The Roman culture was such that physical life didn’t matter at all:
• The Romans would go to take over whole countries and just take them over: England, North Africa, Spain, Europe etc. …. Whether they liked or not …… possibly burn their cities to the ground and take their people back to Rome as slaves as happened in Jerusalem in AD 70.
• If certain slaves showed promise, they could go through the gladiator school and provide live sport for thousands in the watching stands ….. to the death with other gladiators or wild animals …. The rewards were great for successful gladiator
• In later centuries, they executed Christians without mercy when they wouldn’t acknowledge Caesar as God and fed them to the lions in a public spectacle in the Sporting Arenas or burned them as pitched soaked night-time garden candles in the Emperor’s garden.
• Along the highways leading into Rome as the Capital of the Empire, there would be a mile of people who had been crucified leading right to the city walls. This said to people: ‘do not mess with this Empire or this is what happen to you’.
• Roman culture had a variation on wholesale abortion …. Babies would come to full term …. then if mothers didn’t want them, they would left by the roadside for wild animals or vultures to eat or they would die of exposure or they throw them in the river to drown …. Maybe 1 in 3 occurred this way especially they were girl babies
• Homosexuality was common …. Older men often had young boys as sex slaves
I explore this early Roman Culture at this Blog Site ......
Jesus Christ: where do find one record of Him ever bagging the Roman Empire and its hideous practices? Did he ever speak against slavery and any other practice that we would find offensive?
He kept His eye on the goal of the Kingdom of God ...... an eye for the final goal. What He finally taught, overthrew the Roman Empire entirely.
A Spirituality from Jesus Christ began in the first century which was set in the context of the Roman Empire. In the first century, life in the Roman Empire began to change. People who had been influenced by Jesus Christ who later became known as Christians began arriving in Rome. They spread from 120 people meeting together in an upper room in Jerusalem and spread to the four corners of the then known world. Their influence took over the Roman Empire, went to Turkey and Egypt and the Apostle Thomas even went to India.
The major difference that the teaching of Jesus Christ through his followers made in sequential centuries, is astonishing. In the book: ‘How Christianity Changed The World’, Alvin Schmidt looks in detail at how the secondary consequences of first century Christians coming to Rome made in such areas as:
• The great value given to every human life …. Rich or poor, slave or freeman, gladiator or citizen, both men and woman, the disabled and the babies (infanticide was totally acceptable)
• The elevation of Sexual Morality and the value of Marriage
• Woman Received Freedom
• Dignity Charity and Compassion replaced the Greco-Roman cultural ethos of uncompassion for the sick and dying and anyone who couldn’t offer the Emperor something
• The advent of Hospitals and Health Care
• The imprint on the value of Education for everyone, not just the sons of the privileged citizens
• Labour and Economic Freedom dignified
• Science and its commencement
• Slavery being abolished
• The stamp on Art and Architecture
• The Sound of Music
The values that produced these aspects have affected our Western world for the last 2,000 years ….. we take them as normal standards. However, it came at great cost as there were severe persecutions of Christians in the second and third centuries by the Roman Emperors. The values and practices of these people turned the Roman Culture upside down …. Woman equal to men? …. Slaves equal with all people?
There are stories of how these 1st century Christians actually turned the Roman Culture upside down:
Plagues: In some of the Roman towns, plagues would occur and so the whole town population would leave the town and go out into the countryside. They would leave the sick, old people, the handicapped and the children behind. These people would die not from the plague but from neglect. Often Christians would go into these towns and look after these people. Some of the Christians would die from the plague. When the plague was over, the families would come back and wonder why their relatives had become Christians.
Finding abandoned babies: Christian woman going through the snowy forests in the middle of winter to find abandoned babies ….. taking them back as part of their own family
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