40-79 (the point at which the passage under study appears).

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The ruler is divine by nature. His power extends to men, to animals, to the earth and to the sea. Nature belongs to him; the wind and the waves are subject to him. He works miracles and heals men. He is the savior of the world who also redeems individuals from their difficulties.⁹

"The emperor's divinity was attested by signs in the heavens at both his birth and his death that showed he belonged among the gods. Although some leading scholars have denied the link between the meaning of euangelion as applied to the first four books of the New Testament and the connotation it carries in the imperial cult,¹⁰ the connection has recently and rightly been reaffirmed in an important study of gospel origins by Wilhelm Schneemelcher."¹¹

All this attribution of a more-man-human personality to Augustus Caesar, a status comparable in general formulation to that of his contemporary of Palestine in a different sphere, draws our attention because of a certain correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and a disciple in 1937. The latter Was discussing the subject of past lives, and Sri Aurobindo in the course of his replies distinguished between arriving at conclusions by means of "sight" (spiritual vision) and coming to them by "inference". After writing that he was never certain that a poet-friend of the disciple and, for some time, a fellow-sadhak had been Shelley in a past life, Sri Aurobindo added: "as I am for instance about Dilip having been Horace. I am certain because that was 'seen' [by the Mother] and I myself can remember very well (psychically, not in any outward event) my contact with his personality then." (19.7.1937)

When the disciple suggested that Sri Aurobindo might have been Julius Caesar or Mark Antony and the Master gave a clue that he had been neither, the disciple wrote: "So who remains a famous person in contact with Horace? The answer is unmistakable: Caesar Octavianus, afterwards Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. Have I at last hit the nail on the head? If so, will you please tell me, as you did about Leonardo da Vinci, what exactly he stood for in the history of Europe?"

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About Leonardo the disciple had asked Sri Aurobindo: "Mother or you are said to have declared that a divine descent was attempted during the Renaissance with Leonardo da Vinci as its centre - a credible report since you were Leonardo and Mother Mona Lisa. But I shall be much interested to know something about the inner side of the phenomenon. Was there a secretly recognised mystic consciousness at work - that is, recognised by da Vinci? Was he aware of his semi-Avatarhood, aware of the work he was destined to do, aware of the spiritual planes?"

Sri Aurobindo replied: "Never heard before of my declaring or anybody declaring such a thing. What Leonardo da Vinci held in himself was all the new age of Europe on its many sides. But there was no question of Avatarhood or consciousness of a descent or pressure of spiritual planes. Mysticism was no part of what he had to manifest." (16.7.1937)

To the question about Augustus, Sri Aurobindo gave the answer: "Augustus Caesar organised the life of the Roman empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe - he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life aspects but in its intellectual aspects. It was therefore a supreme intellectual, Leonardo da Vinci, who took up again this work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe." (29.7.1937)

The appearance of Augustus in the very period when Christianity had its origination seems to have answered a need of the future Europe standing on the threshold of an era in which a new powerful spirit had broken in upon old Judaism and a Graecised Near East and a rising Roman culture. Its invasion, with its "Christ crucified", its faith in things unseen, its unearthly formula of "Love your enemies" and its passion for the Beyond, called for a complementary if not counterpoising force. While its soulful enthousiasmos brought something

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highly fecundating by means of a subtilising light from the deep heart of religious aspiration, it brought also a threat to the existing progressive elan of the European consciousness. There was the danger of its submerging the glory that was the Greek mind of inspired reason and chastened aesthetic sense and the grandeur that was the Roman vitality building a manifold order, instituting laws, moulding strength of character and striking out pathways of world-communication. A millennium and a half later, Leonardo embodied a well-tempered synthesis of the two currents and gave it a forward-looking face of analytic-eyed imagination. Augustus made the synthesis achievable and rendered a complex yet balanced modern psychology a predictable part of "things to come" by embodying to the nth degree one side of that synthesis at a critical time, a time when Jesus Christ embodied to the maximum the other side and might have tilted by his luminous extreme the fate of Europe in favour of an inward other-worldliness based on an outward primitivism.

However, by a paradox of Divine Destiny, Augustus served also to render possible, instead of negating, the development of the Christian euangelion as a component of the future. For, despite occasional persecution, Roman rule fostered Christianity through the Pax Romana which Augustus had established. This Roman Peace by its maintenance of political stability, easy communications and flourishing trade, ensured not only the survival and transmission of the Classical heritage but also the means for the diffusion of Christ's message.

References

1. The Bible as History by Werner Keller (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957), p. 327.

2. Ibid., pp. 330-31.

3. Ibid., p. 334.

4. Ibid., p. 331.

5. Ibid., p. 336.

6. Ibid.

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7. Published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1977, pp. 133-34.

8. In the Loeb edition of Plutarch the treatise is found in Moralia, Vol. 2, trans. F.C. Babbitt (New York: Putnam's, 1928), pp. 73-89.

9. Friedrich, "Evangelizesthai" in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 2, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1965), p. 724.

10. For example, Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, Vol. I, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribner's, 1951), p. 87.

11. In New Testament Apocrypha, trans. R. Mel. Wilson and others (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), pp. 72-73.

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