The Sojourn at Rome

132:0.1Since Gonod car­ried greet­ings from the princes of In­dia to Tiberius, the Ro­man ruler, on the third day af­ter their ar­rival in Rome the two In­di­ans and Je­sus ap­peared be­fore him. The mo­rose em­peror was un­usu­ally cheer­ful on this day and chat­ted long with the trio. And when they had gone from his pres­ence, the em­peror, re­fer­ring to Je­sus, re­marked to the aide stand­ing on his right, “If I had that fel­low’s kingly bear­ing and gra­cious man­ner, I would be a real em­peror, eh?”

132:0.2While at Rome, Ga­nid had reg­u­lar hours for study and for vis­it­ing places of in­ter­est about the city. His fa­ther had much busi­ness to trans­act, and de­sir­ing that his son grow up to be­come a wor­thy suc­ces­sor in the man­age­ment of his vast com­mer­cial in­ter­ests, he thought the time had come to in­tro­duce the boy to the busi­ness world. There were many cit­i­zens of In­dia in Rome, and of­ten one of Gonod’s own em­ploy­ees would ac­com­pany him as in­ter­preter so that Je­sus would have whole days to him­self; this gave him time in which to be­come thor­oughly ac­quainted with this city of two mil­lion in­hab­i­tants. He was fre­quently to be found in the fo­rum, the cen­ter of po­lit­i­cal, le­gal, and busi­ness life. He of­ten went up to the Capi­tolium and pon­dered the bond­age of ig­no­rance in which these Ro­mans were held as he be­held this mag­nif­i­cent tem­ple ded­i­cated to Jupiter, Juno, and Min­erva. He also spent much time on Pala­tine hill, where were lo­cated the em­peror’s res­i­dence, the tem­ple of Apollo, and the Greek and Latin li­braries.

132:0.3At this time the Ro­man Em­pire in­cluded all of south­ern Eu­rope, Asia Mi­nor, Syria, Egypt, and north­west Africa; and its in­hab­i­tants em­braced the cit­i­zens of ev­ery coun­try of the East­ern Hemi­sphere. His de­sire to study and min­gle with this cos­mopoli­tan ag­gre­ga­tion of Uran­tia mor­tals was the chief rea­son why Je­sus con­sented to make this jour­ney.

132:0.4Je­sus learned much about men while in Rome, but the most valu­able of all the man­i­fold ex­pe­ri­ences of his six months’ so­journ in that city was his con­tact with, and in­flu­ence upon, the re­li­gious lead­ers of the em­pire’s cap­i­tal. Be­fore the end of the first week in Rome Je­sus had sought out, and had made the ac­quain­tance of, the worth-while lead­ers of the Cyn­ics, the Sto­ics, and the mys­tery cults, in par­tic­u­lar the Mith­raic group. Whether or not it was ap­par­ent to Je­sus that the Jews were go­ing to re­ject his mis­sion, he most cer­tainly fore­saw that his mes­sen­gers were pres­ently com­ing to Rome to pro­claim the king­dom of heaven; and he there­fore set about, in the most amaz­ing man­ner, to pre­pare the way for the bet­ter and more cer­tain re­cep­tion of their mes­sage. He se­lected five of the lead­ing Sto­ics, eleven of the Cyn­ics, and six­teen of the mys­tery-cult lead­ers and spent much of his spare time for al­most six months in in­ti­mate as­so­ci­a­tion with these re­li­gious teach­ers. And this was his method of in­struc­tion: Never once did he at­tack their er­rors or even men­tion the flaws in their teach­ings. In each case he would se­lect the truth in what they taught and then pro­ceed so to em­bel­lish and il­lu­mi­nate this truth in their minds that in a very short time this en­hance­ment of the truth ef­fec­tively crowded out the as­so­ci­ated er­ror; and thus were these Je­sus-taught men and women pre­pared for the sub­se­quent rec­og­ni­tion of ad­di­tional and sim­i­lar truths in the teach­ings of the early Chris­tian mis­sion­ar­ies. It was this early ac­cep­tance of the teach­ings of the gospel preach­ers which gave that pow­er­ful im­pe­tus to the rapid spread of Chris­tian­ity in Rome and from there through­out the em­pire.

132:0.5The sig­nif­i­cance of this re­mark­able do­ing can the bet­ter be un­der­stood when we re­cord the fact that, out of this group of thirty-two Je­sus-taught re­li­gious lead­ers in Rome, only two were un­fruit­ful; the thirty be­came piv­otal in­di­vid­u­als in the es­tab­lish­ment of Chris­tian­ity in Rome, and cer­tain of them also aided in turn­ing the chief Mith­raic tem­ple into the first Chris­tian church of that city. We who view hu­man ac­tiv­i­ties from be­hind the scenes and in the light of nine­teen cen­turies of time rec­og­nize just three fac­tors of paramount value in the early set­ting of the stage for the rapid spread of Chris­tian­ity through­out Eu­rope, and they are:

132:0.61. The choos­ing and hold­ing of Si­mon Pe­ter as an apos­tle.

132:0.72. The talk in Je­ru­sa­lem with Stephen, whose death led to the win­ning of Saul of Tar­sus.

132:0.83. The pre­lim­i­nary prepa­ra­tion of these thirty Ro­mans for the sub­se­quent lead­er­ship of the new re­li­gion in Rome and through­out the em­pire.

132:0.9Through all their ex­pe­ri­ences, nei­ther Stephen nor the thirty cho­sen ones ever re­al­ized that they had once talked with the man whose name be­came the sub­ject of their re­li­gious teach­ing. Je­sus’ work in be­half of the orig­i­nal thirty-two was en­tirely per­sonal. In his labors for these in­di­vid­u­als the scribe of Da­mas­cus never met more than three of them at one time, sel­dom more than two, while most of­ten he taught them singly. And he could do this great work of re­li­gious train­ing be­cause these men and women were not tra­di­tion bound; they were not vic­tims of a set­tled pre­con­cep­tion as to all fu­ture re­li­gious de­vel­op­ments.

132:0.10Many were the times in the years so soon to fol­low that Pe­ter, Paul, and the other Chris­tian teach­ers in Rome heard about this scribe of Da­mas­cus who had pre­ceded them, and who had so ob­vi­ously (and as they sup­posed un­wit­tingly) pre­pared the way for their com­ing with the new gospel. Though Paul never re­ally sur­mised the iden­tity of this scribe of Da­mas­cus, he did, a short time be­fore his death, be­cause of the sim­i­lar­ity of per­sonal de­scrip­tions, reach the con­clu­sion that the “tent­maker of An­ti­och” was also the “scribe of Da­mas­cus.” On one oc­ca­sion, while preach­ing in Rome, Si­mon Pe­ter, on lis­ten­ing to a de­scrip­tion of the Da­mas­cus scribe, sur­mised that this in­di­vid­ual might have been Je­sus but quickly dis­missed the idea, know­ing full well (so he thought) that the Mas­ter had never been in Rome.