Peoples & nations
Romans
Rome is the empire in power when the Gospels open. It taxed Israel, garrisoned Israel, crucified Israel’s Messiah, and destroyed Israel’s temple — and its roads, its law, its citizenship, and its peace were the arteries the gospel ran through in a single generation.
On this page
At a glance
Ancestry and origins
Scripture gives Rome no genealogy of its own; the traditional link is through Kittim, a son of Javan (Genesis 10:4), a name used for the western coastlands and applied by Daniel to a fleet from the west that turns back a Seleucid king — an event history records as the Roman envoy Popilius Laenas confronting Antiochus IV outside Alexandria (Daniel 11:30). Balaam’s last oracle looks the same direction: “But ships shall come from Kittim and shall afflict Asshur and Eber; and he too shall come to utter destruction” (Numbers 24:24).
Daniel’s two great visions place Rome fourth and last: the legs of iron in Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, “strong as iron... it breaks and shatters all things” (Daniel 2:40), and the fourth beast, “terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong, with great iron teeth” (Daniel 7:7). It is in the days of that kingdom that “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44).
Where they lived
Everywhere that mattered. Judea was governed first through client kings — Herod the Great and his sons — and then directly by prefects and procurators including Pontius Pilate, with the legions at Caesarea and a garrison in the Antonia fortress overlooking the temple courts. Roman engineering laid the paved highways and policed the sea lanes that Paul used; Roman law gave a provincial like Paul the right to a hearing and to appeal to Caesar.
Timeline with Israel
c. 1400 BC — Balaam’s last oracle
“Ships shall come from Kittim” (Numbers 24:24).
c. 550 BC — Daniel’s fourth kingdom
Iron legs and an iron-toothed beast; a stone cut without hands that fills the earth (Daniel 2:31-45; 7:7-14).
168 BC — Rome turns back Antiochus
“For ships of Kittim shall come against him, and he shall be afraid and withdraw” (Daniel 11:30).
63 BC — Pompey takes Jerusalem
Judea becomes a Roman client state.
37 BC — Herod the Great
An Idumean is installed as king of the Jews and begins the rebuilding of the temple.
c. 5 BC — The census
“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered” — and Joseph goes to Bethlehem (Luke 2:1-7).
c. AD 28 — The centurion at Capernaum
“I am not worthy to have you come under my roof... only say the word.” Jesus marvels: “not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Matthew 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10).
AD 30 — The trial
Pilate finds no guilt in Him, washes his hands, and hands Him over to be crucified; the soldiers scourge and mock Him, and the inscription is written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (John 18:28-19:22).
AD 30 — At the cross
The centurion who watched Him die says, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).
c. AD 37 — Cornelius
A centurion of the Italian Cohort, “a devout man who feared God,” sends for Peter; the Holy Spirit falls on his household, and the door to the Gentiles is opened (Acts 10).
c. AD 50 — Citizenship invoked
Paul, beaten at Philippi and about to be flogged in Jerusalem, twice claims his Roman citizenship, and his captors are alarmed (Acts 16:37-39; 22:25-29).
c. AD 57 — “I appeal to Caesar”
Paul’s appeal takes him, at imperial expense, to preach in Rome itself (Acts 25:11-12; 28:16-31).
c. AD 57 — Romans 13
Paul tells the church in the capital to submit to governing authorities, who are “God’s servant for your good.”
AD 64 — Nero’s persecution
After the fire of Rome, Christians are blamed and killed; tradition places the deaths of Peter and Paul here.
AD 70 — Jerusalem destroyed
Titus takes the city and burns the temple, exactly as Jesus foretold: “they will not leave one stone upon another” (Luke 19:41-44; 21:20-24; Matthew 24:1-2).
c. AD 95 — Revelation
John, exiled to Patmos, writes to seven churches under imperial pressure, and names the city on seven hills “Babylon the great” (Revelation 17:9, 18).
Working with Israel
The New Testament’s Romans are startlingly sympathetic. The centurion of Capernaum had built the local synagogue at his own expense and understood authority well enough to grasp that Jesus needed only to give the word — and drew from Jesus the highest compliment paid to anyone in the Gospels. The centurion at the cross made the confession the whole of Mark’s Gospel has been driving toward. Cornelius became the first Gentile convert and the reason the church had to decide, once and for all, that God “made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:9).
Rome’s structures served the mission repeatedly. Gallio at Corinth threw out the case against Paul and set a precedent that protected the church for years (Acts 18:12-17). The tribune Claudius Lysias rescued Paul from a lynching and then from an ambush by sending him to Caesarea under guard of nearly five hundred men (Acts 21:31-33; 23:12-24). The centurion Julius “treated Paul kindly” on the voyage to Rome and stopped the soldiers killing the prisoners in the shipwreck (Acts 27:3, 42-43). Even Paul’s imprisonment served: “what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard” (Philippians 1:12-13).
Standing against Israel
Rome held Judea by force and taxed it heavily; tax collectors were despised as collaborators, and revolt was answered with mass crucifixion. Pilate’s own record was brutal enough that Luke can mention in passing “the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” (Luke 13:1). Rome executed John the Baptist’s king-maker Herod’s rival claimants, crucified Jesus, beheaded Paul, and put James to the sword through Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2).
The catastrophe came in AD 66-70. A Jewish revolt ended with Titus starving out Jerusalem, burning the temple, and killing or enslaving a large part of the population; a second revolt under Bar Kokhba was crushed in AD 135, after which Jews were barred from the city. The temple has never been rebuilt.
Against the church, imperial persecution ran intermittently from Nero to Diocletian. Revelation is written from inside it, and its portrait of Rome — a beast, a harlot city “drunk with the blood of the saints” — is the New Testament’s judgment on an empire that demanded the worship owed to God alone.
How their story ends
The empire that crucified Christ eventually professed Him. That is not a happy ending in Scripture’s own telling — Revelation’s Babylon still falls — but it is a historical fact worth holding beside Daniel’s stone “cut out by no human hand” that struck the iron and became a mountain filling the whole earth (Daniel 2:34-35). The kingdom announced in a Roman province by a man Rome executed outlived Rome by fifteen centuries and counting.
Christ connection
Everything about the crucifixion is Roman: the governor, the scourging, the nails, the titulus in three languages, the seal on the tomb, the guard. And Peter says it was all foreordained: Herod and Pilate, Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered “to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28). Rome thought it was keeping order. It was executing the plan of God.
The same empire then carried the news. Roman roads, Roman peace, Roman citizenship, and a Roman appeal to Caesar put Paul in the capital “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” — the last words of Acts (28:31).
Key passages
- Numbers 24:24; Daniel 11:30 — Ships from Kittim.
- Daniel 2:31-45; 7:7-14 — The fourth kingdom of iron, and the kingdom that will never be destroyed.
- Luke 2:1-7 — Caesar’s census brings Joseph to Bethlehem.
- Matthew 8:5-13 — “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.”
- Mark 15:39 — “Truly this man was the Son of God!”
- Acts 10 — Cornelius and the opening of the door to the Gentiles.
- Acts 22:25-29; 25:11-12 — Paul’s citizenship and his appeal to Caesar.
- Romans 13:1-7 — Submission to governing authorities.
- Luke 21:20-24 — Jerusalem surrounded by armies.
- Revelation 17-18 — The city on seven hills, and her fall.