The World of Roman Hellenism

Abstract

The movement that later came to be known as Christianity began ca. 26 CE with the public appearance of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, a rural Jewish prophet and teacher in the Galilee, a relatively small region in the Jewish territories located in the eastern Mediterranean region. Though Jesus was executed in Jerusalem by the Roman authorities ca. 29 CE, by the end of the fi rst century CE, conventicles of the followers of Jesus were to be found in urban centers throughout the Mediterranean world. In 313 CE, Constantine the Great (272 – 337 CE) issued the Edict of Milan that mandated religious toleration throughout the Roman empire, canceling the penalties associated with the profession of Christianity that had been the basis for the persecution and execution of Christians and offi cially restoring the property that had been confi scated from them. By the end of the fourth century, despite its humble origins, Christianity had become the dominant religion of the Roman empire. Palestine, the cradle of Christianity, was a region that had been a pawn in the power politics of Near Eastern and Levantine kingdoms for nearly two millennia and in consequence suffered domination by a series of both eastern and western empires. As a reform movement, nascent “ Christianity ” has been profoundly infl uenced by the traditions of rural Galilean Judaism. Judaism itself had begun to experience various degrees of Hellenization as early as the fourth century BCE (Hengel 1974 ). The Roman empire, which eventually took over all the Hellenistic monarchies founded by Alexander ’ s successors by 31 BCE, ironically became a military and administrative vehicle for continuing the spread of Hellenistic language and culture, making the term “ Roman Hellenism ” an appropriate political and cultural designation for the centuries following the Roman victory at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE.