{"id":27410,"date":"2026-06-25T11:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/27410\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T11:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T11:46:08","slug":"rome-vs-christians-thats-not-the-historical-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/27410\/","title":{"rendered":"Rome vs Christians? That\u2019s not the historical truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

For many, the story of early Christianity is forever filtered through Hollywood films<\/a>. Victor Mature\u2019s extravagant pecs or Deborah Kerr\u2019s elaborate coiffure in epics such as The Robe and Quo Vadis signify the heroism of the faithful in the face of Roman persecution. Brave believers refuse to worship deluded emperors as gods. Martyrs are thrown to the lions.<\/p>\n

Tim Whitmarsh\u2019s erudite yet entertaining new study of Christianity\u2019s historical origins, Rome\u2019s Age of Revolution, deftly demolishes such tropes. Ironically, he says, Christians and the Augustan Roman state had much in common \u2013 in fact, the former piggybacked on earlier Roman structures and mores to build their own new empire, overlaid on existing political, civic and cultural templates. Both referenced the mythology of a miraculous child born to be world saviour. Both successfully repackaged revolution as a return to tradition. And both, eventually, achieved the status of a \u201cglobal brand\u201d. As Whitmarsh observes: \u201cWhen Christians set themselves directly against Rome\u2026 they were at their most Roman<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Whitmarsh, regius professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and an expert on early religion, Christianity\u2019s proliferation is inextricable from the age of the emperor Augustus. When Augustus seized power in 27 BC, after long and attritional civil wars led to the decline of republican Rome, he promptly established an imperial state, setting himself up as supreme ruler, despite a constitution that had long been \u201cbuilt on the rejection of kingship\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Deborah<\/p>\n

Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor in Quo Vadis (1951), a film that framed early Christianity as a struggle between the devout and Rome – FilmPublicityArchive\/United Archives via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Augustus established a period of peace and initiated a programme of public building works, including maintaining a vast new network of public roads that created, in Whitmarsh\u2019s words, a unique \u201cancient information superhighway\u201d. This unified empire enabled a \u201cporousness\u201d between ancient cultures, allowing a swifter exchange of Roman, Greek and eastern literature and ideas, all of which were to contribute to both the precepts of the new Christian faith<\/a> and its successful spread throughout the empire \u2013 what Whitmarsh calls \u201cthe swirl\u201d.<\/p>\n

The traffic was often cultural. Christian teachers and \u201cbibliophiles\u201d recognised early on that, in a world \u201centhralled with the book\u201d, the means to gain authority and durability, to manage structure and succession, was through the written word. The narrative structure of the Gospels, Whitmarsh argues, reveals the influence of the popular new literary form of the novel, written in Greek, if often in eastern cities. Whitmarsh also cites Virgil\u2019s Fourth Eclogue, a bucolic idyll by the premier poet of the Augustan age, which predicts the advent of a saviour figure, here possibly Augustus. Much later, Christian emperors such as Constantine the Great claimed this as evidence that Virgil<\/a> had predicted the arrival of Jesus.<\/p>\n

But if this sounds too complex or scholarly, Whitmarsh compensates with a keen eye on accessibility: Rome\u2019s Age of Revolution is packed with fascinating facts. We learn that a single sheet of papyrus in the ancient world would have cost a third of a labourer\u2019s daily wage. That the first beast to confront the Christian martyr Perpetua in the amphitheatre was \u201ca ferocious cow\u201d (anyone who has had to walk through a herd on a country hike will commiserate). My personal favourite is the second-century AD novel Leucippe and Clitophon, which offers \u201cthe longest and most enthusiastic description of the female orgasm in ancient literature\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, the volume asks the age-old question: how did Christianity outlive \u2013 and outplay \u2013 all other faiths, including contemporary eastern cults such as those of Isis, Mithras or Cybele? In the third and final part of his history, Whitmarsh outlines a series of important, interconnected \u201cmakers of Christian culture\u201d, starting with the role of eastern \u201ccharismatics\u201d. Like the Christian apostles, these preachers also roamed the ancient world, performing \u201cmiracles\u201d and speaking in strange tongues, placing the apostles and the account of their deeds in Acts very firmly in the wider tradition of the eastern empire. And so, much as Augustus himself had done, Christianity survived and thrived by selectively absorbing characteristics of ancient cultures and reconstituting them in its own image.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Whitmarsh understands the importance of semantics throughout; that in questions of faith, language matters \u2013 down to the smallest preposition. Pre-Christianity, he specifies, Greek speakers had \u201cbelieved\u201d, but now Christian readers of the Greek Gospels \u201cbelieved in\u201d. Faith, it seems, was no longer the nebulous worship of several gods and cults but a specific credence in a single, omnipotent deity.<\/p>\n

His own style throughout is dry and crisp, elucidating complicated cultural crossovers with clarity. As he explains of the Gospels, whether you were Jewish or pagan, this new Christian text \u201ccarried with it both the thrill of the new and the comfort of the familiar: the exact ingredients for a revolutionary new religious movement\u201d.<\/p>\n

Such issues have long been debated by both classicists and theologians, if, as Whitmarsh notes wryly, usually in separate campus buildings. But his cerebral approach, citing a range of Western thinkers from Hegel to Max Weber and Roland Barthes, is engaging, exploring concepts of space and time to the metaphysics of history. His assault on the traditional foundation of religious belief \u2013 that faith is stronger than evidence, and would survive regardless of any cultural \u201cswirl\u201d \u2013 might not appeal to all. But he imbues his polemic with more than enough charm, and conviction, to carry readers through.<\/p>\n

&starf;&starf;&starf;&starf;&star;<\/p>\n

Josephine Balmer\u2019s books include Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. To order your copy of Rome\u2019s Age of Revolution for \u00a319.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Try full access to The Telegraph free today. Unlock their award-winning website and essential news app, plus useful tools and expert guides for your money, health and holidays.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For many, the story of early Christianity is forever filtered through Hollywood films. Victor Mature\u2019s extravagant pecs or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18939,18940,18937,18093,18938,18941,18943,18942,27,18936],"class_list":["post-27410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rome","tag-ancient-cultures","tag-christian","tag-deborah-kerr","tag-early-christianity","tag-emperor-augustus","tag-peter-paul-rubens","tag-quo-vadis","tag-roman-persecution","tag-rome","tag-tim-whitmarsh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}