The Roman Empire forms the historical and cultural frame within which the emergence and rise of Christianity took place. From its beginnings in Galilee to its gradual expansion all over the Mediterranean, the early Christian movement was deeply embedded in the Roman world. The Roman Empire also played a vital role in the development of Judaism after Pompey appeared on the Palestinian “map” in 64/63 B.C.E. From that time, Rome became an economic and moreover a political factor that influenced political, religious, and cultural developments within Judaism. Finally, Roman military power forced Judaism to take new shape after the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by Titus, the future emperor, in 70 C.E. Instead of seeing the formation of Judaism as a prior process to the birth of Christianity, as was often the case in traditional scholarship, several recent studies emphasize that the two religious traditions evolved in conjunction and in dialogue with each other. It took several decades, sometimes centuries, before outsiders were able to see them as separate movements.

The Roman view on Christians and Jews was not always an outsider view. Another recent emphasis in early Christian studies relativizes the polarity between “Jewish” or “Christian” on the one side, and “Roman” on the other. These were not always mutually exclusive categories; according to Luke, a Roman centurion supported the building of the synagogue in Capernaum (Luke 7:5), and the apostle Paul held Roman citizenship (Acts 22:25-29) as did many later Christians and Jews. Moreover, both the developing Jewish and the nascent Christian movements shared the cultural vocabulary and concepts with their wider environment. Jewish and Christian discourses were part of the broader Hellenistic-Roman discursive world and can only be understood in relation to, not separate from, this context. The categories “Jewish”, “Christian”, and “Roman” were intertwined in several ways, and their meanings were defined and negotiated differently in various connections.

From the present-day perspective, however, there is a profound difference between these categories: whereas both Judaism and Christianity are vibrant religious traditions, the Roman Empire no longer exists but belongs to the distant past. Perhaps for this reason, it is not always easy to remember that the relations between the ruling power and the religious communities were not characterized by reciprocity and symmetry.