Forty years before Mary gave birth to Jesus, the most powerful man in the world was assassinated. Julius Caesar ruled the vast Roman Empire, and he was so powerful the Senate voted to deify him, and the people called him their god. In 44 BC, he was infamously attacked and stabbed to death, and in his will, he adopted his nephew Octavian as his son and his successor.
When Octavian took power, he became Caesar Augustus, and he was called “the son of god.” During his reign, the Empire tripled in size. Augustus reigned for 41 years, and during his 23rd year on the throne, on the outskirts of a minor province, in an insignificant town and to a teenage mother, a child was born. Augustus never heard his name. Jesus was nobody to him.
When Augustus died in 14 AD, his stepson Tiberius took power, and his reign continued throughout the rest of Jesus’ life. He was the Roman emperor when Jesus died on the cross. The gospels mention Tiberius five times, but Tiberius never said the name Jesus. Caesar didn’t have time for insignificant religious uprisings in places like Judea. Judea was nowhere to Rome, and Jesus was nobody to Caesar.
Tiberius died in 37 AD, and his great nephew Gaius rose to power. Gaius never spoke of or cared about Jesus. Four years later, he was assassinated, and Claudius took over until the year 54 AD. He was the first Roman emperor to mention Christ when he expelled Christians from the city of Rome because they “constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Christ.” In this quote, Claudius mentioned Jesus, but he clearly believed Jesus, or “Christ”, was a guy causing trouble; he didn’t even know Jesus had been killed and resurrected.
By the end of Claudius’ reign, the followers of Jesus were spreading the gospel across the Empire, and even though Christians were banned from Rome, they went underground and established a formidable Christian presence in the city. After Claudius died, Nero took over, and his hatred of the Christians is well documented. Nero’s security forces often raided church gatherings and arrested Christians. He fed them to rabid dogs and hungry lions for entertainment in the Coliseum. He burned them alive. He believed he could suffocate the Jesus movement just as Rome had suffocated so many other rebellions in the past.
He ordered the arrest and execution of James, the brother of Jesus. He crucified Peter. He beheaded Paul. By the time he died in 68, Nero took solace in ridding Rome of those insidious Christians. But by the end of the first century, Nero was dead, as were Claudius, Gaius, Tiberius, Augustus, and Julius Caesar, and there were over 1,000,000 Christians alive throughout the Roman Empire. Over a million people fully devoted to that nobody Jewish rabbi from nowhere.
And today, 2,000 years later, the Church continues to take the world by storm, while the Roman Empire is relegated to the history books. This Sunday, over 3 billion people will gather in churches around the world to worship the name of Jesus, while the only time you’ll ever hear anyone call on the name of Caesar is if they’re ordering a salad, or when they’re telling the story of Jesus.
People in China are worshiping Jesus, even though they could be arrested and thrown into reeducation camps for it.
Christians in India are worshiping Jesus, most of them breaking with the Hindu tradition.
Christians in Ethiopia, most of whom are dirt-poor, worship Jesus with joy that is rich.
Christians in Indonesia will worship Jesus this Sunday, even though last Sunday one of their churches was targeted by terrorists.
And every year (Covid notwithstanding), 2,000 years after being expelled from Rome by Claudius Caesar, thousands of people gather in the middle of Rome on Easter Sunday to worship not Caesar, but Christ.
Jesus – that nobody from nowhere who died a criminal on a cross is high and lifted up in Rome as we speak. How did this happen? How do you explain the rise of Jesus and his movement? If Easter didn’t really happen, then it’s all a fortunate series of random coincidences, a lucky twist of fate, and a third of the world’s population from China to Egypt to Houston is bowing down before a dead man who lived a lie.
I’m a skeptic at heart, and for years I believed the resurrection was a powerful metaphor, a meaningful allegory about how life overcomes death. I didn’t really believe the tomb was empty. But the more I weighed the evidence, the harder it got for me to deny what actually happened. As crazy and unscientific as it may sound, the more I learned about the resurrection, the more plausible the empty tomb became. And if the tomb was really empty, that means Jesus was really God. And if Jesus was really God, then he’s the Truth. And if he’s the Truth, then everything about my life had to change. Because I’d been living as though it was all up to me, but if Jesus is the Truth, then all that matters is Christ in me. If Jesus is the Truth, all that really matters is Christ in you.
