CHRISTIAN VIEWS OF THE LUCAN CENSUS
The Gospel of Luke 2:1-2 linked the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem to a universal census commanded by Augustus. The long-standing debates on the historical reality of this chronological link or on its fictionality or fictional construal within a theoÂlogical textual construction, which is more likely, are not of importance here.[254] It is important rather to stress that Christians of Antiquity received this text as truth, and they understood it in an exegetical manner, principally in commentaries of Luke or in didactic works entertaining and answering questions on the New Testament.
The earliest surviving allusion is found in a Commentary on Daniel attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, which was written c. 204:
The Lord was born in the forty-second year of Augustus Caesar, a starting point for the apogee of the Roman monarchy (ton Romaion basileion). This was also the time when, through his apostles, the Lord summoned all nations and all languages in order to make of them a nation of Christian faithful, carrying in their hearts the new and dominating name [i. e., the name of their new ruler]. This is why the empire Ibasileia) currently reigning wanted us to act as Satan would. He also raised up the most well-born men (tous gennaiotatous) in every nation, to outfit them for war and call them �Romans.’ This is why the first census took place under Augustus, at the time of the Lord's birth in Bethlehem: so that the humans of this world who were counted by a king of the earth would take the name of Romans, and for their part, those who believe in the king of heaven would take the name of Christians.[255]
We will not discuss questions of attribution here, which have not been settled in spite of 65 years of scholarly discussion.[256] In the present context, we need only ac-
cept the widely-subscribed conclusion that the author of the Commentary on Daniel was of eastern origin, most likely from Asia Minor.
The interest of this text lies in the parallel that it establishes between the Lord’s census-taking and that of Caesar, between the name Christian and the name Roman. We will leave aside the fact that the demonstration is chronologically debatable, since it brings the Nativity closer in time to the sending of the apostles on a mission to the nations, which did not take place for Christians until after the Resurrection,6 two events separated by at least 30 years. The basic point is the affirmation according to which the Roman Empire is “of this world,” and it follows from this fact that it falls under the domain of Satan, prince of this world.7 This opposes it to Jesus, whose “kingdom is not of this world.”8 Augustus’ universal census, presented by Luke and by the author of the Commentary on Daniel as the first of its type, is here defined as a satanic reaction to the Nativity, which was going to endanger the royalty of this world. According to the author, the purpose of this census was to choose the most well-born among the nations, in order to enlist them for war and to call them Romans. In reality, Rome mostly enlisted volunteers from among the Roman citizens as legionnaires, and sometimes as auxiliaries. But it happened that they gave Roman citizenship to alÂiens in order to attract them as soldiers, and they even enlisted freed slaves, in cases of emergency.9 Also, aliens serving as auxiliaries generally obtained Roman citiÂzenship at the end of their service. But in this case it was not a question of “the best born.” Important recruitment efforts took place in the East on the occasion of the creation of the three Parthian legions by Septimius Severus in 195-196, and it is easy to imagine that this attracted the interest of certain members of the local elites.What is more, in cases of emergency, Roman citizens were not able to refuse enlistment. In any event, in the East as in the West, whether citizens were soldiers or members of the civic elite, the link between citizenship and war was real, which explains the author’s remark.
For the latter, the name Roman and the name ChrisÂtian are completely opposed. Nor, therefore, could one imagine a Roman Christian, because the Romans are conceived of as the people of war, and the Christians are the people of Christ-like peace. The latter profits nonetheless from the Roman Em-polytus, from biblical creation up to 235); and a third whose account varies depending on the source, on the nature of the universe and doubtless directed against Plato’s ideas: see Norelli 2008, 12-13. Finally, Brent 1995, 345-364, assumes that the Against Noetus is later than the Elenchos and that its author, identified with the eastern Hippolytus, would have written Against Noetus in order to enable a reconciliation between the partisans of Callistus’ theological ideas (charactered by Monarchianism) and those of the anonymous Roman (whose Trinitarian docÂtrine of the Logos was more developed). But Simonetti 2000, 70-146, rejects Brent’s two postulates - the absence of the monarchical episcopate in the 220s and the posteriority of AgainstNoetus. According to him, the treatise was written before 213 and must be attributed to the eastern Hippolytus. On the other hand, today we allow that the Apostolic Tradition is later and apocryphal.
6 The expression “all nations and all languages” goes back to the miracle of Pentecost (Acts 2), the first realization of sending people on a mission.
7 Matthew 4: 8-9.
8 John 18: 36.
9 Le Bohec 1990, 75.
pire, since the Nativity is the start of its apogee, according to the link, this time positive, between Christianity and Rome, that Melito of Sardis had established apÂproximately 20 years prior.[257] But the essential point is the absolute opposition beÂtween the demonic values of this world - force, wealth, and injustice - and those of the Gospel, which Tertullian expressed in the same period. The latter was a Roman citizen who cannot be indicted for hostility to Rome, and yet he thought it contraÂdictory that a Caesar could be Christian,[258] when his functions, to wit, waging war and meting out justic, would require him to shed blood.
In Tertullian’s work, as it was for the author of the Commentary on Daniel, it was truly a question of giving to God what was God’s and to Caesar what was Caesar’s. Thus, this text bears witÂness to the persistence of very negative Judeo-Christian ideas toward Rome circa 200.[259] But it also shows a keen awareness of the fact that, a few years before the Antonine Constitution, Roman citizenship remained, especially in the East, the privilege of the military or of a social elite, made up of the “best born”: the former were in the service of Roman domination, with which that elite collaborated.[260]We then find very little in the Christian texts of the third century. The Homilies on Luke by Origen, which we still have only in Latin, are an exception to this genÂeralization. They seem to respond, in the years around 230 and following, to the author of the Commentary on Daniel. Origen wondered why the evangelist had reÂported so many details on the census, and deduced from it that the question of its meaning was allegorical and theological: “because it was necessary that Christ, too, have been counted, because he wanted to be registered with everyone in order to sanctify all men, and to be mentioned in the register with the whole world in order to offer to the universe to live in communion with him. After this census, he wanted to count all the men with him in the book of the living and all those had believed in him should be enrolled with the saints.”[261] Any link between citizenship and war was thus removed, the first universal Roman census of Luke becoming in Origen’s work a figure of universal salvation, linked to the book of the living of Isaiah 53:13. We find a similar interpretation around 350 in the work of Ephrem of Nisibis.[262] However, the Exegetical Questions and the Church History (I, 5, 2-3) of Eusebius of Caesarea deal only with the question of the date of the Nativity. Whereas Origen, Eusebius and Ephrem elsewhere emphasize the positive and structural relationship between Roman power and God’s power,[263] which made them the very antithesis of the author of the Commentary on Daniel, they do not say anything about the census reported by Luke.
This uninterest was ended by a Syriac author, “the Persian sage,” who has since been called Aphrahat. He lived in the Sassanid Persian empire and in 337 wrote a poetic text on the war that seemed to be on the verge of breaking out between ConÂstantine and Shapur II. The Roman emperor’s death was expected to push back the conflict for a few years, but in 337, Aphrahat was confident about outcome of the war he expected, affirming that the Sassanid king of kings would not be able to defeat the Christian emperor. He advanced two principal arguments. The first was built on a typological interpretation of the myth of succession of empires, as it was conventionally understood in Daniel: as the Achaemenid empire had been defeated by Alexander, so the Sassanian empire, being descended from the Persian empire of long ago, would be defeated by the Romans, the heirs of the Macedonian empire.[264]
The second argument advanced by Aphrahat emphasized the fact that Christ henceforth fought with the Romans. “Just as he is registered with them in the cenÂsus, he is going to help them. His sign has been multiplied in this place; they have donned his arms and they will not be defeated in war.”[265] Aphrahat was alluding to the fact that the Roman armies harbored the sign of Christ - the chrism or the labaÂrum - as an emblem. By the same token, he supposed that Jesus had been registered as a Roman citizen on the occasion of Quirinus’ census. In Aphrahat’s work, as in the Commentary on Daniel, we find the link between Roman citizenship, the BethÂlehem census, and war, but henceforth with an inverted meaning. Indeed, Aphrahat thought that Christ had been Roman, an anachronism only made possible the fact that citizenship had become universal in 212; in addition, Aphrahat thought that Christ had become the protector of the Roman armies, which only the existence of a Christian Roman emperor made possible. Aphrahat therefore combined diverse elements.
The exegesis of Daniel and the parallel between the two Persian empires, the Achaemenid and the Sassanian, is doubtless his alone.[266] The themes of Christ’s protection of the Roman armies and the use of the sign of Christ by the armies of Rome are Constantinian themes. They were known in the East through ConstanÂtine’s letter to Shapur II, which probably dated from 324-325.[267] Finally, the theme of Jesus’ Roman citizenship could be a Greek Christian argument of the Constantin- ian age, which responded to the argument made in the Commentary on Daniel and which cast the link between being Roman, being Christian, and going to war in a positive light. But as things stand, no Greek text expressing that in such a clear manner has been preserved.Then we have two Latin commentaries. Around 377, Ambrose of Milan took up Origen’s argument in supposing a divine mystery might be detected behind the Evangelist’s details. The earthly census was nothing but a figure, representing the divine census, the census animorum, which was not opposed to the emperor’s cenÂsus but to the synagogue’s, though Ambrose would go on to draw a whole series of distinctions between the imperial census and Christ’s, in favor of the latter.21 Around 400, Chromatius of Aquileia, following Ambrose, favored the spiritual meaning and multiplied the parallels between Augustus and Christ,22 between the earthly and heavenly census of humankind, and between the imperial poll-tax and heavenly interest in individual faith. In this argument, Augustus’ census at the time of the Nativity was in reality done for the Lord with a view to salvation.23
On the other hand, in 417, the historian Orosius strongly insisted on the priviÂleged link between Christianity and the monarchical form of Roman power from the time of Augustus. This Orosian theory, which took up earlier ideas already preÂsent in the work of Melito of Sardis, Origen, and especially Eusebius of Caesarea, is the clearest expression of Latin Eusebianism, and it was rejected by Augustine in the last books of the City of Godf4 As in Aphrahat’s work, Orosius’ originality lies in using the legal argument of Jesus’ supposed Roman citizenship to reinforce the link between the empire and Christianity, thus transforming the chronological coinÂcidence of Jesus of Nazareth’s birth during the reign of Augustus into an essential theological conjunction. “This very year, thus for the first time, this same Caesar, whom God had predestined for such great mysteries, ordered the census to be taken of each province, wherever it was, and to count all the men, when God deigned to show Himself and exist as a man. Thus Christ was born, enrolled on the registers of
over to your regions, with, as a result, this famous trophy of his shame that is known among you” (he alludes to the defeat and captivity of the emperor Valerian in 260 in battle against the Persians). Ephrem, Hymns on the Nativity 18.3, makes allusion to Constantine in mentioning “the royalty that displayed His cross: blessed be he who exalted him.” And he mentions Christ in jubilation in the midst of the solemnity of the feast of the Nativity, “as an army commander,” Hymns on the Nativity 5.12.
21 In Lucam 2.36: it is not a question of evaluating the reach of the lands but that of minds and souls, nor of delimiting the frontiers but of pushing them back; there is neither a distinction of age, nor of immunity, for all are concerned, even the children; this census without staff or sword does not inspire fear. Ibid. 37: Luke’s census affects the entire universe, which Augustus did not control, but which Christ dominates, who reigns over the Goths and also over the ArÂmenians. Ibid. 38: the evangelical mention of the “first census” indicates that it was indeed that of souls, because there had been many others beforehand.
22 Chromatius, Sermon 32.1: Christ is the only true and eternal Augustus; he was the emperor of the sky and Augustus the emperor of the earth.
23 Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospel 8.1, takes up this same idea.
24 Inglebert 1996, 570-576, 493-494.
the Roman census as soon as he was born.”[268] And Orosius continues the demonstraÂtion of the providential structural link between Christ, Rome and its empire, writÂing: “And we cannot doubt that it appears clearly to everyone’s knowledge, faith, and reflection that our Lord Jesus Christ will have made progress in this city, inÂcreased and protected according to his will up to this summit of prosperity, the city to which he wanted, above all, to belong when he came, in order to truly be a RoÂman citizen by declaration of the Roman census.”[269] The history of Rome, oriented to a Christian end, thus culminates with the Nativity of Jesus Christ, Roman citizen. This conclusion is not only tied to Orosius’ project to write the Historiarum aduer- sum paganos libri. It also reflects his certainty, inherited from Constantine and from Eusebius, of the link between Christian monotheism and Roman monarchical govÂernment. For Orosius, the history of Rome was desired and controlled by God from its foundation by Romulus up until the conversion of the barbarians under HonoÂrius. Christ, human and Roman, was thus, for Orosius, the model for his contempoÂraries, citizens of the Theodosian empire, whom Orosius understood likewise to be Romans, Christians, and humans.[270]
To conclude this first part, we must note that, except in the works of Aphrahat and Orosius, who doubtless refer to a Greek Christian theme from Constantinian imperial propaganda, the commentators on the Gospel of Luke emphasize the meaning, whether demonic or salvific, of the act of census-taking, of the apographe, and not the Roman citizenship of Jesus. Furthermore, we must take note of an evoÂlution in the commentaries linked to the transformations of Roman power, because the fiscal reforms started by Diocletian changed understandings of the Lucan cenÂsus. From the Commentary on Daniel to Origen and Aphrahat, the authors emphaÂsized the counting of persons, defined as Romans or Christians, for enrollment into the army on earth, or into the book of eternal life. Then, starting with Ephrem and in the later Roman Latin authors, except in Orosius’ works, the census was underÂstood as being essentially fiscal,[271] tied intimately and necessarily to a poll-tax or persons and no longer to the quality of being a Roman citizen, which had become common. In the later Roman Greek exegetes, the theme is hardly dealt with or it has not been preserved.[272]
3.