The present essay reflects upon “Religion and Just Peace” with a focus on Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire. Roman culture delighted in the spectacle of violence, and the rise of its empire was marked by the elevation of hyper-violent men. Paradoxically, however, this is an empire remembered for peace—that is, the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”).⁴ The paradox proved especially stark for those ancient Jews and Christians living under Roman rule. It was precisely at the times when Jews and Christians most experienced the violence of the empire that some of Rome’s rulers were most vociferous in their claims to bring and keep peace.

Is this seeming paradox, then, really a paradox at all? In what follows, I explore this question with a focus on two pivotal moments. First is the advent of the Empire, with the fall of the Republic in the first centuries BCE, and with an especially dire impact upon Jews in the first two centuries CE—the very centuries that also see the emergence of Christianity. Second is the beginnings of the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century—which also had an especially dire impact upon Jews.

My aim is not to mine the past for any presentist models. To my mind, the value of a long view and historical purview is precisely the opposite. It is an invitation to see differently and know differently. In this case, my suggestion is that ancient examples invite us to interrogate the impulse with which I began—namely: our yearning for peace. Our yearning for peace can feel so universal, so visceral, so human, so unassailably beneficial. Roman examples draw our attention to what this feeling can enable and erase. When we assume peace as a simple positive, it can be easy to miss the dynamics whereby some may claim to bring rest and respite from conflict, albeit only for some at the expense of others. It can be easy to miss the dynamics whereby some can claim to foster unity, tranquility, civility, and harmony, albeit by silencing others. To ask about “Religion and Just Peace” from historical perspectives, by contrast, is always to wonder justice for whom and peace for whom, at whose expense and with whose erasure.

Today, we encounter references to peace all the time. Many of us even greet one another with “Shalom”! The word is repeated so often in Jewish and Christian scriptures, for instance, that peace might strike us as a pithy positive—or at least, as a basic value in need of no explanation. Who doesn’t want peace? What could be more natural or more universal? What’s even to analyze or explain?

As with so much of Judaism and Christianity, however, their scriptures bear the marks of the specific historical contexts in which they took form. When read with an eye to these contexts, the use of the word “peace” sometimes rings dense with meaning. And this is especially the case for scriptural and other writings shaped in and by Roman power.

Roman culture had long valorized military prowess, force, and domination, dismissing what we now call “pacifism” as mere weakness and cowardice. During the transition from Republic to Empire, however, there was a new value placed upon peace, which included its reification in political rhetoric but also its divinization as the distinctively Roman goddess Pax.⁵ During the reign of Augustus—the first of Rome’s emperors—the Senate commissioned a temple to Pax, the Ara Pacis Augustae in Rome, which served as the site of two annual sacrifices.⁶ Augustus’s own memory-making further framed his reign as the beginning of a new age of peace.⁷

Most famous today is the Arch of Titus, which is prominent on Rome’s Via Sacra and which features the image of a menorah and other looted vessels from the Jerusalem Temple. But this was just one of multiple commemorative arches in the city, and the Colosseum also functioned as war memorial by virtue of having been funded by spoils from this same conflict.¹² Significantly for our purposes, Vespasian also commissioned a forum with a temple to the goddess Pax, the templum pacis, in which were housed vessels looted from the Jerusalem Temple.¹³ The parallels with the Ara Pacis Augustae are not accidental. Vespasian’s memory-making legitimated the new dynasty by hailing back to Augustus as peacemaker.¹⁴ As a result, and in the process, spoils from war in Judaea became re-sanctified as votives to Roman peace.

It is difficult to think of a more poignant example of what Shaw posits of the Pax Romana: “. . . the Roman pax was always a one-way settlement imposed on others, on the defeated or the surrendered.”¹⁵ Roman culture, famous for its glorification of hyper-violent men, thus maintained the valorization of the power to dominate and subdue. What changed with the advent of Empire was its articulation through a new idiom of peacemaking.

To Shaw’s insights, we might add that this transmutation of violence into peace was enabled by acts of de-sanctification and re-sanctification, temple destruction and temple building. This transmutation was communicated to imperial subjects through the religious elevation of Pax in Roman ritual and sacred landscapes. The same message also circulated throughout the Empire in the form of coinage. Coins minted in the wake of the Roman victory in Judea include some that feature images of the goddess Pax but also others that bear the imagery of Judaea capta, dramatizing the Flavian subjugation of Judaea. Two women—one resplendent, the other subjugated.

There is a sense in which the survival of some ancient Jewish writings means that historians have a rare opportunity to see the victors of history through the eyes of their victims, the rulers through the eyes of the ruled. It is not just the peace of the Roman center that we remember but also the violence at the empire’s periphery. We glimpse Roman imperialism as it looked from the provinces, on the empire’s Embattled edges, seen apart from the imperial frame. We see some of what (and who) are otherwise forgotten.

To think with the cautions posed by Padilla Peralta, however, is also to notice that what survives of ancient Jewish “ways of knowing” is perhaps akin to an erasure that leaves some smudge upon a page. It reminds us of the extreme selectivity of our surviving archive and makes visible—even if just for a moment—the imperial logics and imperial power (and thus violence, too) that govern this selectivity.

In the case of ancient Jews, it is also a reminder that Roman imperial violence had a destructive impact upon bodies and buildings and continuities in lineage and locales, but part of what survived were some forms of Jewish knowledge and even some Jewish “ways of knowing.” Within Jewish tradition, for instance, it is common to periodize on the pivot of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, as pre-70 or post-70 CE (with the latter period sometimes assumed to continue to this day!). Scholars debate the degree to which 70 CE was really a “watershed.”²⁵ How it functions in Jewish memory, however, is as a striking resistance to any framing of the Jewish past as simply part of the Pax Romana. It functions to resist any periodization that subsumes Jewish memory wholly into Roman history. And it does so precisely by preserving an ancient Jewish perspective whereby what really matters is the Temple, the power of which persists even in its absence. Time is not marked before and after Rome, but by Jerusalem and its Temple.

As in the linear time of Jewish periodization, so too in the cycles of Jewish festal time. Within and beyond Jerusalem, Jews mourn the Jerusalem Temple’s destruction every year on the fast day of Tisha b’Av.²⁶ It is not Rome that is remembered. If anything, the ritual practice and liturgical scripting of Tisha b’Av function to erase any Roman perspective by virtue of the denial of any distinctiveness to this one empire. As also in Jewish apocalyptic and later Rabbinic reflections on 70 CE, Rome blurs into Babylon.²⁷ Both, moreover, become reduced into mere instantiations of the perennial conflict between Israel and “the nations” proclaimed already by biblical prophets.²⁸

The beginnings of Christianity belong both to the story of ancient Jewish resistance to the Roman Empire and to the story of the Roman Empire. And this doubling has consequences, including for shifting Christian ideas about both Jews and the Roman Empire, both power and peace.

Scholars have long noted how the earliest surviving narratives about Jesus use much of the same rhetoric that we also find used of Augustus. This, in fact, may help to explain why the gospels of the New Testament are even called “gospels” (Greek euangelia)—a term not used in titles of texts at the time!²⁹ Where the term does appear, however, is in Roman imperial propaganda. In one inscription, dated to 9 BCE, Augustus is called a “Savior” and his birthday is proclaimed as “good news” (euangelia):

Since Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a Savior, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance (excelled even our anticipations), surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news for the world that came by reason of him . . .³⁰

It may not be a coincidence that the Gospel of Mark introduces itself with this same term: as the beginning of the “good news” or “gospel” (euangelion) of Jesus Christ (Mark 1:1).

The Gospel of Mark was textualized precisely in the period discussed above, at the end of the first century CE, in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. In other words, this gospel took shape in that same era when Vespasian was reviving the memory of Augustus and repurposing his imperial rhetoric of peace through the memorialization of military violence in Judaea. To first-century readers/hearers of Mark, the parallel would have been striking. The claim, in effect, is that the real “good news” does not concern any Roman emperor but rather a Jewish man born in the same era at the far edges of the Empire—namely: Jesus of Nazareth. And Mark goes on to recount how this Jewish man spoke parables about the real sovereignty—namely: the kingdom of God.

This is perhaps not surprising, given Eusebius’s concern elsewhere to celebrate Constantine’s military triumphs, especially under the banner of Christ at the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 CE), in terms of Christian salvation-history. As earlier for Augustus and Vespasian, Constantine’s warfare is interpreted as peacemaking. In the case of Eusebius’s memory-making surrounding Constantine, however, the peace is not only military. He simultaneously repurposes the Roman rhetoric of peace to laud the silencing of all those Christians whom he deems “heretics.”

We see this dynamic in the account of the convening of the Council of Nicaea in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine. The gathering of bishops at Nicaea to determine the bounds of what does and does not count as “orthodoxy” is here cast as another of Constantine’s victories—in this case, a victory over the dangers of inner-Christian difference (3.5–6). Inner-Christian differences of opinion are demonized but also redescribed with idioms of war. The peace that follows quiets but silences, calms but constrains. That Eusebius means “victory” in a very Roman sense, moreover, is clear from his emphasis on Nicaea as heralding a site of “victory,” by virtue of the city’s naming after the Roman goddess of victory, Nike (3.6).

So too, I’d suggest, with peace: Eusebius writes in Greek but means that term in a very Roman sense. What we see here, in effect, is akin to what Momigliano and Shaw observe of the first centuries of Roman imperial rule: “Roman power demanded a new kind of subjectivity as the price of its peace.”³⁷ Here too, this price was not just the willingness to cede liberty for peace, but also the celebration of the silence that comes from silencing.

This dynamic also leads us to notice who is missing in his treatment of peace in Praeparatio evangelica—namely: Jews. Above, we saw how Eusebius quotes Ephesians 2:17, which speaks from a Jewish “we” about the peace made by Jesus between Israel and “the nations.” But Eusebius erases any trace of its Jewish “way of knowing.” To be sure, Ephesians 2:17 occurs alongside prooftexts from Jewish prophets. But these are voices projected into the past, with Judaism thereby reduced to those pre-Christian Jewish books useful for Christians. When Jesus brings peace, it is a peace that pertains now to the Roman Empire.

The erasure of Jewishness proves so total, in fact, that Eusebius quotes from Jewish prophets but quite pointedly never calls them “Jews.”³⁸ Here as elsewhere, he distinguishes prophets as among the “Hebrews” of the proto-Christian past, in contrast to the Jews of his own time, whom he treats like the abject Judaea of Flavian propaganda.

In Vespasian’s iteration of the Pax Romana, Jews exemplified the dangers of difference and dissent within. Eusebius shifts the focus onto so-called “heretics.” But just as Vespasian’s templum pacis showcased the vessels looted from the Jerusalem Temple, so later Christians like Eusebius cast the rise of Christianity as the decline of the Jews. but nevertheless delighted in showcasing Jewish books for the Christian gaze—not just the Jewish scriptures within Christian Old Testaments, but also the writings of Philo and Josephus and the words of all those otherwise lost Jewish authors selectively gathered and quoted in Christian anthologies like Praeparatio evangelica.

In the case of the Christianized Roman Empire, we do not find the valorization of hyper-violent men that marks the Pax Romana of earlier eras. What we do find, however, is violence further channeled. Roman imperial claims about peace, before and after Constantine, functioned in part to naturalize assumptions about what sorts of differences could be harmonized and what sorts of differences must be destroyed to “keep the peace.”

The earliest Christians arguably adopt elements of Roman imperial rhetoric from within a stance of resistance sometimes in line with ancient Jewish “ways of knowing.”³⁹ Eventually, however, the rhetoric of Roman peace becomes repurposed toward the Christian imperial erasure of inner-Christian difference, on the one hand, and Jews and Jewish “ways of knowing,” on the other. Both would have tragic consequences. The legislation of Christian emperors increasingly constrained Jewish life in the Roman Empire, and under their European heirs, Jews would suffer demonization and persecution in the Middle Ages—within locales that later, in turn, became some of the primary crucibles for modern antisemitism. And arguably, it is not just our archives for late antique Christianity that suffer from the silencing of those inner-Christian differences condemned as “heresy” but also our attempts at pluralism in the present.

How can we cultivate religious and intellectual cultures in which a desire for peace does not come at the cost of a space for differences that are different enough that some conflict proves unavoidable—differences that might include varied frames and perspectives, varied “ways of knowing,” varied temporalities and sanctities, and thus also the possibility of disagreements that can’t be readily harmonized or resolved? How do we avoid the temptation of imperial habits whereby managing difference entails “making peace” in the sense of imposing one dominant frame on everyone and erasing whatever and whomever doesn’t fit? And how do we do so when so many of our archives and histories—so many of our ideas of what even counts as peace and power and knowledge (and so many of our own “ways of knowing”)—are shaped in and by imperial cultures that valorized domination (including Rome, but also those many other states that idealize its memory)?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. but I do think that it might be a good time to ask them—not just of American culture but also of ourselves, especially but not only within universities. It was at Harvard Divinity School in the 1920s, for instance, that George Foot Moore published the first extensive catalogue of the epistemic erasure that Christian tradition inflicted upon Jews and Judaism, systematically demonstrating how ancient Christian polemics and supersessionist theologies have been continually reinscribed by modern scholarly approaches to ancient Judaism.⁴⁰ Moore’s “Christian Writers on Judaism” is still read to this day—and rightly so! Not only does his point still hold true, but it arguably resonates all the more in light of current concerns about antisemitism here at Harvard. The article was written right at the time when Harvard’s then-president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, sought to impose quotas on the admission of Jewish students, sparking larger campus conversations about which Jews “really fit in” at Harvard.⁴¹

What Moore so powerfully demonstrated with respect to Christian anti-Judaism and its secularized afterlives, thus, presages what Padilla Peralta recently notes of Roman epistemicide: “Whether consciously or not, all Roman historians labor in the shadows of Roman knowledge destruction.”⁴² One hundred years prior, Moore said much the same to those of us who study ancient Judaism and Christianity. We labor in the shadows of Christian knowledge destruction, especially but not only vis-à-vis Jews. Even ostensibly “objective” acts of modern scholarship about Judaism have too often extended premodern Christian polemics and erasures, displacing Jewish “ways of knowing” with Christian ideas about Judaism.

At first sight, the lesson of Moore’s article might appear to be that nothing ever changes. Yet another lesson comes when we look to Moore himself.⁴³ His example stands as a reminder that historical research can also serve other purposes—including the diagnosis and correction of past epistemic erasures. In Moore’s case, a Christian scholar might notice and note what Christianity and scholarship erase about Jews.⁴⁴

Moore was a brilliant scholar. It is tempting to credit his rigor and erudition with enabling him to see beyond centuries of erasures, but also to see and name the erasures. What I suspect, however, is that his insights may also pertain to something far more quotidian, but arguably much more powerful—namely: friendship.

I have read Moore’s “Christian Writers on Judaism” more times than I can count. One of my teachers, John G. Gager (himself a Harvard PhD), always assigned it in his classes. I’ve assigned it in many of my own classes. But I didn’t connect it to the context of the debate here at Harvard about limiting Jewish enrollments until I was working through the archives of his Jewish colleague, Harry Austryn Wolfson, and encountered a 1922 letter in which Wolfson adduces the article in this context.⁴⁵

Moore was one of Wolfson’s teachers and played a part in Wolfson’s hiring at Harvard. His efforts thus contributed to the establishment of the very first chair dedicated specifically to Jewish Studies in the United States.⁴⁶ In addition, Moore—as a Christian—famously wrote a history of Judaism that takes Jewish perspectives and Rabbinic sources seriously.⁴⁷ Wolfson lauds Moore’s 1927 Judaism for precisely this, including in a talk at Harvard Divinity School where he credits Moore’s efforts with inspiring him to write—as a Jew—a book on philosophy that takes the Church Fathers seriously.⁴⁸ Within Wolfson’s ample archives at Harvard, one can also glimpse the little story behind this bigger one. His files include tiny pieces of papers, scraps and stray receipts, onto which are written notes between the two.⁴⁹ Tiny but nevertheless kept. Notes that speak to their friendship.

We live in unpredictable times, and it can be tempting to yearn for a peace that consists of the victory of our ideas about how things should be and our sense of who should (and shouldn’t) be included in a pluralistic consensus across difference. But examples from the past, as we have seen, attest the dangers that can come with this very yearning—the violence and the erasure. Dangers abound, even in our yearning for peace! Hope is much harder to find, and the desire for hope can feel especially naïve from the long view of a historian. Our histories are so filled with war. Peace too often comes at the cost of silencing, erasure, and domination.

Yet I must confess that I felt some hope when working in the Harvard University Archives and finding those little notes. I found some hope in this smaller story, this local story, which resounds with the reminder that empires may proclaim peace and glorify war and erase difference, but sometimes between individuals, it can be possible to take up the harder, slower, and far more humbling work of talking and listening across difference.

To engage in such work, we may well need to set aside our yearning for peace at any price. Such work requires making space for tensions to stand without resolution, accepting that honest and inclusive conversations can’t always avoid conflict, and letting multiple stories from multiple perspectives stand as true without assimilating them into one narrative, polarizing them into “two sides,” or otherwise effacing multivocality in the name of harmony.

It is not a goal quite as lofty as peace, let alone “Religion and Just Peace.” But it is perhaps a place to begin.

Annette Yoshiko Reed is Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. Her research spans Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and Jewish/Christian relations in Late Antiquity, with a special concern for bringing ancient examples to bear on the theorization of identity and difference.