How Often Do You Think About The Roman Empire?

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 22nd

Denarius of Caracalla, ca 216 CE. Image by Johny SYSEL, licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0, taken from Wikimedia.

There was a thing going around the internet a few weeks ago—whether it’s better to call it a meme or a trend, I’m not sure—where people were asking each other how often they think about the Roman Empire. The power behind it seems to have been the discovery that men think about the Roman Empire far more frequently than women do, and for a while the internet was full of flabbergasted women who couldn’t believe that the men in their lives think about the Roman Empire several times a week, daily, or even more than once a day. By contrast, many of the women were saying that they hardly ever think about the Roman Empire at all. I think this is a fascinating cultural moment for several reasons, not least of which is that while gender binarism has been eroding in American pop culture for some time now, this whole discourse about the Roman Empire snapped back into the male/female grid. Suddenly everyone was talking about men and women as durable and predictable categories, which is kind of surprising, I must admit. After years of widespread dismissals of gender essentialism, the whole online culture started speaking in that “women are like x, men are like y” kind of way.

My response, the few times someone asked me about it, is that I think about the Roman Empire professionally, and therefore all the time. I am not sure whether that makes me atypical or hyper-typical for this meme/trend. I suppose it’s the latter; a lot of what drove me to study the New Testament and early Christianity was a fascination with imperial politics, including domination, accommodation, violence, and rhetoric. I am not sure how else to think about the theologies and writings and social structures of early Christianity, aside from the Roman Empire. It’s the water that the whole thing swims in, at least for the first few hundred years and within the Mediterranean basin. To put it another way, the Roman Empire is the guardrails around every part of Jesus’ life and death, and it is present in every word of the New Testament, whether it’s there on the surface or not. Even though we might transpose those stories to our own time and place (and there have been big interpretive projects dedicated to doing just that), Jesus’ life and death took place within an imperial milieu, in a way that makes thinking about the Roman Empire pretty inevitable.

Sometimes the Roman Empire is in the background of the gospels’ stories about Jesus, but sometimes it’s in the foreground. The gospel reading from the lectionary for this week, Matthew 22:15-22, is one of those times when it’s in the foreground. This is the story of Jesus being presented with a question from some Pharisees and Herodians: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” (I published a poem about this passage on this Substack, about a year ago). Then, as now, it was not an idle question. It was not the sort of question that people were at liberty to treat philosophically. There were real, embodied consequences to resisting taxation, just like there are today; governments tend to be serious about collecting the money they feel they are owed. Taxation is one of those times when people feel the presence of government, even if they might not feel it that much at other times. Every April 15^th, Americans are reminded that they are part of and subject to a large system of revenue and expenditure that governs their lives, and that (for most of us) compliance is not optional.

In Jesus’ day, there were a few forms of taxation, just the way each of us might pay several different kinds of taxes today. Most likely, the kind of tax that’s behind this story is an annual census tax, in which the Roman Empire demanded one denarius from every subject. One denarius was not a lot of money to some people, but it was a hefty sum to others. It was about one days’ wages for an average laborer. So it was a regressive tax, a “flat tax,” hitting harder at the lower economic levels and becoming almost negligible at the top. Everyone had to pay it, theoretically; tax collectors’ job was to seek out people who hadn’t paid up and squeeze revenue out of the population for the empire.

It's interesting who came to Jesus with this question. “The Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said,” Matthew writes. So far, pretty standard stuff: the gospels frequently depict the Pharisees as coming to Jesus with loaded questions and baited traps (even if this dynamic might be exaggerated in the gospels, with the benefit of hindsight, so that the writers could heighten the stakes of Jesus’ life and teachings). But then Matthew adds, “along with the Herodians.” Who were the Herodians?

The word “Herodians” only appears three times in the New Testament: here in Matthew 22, and once each in Mark 3 and Mark 12. Each time, the Herodians are part of a plot to entrap or ensnare Jesus; they come across in the text like a hyper-vigilant anti-Jesus faction. (Mark 12 is the parallel passage to Matthew 22; both are the story about taxation). Their name, “the Herodians,” suggests that they were supporters of Herod Antipas and the Herodian dynasty. You might remember that Jesus’ life in the gospels is bookended by Herods. Herod the Great shows up in Matthew as the king who summons the magi after Jesus’ birth and orders the slaughter of all the baby boys, and his son Herod Antipas is the one reigning during Jesus’ lifetime and death, with whom Jesus has some interactions during the last hours of his life. So, these “Herodians” who come to Jesus are probably supporters of that dynasty, and specifically of Herod Antipas. This would not have been a broadly popular position to take, because the Herods themselves do not seem to have been especially beloved figures. There was some question about their ethnic identity, as the Herods might have been Idumean or Arab by ancestry and only Jewish by conversion. (Modern scholars still argue about this). So they were sometimes viewed suspiciously because of that. But the bigger issue with the Herods, in the eyes of some people, was that they were client kings of Rome. The Herods did not sit in the lineage of David, and therefore they did not represent the kingship as many imagined it should be. Instead, the Herods were appointed by Rome to rule in the empire’s name. Rome preferred it this way—they liked to have a buffer layer between the empire and the local population, and they found it convenient to use client kings like the Herods to do the dirty work of interfacing with the people. (This is why, in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trials, he gets shuffled between the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and the Judean king Herod—it was a question of jurisdiction, and which part of the government wanted to spend time dealing with him).

These “Herodians” in Matthew 22, then, are people who supported the Herods, and therefore the Roman Empire. The scholar Shaye Cohen identifies a pattern in Judean politics over time, as the Judeans dealt with successive occupying powers, of accommodation and resistance. Some Judeans resisted occupation by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and other Judeans accommodated themselves to those powers in hopes that by working closely with them, they could improve things for the people. It’s not so different from the dynamic playing out right now in Palestine, with groups like the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: do you spend your time trying to overthrow occupation, or do you spend your time trying to cut a deal with the occupiers for better services to the people? Both are reasonable options, but the Herodians were clearly in the accommodationist camp. They seem to have been people who were convinced that the best path forward was to work with Herod, who could then advocate with Rome for better privileges and benefits under imperial rule for the Judean people. This made them pragmatists, but it probably also made them the object of ire and irritation from others.

So when the Pharisees and the Herodians came to Jesus with their question about taxation, it might have been an honest question, but there were no answers that Jesus could have given that wouldn’t get him in trouble. If he said that yes, it’s lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, the Herodians would have been satisfied, but the resistance-minded folks among his followers might have been angry. If he had said that no, it’s not lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, he might have satisfied the zealots (and Zealots) among his followers, but he also would have handed the Herodians ammunition to use against him. Jesus’ response was to ask for a denarius—the coin used to pay the tax, the one that represented about a day’s work. Its face was the emperor’s face. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,” Jesus said, “and to God the things that are God’s.”

It was a non-answer, but a very savvy one. It was a recognition of the Roman Empire’s power and sovereignty, paired with a mention of the limits of that power and sovereignty. It was an admission that everyone standing there was embedded in the Roman economy, but also a suggestion that there were things in the world that still belonged to God, and not to Caesar.

It’s interesting that this story appears in all three synoptic gospels, each time as part of the ramp-up to Jesus’ arrest, but never quite as the actual cause of him coming to the empire’s attention. In all three cases, this dispute about taxation is part of a gradual tightening of the imperial grip. In Luke’s gospel, there are only a couple of chapters between this story in chapter 20 and the accusation before Pontius Pilate in 23:2 that “we found this man…forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor.” It was a powerful argument to make to the Roman governor.

But I still think that this story about taxes might be best understood as an honest debate about how best to be subject to an empire. The Pharisees and the Herodians seem like an unlikely pairing to me; they were groups with different goals and directions. Jesus and his group of followers were yet a third group, distinct from the other two. What binds them all together, in this story about taxation, is the question of how best to live life under the thumb of power. The Pharisees and Herodians are depicted as Jesus’ enemies in the text, but you have to remember that the gospels were written a generation or two after the events they described, and that they were written with the filter of hindsight. In the moment, when Jesus was discussing taxation with Herodians and Pharisees, I find it equally likely that they were simply distinct factions, holding counsel with each other over whether and how to accommodate and resist.

It’s a question that’s very much alive in our world today, even for those of us who live our lives aligned with and embedded within an empire. Those of us who live privileged lives in the relative safety of the shadow of power still find ourselves having to think about our own position within these kinds of systems. Come April 15^th, each of us will contribute a few cents toward a bomb that will end up dropped on Gaza, or a fence that will end up on the southern border, or a meal that will be delivered to a refugee. We are all enmeshed in, complicit with, and responsible for the ways power is wielded in our names, so the questions that Jesus and the Herodians and the Pharisees were discussing are not so far from our own questions. If we can recognize bad uses of power, we can imagine good uses of power, and that kind of imagination is sorely lacking in the world right now. How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Maybe too much. But how often do you think about our own empire and the ways it shows up in the world today? Maybe not enough.