THE CITIZENSHIP OF PAUL
The second exegetical context of Christian reflections on Roman citizenship is that concerned with Acts of the Apostles, which repeatedly mentions Paul’s Roman citizenship and its legal consequence, namely, the possibility for him to appeal to Caesar to be judged in Rome.30 The Acts have been less commented upon than the gospels, and most of the exegeses are, in reality, about psychological matters, which do not concern us here, which pushed Paul to pride himself on his dignitas as a RoÂman citizen.31 The first one who called attention to the legal aspect of the problem seems to have been John Chrysostom, when he comments on the moment when Paul asked the centurion if he were allowed to flog a Roman citizen who had not been convicted: “precious rights were the prerogative of Roman citizens; this privÂilege was far from being common to all of the inhabitants of the empire.
It is from the reign of Hadrian that they were called Romans indiscriminately, which beforeÂhand had not taken place.”32 We notice first of all that Chrysostom opposes the past to his era in two ways. First, he judges that the judiciary laws considered precious were in times long past attached to the quality of being a Roman citizen, since Paul was able to escape flogging before trial and then appeal to Caesar. That is correct, but these two aspects no longer existed in this form at the time of Chrysostom. In his time, only the honestiores (but Paul would not have belonged to this category, which was created a century later) escaped from torture and humiliating corporal punishments, and the exemption for honestiores did not apply in the case of lese- majesty. And at the end of the fourth century, the appeal to Caesar (in fact, to the prefect of the praetorium in Paul’s time) no longer existed, except in certain excepÂtional cases of political trials implicating Roman senators.Secondly, Chrysostom was completely correct to say that the privilege of RoÂman citizenship was rare in the time of Paul. This was all the more true in the East, where the absence of civic charters of the Roman type meant that local elites did not automatically receive Roman citizenship in reward for the holding of local office. On the other hand, Hadrian’s name poses a problem - it was not Hadrian but CaraÂcalla a century later who made the universal grant of Roman citizenship. We can try to explain this in three ways. The first is to suppose an error on Chrysostom’s part, namely, that he simply attributed this benefit to the philhellene Hadrian. The second is to suppose a fault in the manuscript tradition; according to this theory, an original reading of “Aurelios” (because Caracalla officially called himself Marcus Aurelius
tributed to Severian of Gabala, but the text only emphasizes Christian universality. We find two other texts in Reuss 1984, 54, with a homily fragment by Cyril of Alexandria on Luke 2:1-4, and 225 with a passage of a homily by Cyril of Alexandria on Luke 2:5. But it is only a question of two allusions to the census, without commentary. We find nothing more in the Syriac version of the homilies on Luke by Cyril of Alexandria (CSCO 70 and 140).
30 The passages are: Acts 22:25-29, where Paul says that he is a Roman citizen; Acts 23:23-30, where Paul is said to be a Roman citizen; Acts 25:6-12, where Paul makes an appeal to Caesar; Acts 26:21 and 32, and 27:24, where Paul is said to have lodged an appeal to Caesar.
31 Augustine, On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 1.19.58; Theodoret of Cyrus, Letter 3; John Chrysostom, Homily 51 on the Acts of the Apostles.
32 Homily 48 on Acts 1 = PG 60.333.
Antoninus, as the Giessen papyrus shows) into “Hadrianos.” But this cannot be confirmed: there is still no critical edition of this text, and the Armenian translation that has been preserved is late.[273] If we endorse this hypothesis and therefore the correction (and it is not obvious we should do this), this text of Chrysostom would be, along with those of Dio Cassius and Ulpian, the only literary account of the Antonine Constitution.
A third interpretation would be that Antioch was sometimes supposed to have received Roman citizenship from Hadrian when through his benÂefaction it became an honorary colony[274]; on this theory, “Hadrian” is the correct reading and Chrysostom merely generalized a local situation that he knew to the Empire at large. We know that Antioch was stripped of its status and civic honors by Septimius Severus in 194 for having supported Pescennius Niger. It would be pardoned and its civic honor was restored around 200, without, however, any menÂtion of colonial status, which it did not obtain until some years later.[275] Indeed, the title of colony is not attested with certainty until the reign of Caracalla, and we do not have any epigraphic or numismatic clues to an earlier grant of colonial status for Antioch. The last hypothesis must, therefore, also be rejected.Another document linked to Paul’s trial is a letter from Isidore of Pelusium, dating from the beginning of the fifth century[276]:
Besides, if he did not want to defend himself either, he had the possibility of appealing, like Paul. They were indeed under Roman domination - moreover, it is Augustus, Emperor of the Romans, who, after having forced the submission of all peoples (they [i. e., alien subject of the empire] were counted among this number as well) had given the order to take a census of the entire earth before the birth of the Savior in the flesh, and their Roman governor was Pilate. He administered affairs, sent those to Rome who made appeals, and respected their inviolability. It is thus under the same legal rule that Festus, and, if you will, the tribune saved Paul from the assembly that was seeking to kill him and sent him to Rome before Caesar. But Christ did not do any of that: he used neither his power, nor his right to defense or appeal, to clearly show that he had come to earth to put an end to death.
In comparing the reactions of Jesus and Paul at the time charges were brought against them, Isidore concluded that Jesus had voluntarily given himself up to death, since he could have, like Paul, made an appeal to Caesar.
This supposes, of course, that Jesus was a Roman citizen like Paul, which is an error since he was a peregrinus, an alien in respect to Rome. But this error had in fact become an anachÂronism that was shared and as obvious for Isidore as for his correspondant Eus- tephios. It was one of the consequences of the Antonine Constitution, two centuries after its promulgation, but also of Christianization, which had led the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean to define themselves as Romans and no longer as Hellenes after 350. The evolution of mentalities in late Antiquity transformed a posteriori the reading of texts. We find the same reasoning again in 417 in Orosius' work. We have seen above that he made Jesus into a Roman citizen, but he also, in an anachronistic way, extended Paul’s legal status to all of the apostles: “so that freedom to travel and to present their arguments would be guaranteed to his disciples, who went to the different peoples and graciously offered the gifts of salvation to everyone, for they were Roman citizens among Roman citizens.”[277]We should mention another aspect of Christian reflection on Paul's Roman citizenship, but in a context that is more political than exegetical. Indeed, we know that Damasus, bishop of Rome (366-384), defined Peter and Paul as the true foundÂers of the City, since these brothers in faith were superior to the enemy brothers Remus and Romulus.[278] Damasus called them cives Romani (Roman citizens)[279]: this we cannot understand as an allusion to the civitas Romana of Paul, which Peter did not have, but should interpret as referring back to an urban origo, legal place of origin, of the apostles. That was not to be understood in the strict legal sense: not being a Roman citizen, Peter could not, of course, claim such an origo, but Paul could not either, his origo obviously being Tarsus. For Damasus, this citizenship and this origo came from the martyrdom that made Peter and Paul members of the Church of Rome.[280] The reasoning is, of course, metaphoric, but can be compared to a particular Roman legal rule, which had it that when a new senator was adlected to the Roman Senate, his origo became that of Rome. In any case, Paul’s Roman citizenship was an important component in religious argument at the time of the emperors Gratian and Theodosius when Christianity became the only official reliÂgion of the emperors. Indeed, Paul was a better example for the senators who were incited to convert than Peter, a simple Galilean fisherman.[281] We are thus not surÂprised by the imperial magnificence evoked by Prudentius,[282] during the construcÂtion of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls after the defeat of Maximus.
4.