In the year 112, a Roman governor in modern-day Turkey had his first encounter with members of a strange religious cult called “Christiani.”
The governor had heard reports the cult followed an obscure criminal who had been tortured and executed by the Romans. His followers, though, believed that their leader was still somehow alive. They met in each others’ homes for communal meals where, rumor had it, they practiced cannibalism by drinking the blood of their leader and held orgies.
The governor became even more puzzled when he summoned two leaders from the cult for interrogation. He wrote about the encounter.
“I believe it all the more necessary to find out the truth from two slave women, whom they call deaconesses, even by torture,” he wrote to the Roman Emperor Trajan.” I found nothing but depraved and immoderate superstition.”
He assured Trajan that he had deployed the firm hand of Rome to halt the “contagion.” The governor, Pliny the Younger, would go on to some renown. He would write additional letters that gave historians crucial insight into the Roman Empire. And he would provide a harrowing first-person account of the volcanic eruption that buried the city of Pompeii.
But he would miss the seismic religious shift that literally stared him in the face. The obscure cult would become the dominant faith in Rome and the most widely practiced religion in the world. The cross, an instrument of torture used by the Roman government to publicly lynch political revolutionaries, would “come to serve as the most globally recognized symbol of a god that there has ever been,” according to the scholar Tom Holland, in his book, “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution remade the World.”
This improbable rise of Christianity is what many of the world’s estimated 2 billion Christians will celebrate today. The holiest day of the Christian calendar commemorates what Christians believe is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, symbolized by the empty tomb.
This is not a typical Easter sermon topic. The Easter miracle, though, cannot be explained exclusively through a spiritual lens. It’s also a story of power — about people who seemed to have none but rose up to defeat an empire.
The first Christians faced challenges that would be familiar to anyone in authoritarian states or failing democracies today. They lived in a political system where a predatory elite amassed almost all the wealth. They faced a repressive regime that used fear to silence internal critics and enforce conformity. They faced the prospect of being arbitrarily arrested without due process and whisked off to prison or disappeared.
The early Christians faced a government that had perfected a form of proactive brutality that made political change seem impossible, says Obery M. Hendricks, a social activist and author of “The Politics of Jesus.” When the Romans heard that a group of demonstrators had assembled near Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth to protest excessive taxation, they deployed their own version of shock and awe.
“Roman legions came in and killed folks, crucifying 3,000 of them,” Hendricks says. “These people weren’t doing anything violent. They were just protesting. But the Roman empire said, no, we don’t play that. They killed folks if they thought they might be a threat.”
And yet these first Christians still triumphed. The conventional Easter story says they beat the Romans because of their beliefs and courage. That is partially true. Christians preached a message of “God is love,” which tapped into a spiritual need that Rome’s pagan religions could not meet.
But they also shrewdly employed two lesser-known tactics that offer lessons for resistance movements today — whether these movements identify with the left, the right or somewhere in between.
