Molly Judd reviews Tim Whitmarsh’s Rome’s Age of Revolution as a history of Christianity inside the world that made it possible. Roman roads carried missionaries, while shared languages carried stories across Jewish, Greek, and Roman traditions. Christianity’s emergence belongs to that history of movement and borrowing.
- Roads and belief: the Greek hodos, translated as “the Way,” can also mean a physical road. Paul’s spiritual journeys depended on an imperial transport network expanded under Augustus.
- Shared birth stories: Suetonius recounts a threatened royal infant in his account of Augustus. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue also imagines a child ushering in a new age. Whitmarsh places Christian narratives within this wider circulation of motifs.
- Translation changes meaning: Isaiah’s Hebrew almah, a young woman of childbearing age, becomes Greek parthenos, whose meanings include “virgin.” Matthew’s use of the Greek text matters to the later birth narrative.
- Martyrdom as literature: Whitmarsh reads The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, concerning executions in 203 CE, through the suspense and erotic imagery of Greek novels.
- Borrowed images: Judd extends the argument to the Good Shepherd, adapting an older Greek ram-bearer figure into a Christian image of care and safe passage.
Judd finds the close reading of languages and narrative especially persuasive. She is less convinced that imperial control explains a whole imaginative geography of lunar voyages, distant places, and desert retreat.
A religion can transform the world while drawing its materials from that world. Judd’s review makes those connections visible without turning the Roman Empire’s role into a defense of empire.