Before we leave completely the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire between the time of Nero, in the mid-sixties AD and the rise of Constantine in the very early 300s, AD, Let’s look one more time at the whole history of that era.
We noted that the earliest persecution of the Church wasn’t by the Romans, at all, but rather at the hands of the Jewish authorities, who tried to wipe the Church out because the Jewish Temple leadership (and the civil authorities) wanted to take no chances on irritating those same Romans. This isn’t the way it’s generally taught, but from the Book of Acts, it’s clear that this is how it played out. Let’s go back to the beginning.
The beginning, in this case, came at about the year 597 BC. That’s the year that Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Kingdom of Judah. Many of the residents (not yet called Jews, but they were) were marched off to Babylon, some as slaves and some as just captives.
They stayed there for 70 years. Many stayed longer, but after seventy years, and after the Babylonian Empire had been itself been overcome by the Medo-Persian Empire, many of the captives returned “home” under the leadership of Jewish officials in the Imperial service. We know the leaders Ezra and Nehemiah: yep, the same ones who had books of the Old Testament named for them.
They rebuilt the Jerusalem city wall and started rebuilding Solomon’s Temple. But: They did not come back as free men. They came back as representatives of the Empire. They worked for the king of Persia.
In 331 BC, a Greek upstart named Alexander the Great captured Babylon and the whole Medo-Persian Empire. With it came the possession of Jerusalem and the surrounding part of the Middle East. Nobody thought it strange that Judah wasn’t actually “conquered”; it was nothing but a province of the Persians, anyway. When Alexander died in 323 BC, his empire was split five ways among his generals.
One of those “splits” included what we today know as Israel and most of the Middle East. It was ruled by a Greek king and called the Seleucid Empire. That lasted until 167 BC, when a family named Maccabaeus led Jews in a revolution (for religious reasons) against the Greeks, and established a dynasty of native rulers called Hasmoneans: descendants of the Maccabees.
Anyone interested in all this is referred to the Books of the Maccabees, which were left out of the King James Version of the Bible for reasons we can go into later, but they’re still in the Greek and Roman Catholic versions (and most Anglican), so they’re easy to find. Anyway, the Hasmoneans were Jews by religion, but Syrian by nationality.
This brings us to the time of Julius Caesar. After his murder in and by the Senate, as all will remember from Sophomore English, the Roman Republic was split by civil war. All the stuff involving Octavian, Brutus, Cleopatra and all that spilled over into Palestine, and the result was Rome establishing a protectorate in Jerusalem under Herod.