The Roman Church in the First Century

The Christian community at Rome emerged in the apostolic age as a network of household assemblies, Jewish and Gentile, soon linked in tradition to the apostles Peter and Paul. Its first century was framed by two great trials: the Neronian persecution of AD 64, in which (according to 1 Clement 5–6 and Tacitus) Peter, Paul, and “a vast multitude” perished, and the troubled situation of the 90s under Domitian, to which 1 Clement 1.1 alludes. This article treats the Roman church and its world; Clement himself and the letter he wrote are handled elsewhere.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Origins of the Roman Community

The beginnings of Christianity at Rome lie in obscurity, but the evidence permits a coherent picture. The community was not founded by a single apostolic mission so much as it grew from the movement of Jews and Jewish-Christians along the well-traveled roads between Judaea, the eastern provinces, and the capital. By the time Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans (c. AD 57), there was already a substantial, well-established body of believers there whose “faith is proclaimed in all the world” (Romans 1:8), a community Paul had not yet visited (Romans 1:10–13; 15:22–24) and therefore had not founded.

The Acts of the Apostles records that among the pilgrims present at Pentecost were “visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes” (Acts 2:10), and it is plausible that some carried the new faith back to the large Jewish population of the city. Rome’s Jewish community in the first century was sizable, organized around numerous synagogues attested in inscriptions, and concentrated especially in the Transtiberine district (Trastevere) and other quarters; Christianity took root first within or alongside these synagogue communities before becoming a distinct movement (Lampe 2003, 38–47).

The Witness of Romans 16: Households and Names

Paul’s letter offers the single richest window onto the social shape of the Roman church. The long greeting list of Romans 16 names some twenty-six individuals, together with several house-churches and named groups, and so reveals a community made up of multiple distinct assemblies rather than one congregation. Paul greets “Prisca and Aquila… and the church in their house” (Romans 16:3–5), the same couple Acts associates with him at Corinth and Ephesus (Acts 18:2, 18, 26); he greets “those who belong to the family of Aristobulus” and “those in the Lord who belong to the family of Narcissus” (Romans 16:10–11), and again “the brothers who are with them” and “all the saints who are with them” around Asyncritus, Philologus, Julia, and others (Romans 16:14–15). These formulae point to several discrete cells meeting in private homes and tenement quarters across the city — the fractionated, non-centralized structure that Peter Lampe has argued characterized Roman Christianity well into the second century (Lampe 2003, 359–365).

The names themselves disclose the community’s mixed composition. Many are Greek or Latin and of servile or freedman background (Ampliatus, Urbanus, Hermes, Persis, Tryphaena, Tryphosa); some are explicitly Paul’s “kinsmen,” that is fellow Jews (Andronicus, Junia, Herodion — Romans 16:7, 11). The references to “the family of Aristobulus” and “the family of Narcissus” have led some scholars to detect Christians among the slaves and freedmen of great Roman households, possibly even within the imperial familia — a social location that would help explain how the faith reached persons of rank by the end of the century (Lampe 2003, 164–183). The list also includes a notably high proportion of women in active roles, among them Phoebe the diakonos of Cenchreae who likely carried the letter (Romans 16:1–2), Prisca named before her husband, and “Junia… prominent among the apostles” (Romans 16:7). The community Paul addresses is thus both Jewish and Gentile, free and freed and slave, and socially diverse, drawn largely from the laboring and servile strata of the great city.

The Expulsion under Claudius

A decisive episode in the community’s early history was the action of the emperor Claudius against the Jews of Rome. Suetonius reports tersely that Claudius “expelled from Rome the Jews who were constantly making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus” — Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit (Suetonius, Claudius 25). The name “Chrestus” is widely, though not universally, taken as a garbled reference to Christus, suggesting that the disturbances arose from conflict within the synagogues over the preaching of Christ; on this reading the edict bears witness to a Christian presence in Rome already in the 40s or early 50s.

The expulsion is independently attested in Acts, which notes that Paul at Corinth “found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome” (Acts 18:2). The date is usually placed around AD 49, following Orosius, though the chronology is debated. The effect on the Roman church would have been significant: the removal (whether total or partial) of the Jewish-Christian element for a period likely shifted the balance of the community toward its Gentile members, and the subsequent return of Jewish believers such as Prisca and Aquila after Claudius’s death in AD 54 may lie behind some of the Jew–Gentile tensions Paul addresses in Romans (Lampe 2003, 11–16).

Organization: A Presbyteral and Collegial Church

The first-century Roman church shows no trace of a single monarchical bishop. Its leadership appears collegial, exercised by a body of presbyters (also called episkopoi, “overseers”) who guided the several household assemblies. This is the picture that 1 Clement itself presupposes a generation later, where the letter, written in the name of the whole Roman church rather than of an individual prelate, speaks of presbyters appointed by the apostles and their successors and uses “presbyter” and “bishop” interchangeably (1 Clement 42; 44; trans. Holmes 2007). The fractionated, house-church structure attested in Romans 16 is consistent with this: a plurality of small assemblies coordinated by a council of elders rather than ruled from a single see. The development of a recognized single bishop at Rome belongs to the second century, and the early succession lists — which name Clement as third in line from the apostles — represent a later ordering of this collegial leadership; on Clement’s place in those lists see The Third Bishop of Rome.

The Apostolic Foundation: Peter and Paul

By the later second century, the Roman church’s identity was firmly bound to the two chief apostles. Irenaeus describes it as “the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul,” and proceeds to give the succession of bishops “from the apostles” (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.2 [ANF Vol. 1]). Irenaeus’s list runs from Linus, whom “the apostles… committed the office of the episcopate,” through Anacletus to Clement, “who had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them” (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.3 [ANF Vol. 1]).

This tradition is not to be read as a claim that Peter and Paul first evangelized Rome — Romans itself shows a flourishing church before either apostle arrived — but as a memory that both apostles labored and ultimately died there, lending the community a double apostolic foundation. The earliest internal witness to their presence and martyrdom at Rome is 1 Clement itself; on the apostles’ deaths in the city see The Apostles in Rome. For the apostles’ own dossiers see St. Apostle Peter and St. Apostle Paul.

The Neronian Persecution of AD 64

The first imperial persecution of Christians at Rome followed the great fire that destroyed much of the city in July AD 64. The blaze raged for days and consumed much of the urban center, and popular rumor — which Tacitus records without endorsing — held that Nero himself had ordered it to clear ground for his building projects. To deflect this suspicion the emperor sought scapegoats, and the small, already-unpopular Christian community provided them. According to Tacitus, to quell the rumor that he had himself ordered the blaze, Nero “fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace” (Christianos), tracing the name to “Christus, who in the reign of Tiberius suffered the extreme penalty at the hands of… Pontius Pilatus” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44). Tacitus reports that “an immense multitude” (multitudo ingens) was convicted, and describes the cruelty of their executions: some were sewn into animal skins and torn by dogs, others crucified, and others burned as living torches to illuminate the emperor’s gardens at nightfall (Tacitus, Annals 15.44).

1 Clement, writing some three decades later, preserves the church’s own memory of this period of suffering. It holds up “the greatest and most righteous pillars” of the recent past — Peter, who “endured not one or two but many trials, and having thus given his testimony went to the glorious place which was his due,” and Paul, who “after he had been seven times in chains… and had taught righteousness to the whole world… departed from the world and went to the holy place, having become the greatest example of endurance” (1 Clement 5; trans. Holmes 2007). The letter then turns to “a great multitude of the elect” who suffered alongside them, including women tortured as “Danaids and Dircae” — an allusion to mythological tableaux of torment that resonates strikingly with Tacitus’s account of theatrical executions (1 Clement 6; trans. Holmes 2007). The two witnesses, pagan and Christian, thus converge on the reality of a severe, if localized, Neronian assault on the Roman community around AD 64–68.

The Domitianic Situation of the 90s

1 Clement opens by apologizing for the church’s delay in addressing the Corinthian troubles, attributing it to “the sudden and repeated misfortunes and calamities that have befallen us” (1 Clement 1.1; trans. Holmes 2007). Eusebius and much subsequent tradition read this phrase as a reference to a persecution under the emperor Domitian (reigned AD 81–96), and the letter is conventionally dated to the mid-90s on this basis. The Domitianic reading also draws on Roman testimony to the emperor’s late suspicion of the upper classes, including persons connected to the imperial house.

Cassius Dio records that in AD 95 Domitian executed his own cousin, the consul Flavius Clemens, and banished Clemens’s wife Flavia Domitilla, on a charge of “atheism” (atheotes) for which “many others who drifted into Jewish ways were condemned” (Cassius Dio, Roman History 67.14). Suetonius likewise reports that Domitian “put to death… his cousin Flavius Clemens… on the slightest suspicion” (Suetonius, Domitian 15). Whether these victims were Christians or Judaizing sympathizers is uncertain, and the relationship (if any) of this Flavius Clemens to Clement of Rome is a separate question treated in The Historical Clement. What the sources do show is an atmosphere of denunciation and arbitrary execution in Domitian’s final years that could plausibly have touched the Christian community.

The extent and even the existence of a systematic persecution under Domitian, however, is genuinely disputed among historians. [Disputed: the traditional reading sees a real, if localized, affliction of the Roman church in the 90s, reflected in the “calamities” of 1 Clement 1.1 and the executions reported by Cassius Dio 67.14 and Suetonius, Domitian 15; against this, L. L. Thompson and others argue that the picture of a great Domitianic persecution is largely a later construction, drawing on hostile senatorial sources that blackened Domitian’s memory, and that there is little evidence for any empire-wide or programmatic campaign against Christians in his reign (Thompson 1990, 95–115).] The cautious conclusion is that 1 Clement attests to genuine trouble experienced by the Roman church, without licensing the older portrait of a sweeping imperial pogrom.

The Church at Century’s End

By the close of the first century the Roman church had survived two periods of severe trial and had grown from its synagogue-based origins into a populous, socially mixed, and self-conscious Christian community, still organized along collegial and presbyteral lines and still meeting in scattered households. It was confident enough of its standing — and of its memory of Peter and Paul — to write authoritatively to a sister church in Corinth. That letter, 1 Clement, is at once the earliest substantial Christian document from Rome after the New Testament and the principal witness to the community whose first-century history is sketched here; see The Letter to the Corinthians. On the wider setting of the apostolic and sub-apostolic Church, see The Pre-Schism Church and, on the Apostolic Fathers as a corpus, The Church Fathers.

References

Cassius Dio. Roman History. Trans. Earnest Cary. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914–1927. (Book 67.14.)
Ehrman, Bart D., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007. (1 Clement 1; 5–6; 42; 44.)
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). In Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885. (3.3.2–3.)
Lampe, Peter. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries. Trans. Michael Steinhauser. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars (De Vita Caesarum). Trans. Robert Graves, rev. J. B. Rives. London: Penguin Classics, 2007. (Claudius 25; Domitian 15.)
Tacitus. The Annals. Trans. John Jackson. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937. (Book 15.44.)
Thompson, Leonard L. The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
The Holy Bible. Scripture citations follow the standard book/chapter/verse divisions (Acts 2:10; 18:2; Romans 1:8–13; 15:22–24; 16:1–16).