I would tend to agree with @Tim on this one. I doubt that Jesus would have been notable enough to require informing the Emperor.
Well ok but why?He draw a lot of attention to the Gospels.The hole Jewish nation knew him
Eventually, yes. But the Emperor lived about 1500 miles awayâacross the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, an itinerant teacher (even one reported to perform miraculous healings) is not necessarily a high priority news item.
Those were written much later.
Yes, but as they were in a hole, nobody could hear them.
The Roman Empire was a very large, and ethnically diverse polity. New religious movements were popping up all the time. These would generally have been considered to be matters for the local governor to deal with. The central government would generally only be interested in them if they put taxes at risk (necessary to pay for the central government) or if they raised the risk of rebellion (meaning they might have to send more troops). There is no sign that Christianity threatened on either of these two issues, so the central government would likely have considered them to be a purely local matter.
The Jewish authorities would have been more concerned as they would have seen Jesus and Christianity as undercutting their own authority. From what Iâve read however, Roman opinion of Judaism was, at best, ambivalent (they were seen as trouble-makers â not an unreasonable opinion given events in the decades thereafter), so the Roman authorities probably would not have taken these concerns to heart.
OK, but it wasnât just the Romans doing the redaction.
The execution of a wandering preacher is one thing, and Iâm not particularly surprised that nobody in Rome seems to have known about it at the time. Far stranger is that if no fewer than 500 people witnessed the same person coming back to life, this astonishing news would not have spread like a wildfire and reach the ears of the Romans. Now there is a story that Iâd think even the Emperor might be interested in.
Yes, failing to stay dead when you had been lawfully executed would generally be considered an affront to Roman authority, aggravated by flaunting this disregard in front of crowds. Probably not the sort of thing that a mere provincial governor could be expected to handle, so best left to the emperor (who also happens to be the Pontifex Maximus of the Roman religion, and thus qualified to handle supernatural threats to Roman authority).
Perhaps. But Palestine was famous (infamous) in those days for its stubborn peoples with their crazy religion and crazy stories, along with âbombasticâ claims about their deity, plenty of itinerant teachers, and even a series of revolutionaries. Keep in mind that the Romans even gave the Jews extra leeway for their âcrazinessâ which was not otherwise tolerated among other conquered peoples of the empire. Thus, Iâm inclined to think that reports of the resurrection of Jesus would have been casually shrugged off by Roman leaders as just more of the same. Indeed, this probably worked to the advantage of the early churchâfor a while.
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