Pax Romana (Imperial Waypost to Nicaea)

PAX (hammer blow)
ROM (hammer blow)
ANA (hammer blow)

Pax Romana — Roman Peace — is considered the period between 27 BCE and 180 CE.

This warning poster could have been hung by the Roman Empire. If you bought into the Imperial patriarchy — including prayers and sacrifices to the emperor — and you weren’t too poor, things might just have been okay for you. But if you were Judean, then sacrificial offerings to the emperor were just the first no-go with the prevailing order.

The Romans didn’t need much of an excuse to crucify anyone.⁴ If you were attacking the structural power of the Empire, crucifixion could be almost perfunctory. Jesus ran afoul of the powers-that-be simply by inspiring folks to create social structures outside the Imperial patriarchy. Rome may have stopped him but could not wipe out Jesus communities by that action; and neither did political repression over the next 300 years.

The next wave of trouble came in the form of Constantine I (emperor 306-337 CE). He made Christianity the state religion of Rome and in doing so, entirely reformulated how Jesus communities believed and operated. Instead of being a follower of Jesus because of what you did, you were now a follower because of your creedal belief.

Before Constantine, the common symbol of Jesus followers was a kneeling woman with arms outstretched in prayer. That was how a Jesus follower would view themselves. After Constantine, that image went away and was replaced by images of the cross and crucifixion. Gone were women in positions of importance in Jesus communities. Also gone was the wide variation in practices which had previously been inherent to these communities. Had the Roman Empire finally defeated nascent Christianity by co-opting it?⁵

The poster’s cross and crucifixion image is not the one expected for Jesus and the two other victims killed with him. But Roman crucifixion practices were not standardized; Jesus’ crucifixion on a “t”-shaped structure is only one example of the way in which such things were done. A victim tortured and killed on a bed of nails was another contemporary example of crucifixion.⁶

_{4 Arthur J. Dewey, “Crucifixion,” in Inventing the Passion: How the Death of Jesus Was Remembered, 17-20 (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2017).
5 Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig, After Jesus Before Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).
6 Erin K. Vearncombe, “Crucifixion in the Roman World,” The Fourth R 37, no. 2 (2024) 7-12 and 20. For discussion of the history of the Latin ‘crucifixion’ becoming Greek ‘stauros’ and on to English ‘cross’ and Roman practices.}