An Apology of Rome: Empire, Incarnation, and the Making of Christianity.
I write this as a civis Romanus, by instinct and inheritance, and as someone who has long felt a quiet disappointment at how Rome is remembered in the Christian imagination. Too often, Rome is reduced to a convenient villain: the brute empire that crushed Christ and then conveniently disappeared once the Gospel triumphed. That account has always felt both historically thin and theologically unsatisfying. What follows, then, is an apologia of sorts—not for Roman cruelty or injustice, but for Rome’s place in the providential economy of Christianity. It is an attempt to say, with clarity and gratitude, that Rome was not merely the backdrop of the Christian story, but one of its necessary conditions.
From the beginning, the Christian claim is not merely that God entered history, but that he did so at a decisive moment and within the most influential empire the world had ever known. The Gospels assume that this timing was providential rather than accidental. God chose the most influential empire of all time as the setting for the Incarnation so that what occurred in one life, in one province, could shape not only its own age but the whole world to come. The Roman Empire provided a unified horizon of law, language, roads, and political imagination. Into this world, at the height of its reach and coherence, God sent his incarnate Son, not to remain local, but to influence history universally.
From the perspective of the Gospels, the Romans are therefore not cast as the primary villains of the story of Christ. Instead, they appear as reluctant participants in a drama whose meaning exceeds their understanding. This is not accidental. The Gospel writers carefully avoid portraying Rome as the embodiment of evil, because their theological claim is larger than local politics. Christ does not come to defeat an empire in battle but to reveal a kingdom that operates within history while transcending it.
There is also a quieter Roman witness at the foot of the Cross. Pontius Pilate, who condemns Jesus out of fear and expediency, fades back into history burdened by ambiguity rather than hatred. Alongside him stands another Roman, the centurion traditionally named Longinus. According to Christian tradition, it is Longinus who pierces Christ’s side and, seeing how he dies, confesses, “Truly this was the Son of God.” The first explicit confession of Christ’s divinity at the Cross is thus made not by a disciple, but by a Roman soldier. This detail is profoundly symbolic. Rome both executes Christ and first names what that execution truly means. Power and violence give way, in one moment, to recognition and faith. Even at Calvary, Rome is not only an instrument of death, but the beginning of Gentile confession.
Roman authority in the Gospels is consistently pragmatic rather than ideologically hostile. Pontius Pilate repeatedly declares Jesus Christ innocent and authorizes the crucifixion only under pressure. Rome acts procedurally, not theologically. This restraint matters. It prevents Christianity from becoming an anti-imperial sect or a nationalist revolt. The true antagonists of the Gospel narrative are not Romans as such, but sin, fear, and the human refusal to recognize truth when it stands before us.
At the same time, Roman involvement is necessary for the revelation Christianity proclaims. Crucifixion is not a private religious penalty but a public, imperial execution. Because Rome executes Jesus, his death becomes visible to the entire known world. The charge affixed to the cross names him “King of the Jews,” framing his death in political and cosmic terms. The inscription appears in multiple languages, announcing Christ’s identity to Jews and Gentiles alike. Rome unwittingly provides the stage on which a universal revelation can occur.
This universality is reinforced by Jesus’ own teaching about political power. When he speaks of rendering unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God, Christ neither blesses nor abolishes Roman authority. He places it in its proper scale. Caesar’s power is real but limited. God’s claim is absolute. In acknowledging Caesar, Jesus refuses rebellion and sanctification alike. Rome is allowed to exist as part of the world God enters and redeems.
Early Christians even perceived intimations of this truth within Roman tradition itself. Late antique legend tells that Augustus consulted the Tiburtine Sibyl, who revealed a vision of a woman and child greater than any emperor. Whether legend or symbol, the story mattered because it suggested that Rome itself sensed the limits of its power. Pagan prophecy, like Roman law, became an unconscious preparation for Christ.
Roman religious life further prepared the ground for Christianity’s public expression. Shrines stood at street corners and in homes, embedding devotion into daily movement and memory. When Christianity spread, these forms were not erased but transformed. Street Madonnas replaced household gods. The structure remained while the meaning changed. This was not dilution but translation. Christianity learned how to live visibly from Rome.
Roman piety shaped Christian devotion in deeper ways. Roman religion prized duty, ritual consistency, reverence for tradition, and the ordering of heaven and earth. Christianity baptized these instincts. Pietas became devotion to God and neighbor. Ritual became sacrament. Ancestral memory became the communion of saints. Household religion became domestic Christianity. Rome taught Christianity how to be embodied, rhythmic, and communal rather than purely inward.
Festivals show this process clearly. Saturnalia celebrated light in darkness, gift-giving, feasting, and social reversal. Christianity did not suppress these instincts but redirected them toward the birth of Christ. Christmas spoke the cultural language people already understood while proclaiming a new meaning. Darkness was pierced not by myth but by incarnation. Christianity triumphed not by cultural annihilation but by conversion.
Rome’s influence is especially visible in the development of elaborate Christian liturgy. The Church inherited from Rome a sense that public ritual should be solemn, ordered, and beautiful. Processions, vestments, incense, calendars, and ceremonial language echo Roman civic and religious practice. Worship became something enacted in time and space, not merely believed in private. This liturgical inheritance allowed Christianity to preserve communal memory across centuries and cultures.
Alongside liturgy emerged a distinctive relationship between Church and state, crystallized under Constantine the Great. With Constantine, Christianity was no longer merely tolerated but recognized as a faith capable of shaping public life. The alliance did not collapse Church into state, nor state into Church, but established a durable tension between spiritual authority and temporal power. The emperor protected the Church; the Church claimed a moral horizon beyond imperial control. This settlement, refined rather than rejected over time, became one of Rome’s most enduring legacies.
Before Constantine, Christian martyrdom under Rome became one of the faith’s most compelling witnesses. The refusal of believers to sacrifice to the emperor gave Christianity a moral seriousness that words alone could not convey. Yet it is worth remembering that Roman authorities rarely demanded the renunciation of Christ as such; they asked only for participation in public cult as a sign of civic loyalty. Courage and zeal sometimes mingled in ways that later centuries would temper with pastoral prudence. After the peace of the Church under Constantine the Great, this posture softened. Imperial authority came to be viewed less as an adversary and more as a providential guardian of order, allowing Christian faith to mature from heroic resistance into settled, public responsibility.
A clear descendant of this Roman Christian synthesis can be seen in the Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana. Its structure, ceremonial life, and relationship to the crown echo this ancient grammar. Coronations remain liturgical acts. Bishops sit within national governance. Law and worship share public space. Political authority is acknowledged, limited, and sanctified without being absolutized. This is not innovation, but inheritance.
What began in Galilee as a rural and relatively unsophisticated religious movement, expressed in parables drawn from fields, nets, and villages, was never intended to remain culturally narrow or intellectually raw. As the Gospel moved outward into the cities of the Mediterranean world, it encountered the philosophical inheritance of Greece and the institutional power of Rome. Greek thought gave Christianity conceptual clarity and intellectual precision, allowing it to speak coherently about truth, nature, personhood, and divinity. Roman power, in turn, gave it discipline, structure, and permanence. Under Roman conditions, proclamation became doctrine, charisma became institution, and a local faith became a universal one. The rustic religion of Galilee was not erased in Rome; it was refined there, shaped by Greek reason and Roman authority into a form capable of addressing both philosopher and emperor, and of enduring across centuries rather than generations.
Rome’s greatest contribution, however, came through scale. The empire provided roads, cities, law, trade networks, and a shared sense of belonging to one world. Once Christianity took root within this structure, it spread with a speed and reach no apostle alone could achieve. Roman order became missionary infrastructure. Roman universality became catholicity. The Pax Romana created the conditions for sustained theological exchange and institutional continuity.
One might note, by contrast, that centuries later certain reforming movements in northern Europe, shaped by harsher landscapes and thinner cultural inheritance, struggled to perceive the accumulated weight of Roman tradition—its continuity of beauty, ritual, and memory stretching back to the empire itself. From such places, far removed from the civic, artistic, and ecclesial formation of Rome, there emerged an audacity and presumption to judge, dismantle, and claim the fruits of an inheritance they were not born into and did not patiently receive. That confidence was perhaps sincere, but it was also historically naïve, mistaking distance from Rome for freedom from it, and presuming that conversion and reform could be undertaken without the means, formation, or cultural memory required to sustain them, as though one might comprehend the faith without first breathing the air once breathed by apostles and emperors alike.
It is therefore no accident that Christianity was refined in Rome. Here the Church learned hierarchy, law, liturgy, doctrine, and historical memory. The faith that began in Galilee became a world religion in Rome. The empire that crucified Christ later preserved his Gospel, articulated his teaching, and carried his name across continents.
This is why Rome’s story deserves more gratitude than it usually receives. The Romans are not the baddies of the Gospels because they are not the ultimate agents of the story. They represent the world itself: powerful, flawed, unaware, yet capable of being used by God. Rome governs bodies; Christ claims souls. Caesar rules time; Christ reveals eternity. Christianity does not conquer Rome by force. It fulfills Rome’s deepest instincts and transforms them. And in the end, there is no honest conclusion to the Christian story that does not pass through Rome, because without Rome, there would be no Christianity as we know it.
As Virgil writes in the Aeneid: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, mementohae tibi erunt artes.
