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I wanted to do something different for Easter that will support our growth and understanding as we work through Paul’s letter to the Romans. Across the world today, Christians will be celebrating Easter. While it has become a secularized holiday in the US, for Christian believers it is very much a special time of year. Easter, along with Christmas, comprise the two times of the year when people re-emerge into church services, bringing family and friends, and many churches swell to capacity.

While I’ve comment many times on the superficiality of modern Easter celebrations, I thought it would be an interesting study to revisit what Easter may have been like at the time Paul wrote his letter to the church in Rome.

Paul’s Letter and Arrival In Rome

In our study, I’ve compared the church in Rome to the diversity of a Super Bowl since it was comprised of Jews, Gentiles, Greeks, and Barbarians, wise and foolish…(Romans 1:13-15). Some scholars place the writing of Romans around AD 57 in Corinth during his second (some say third) visit there. Paul wouldn’t arrive in Rome till the Spring of AD 58. This would have been just after the Jewish passover and so we could say he arrived after Easter. While he was there, he was under house arrest by a Roman guard. He would eventually be freed after two years and go on another journey, but he would return around AD 64-67 where emperor Nero would behead him.

Paul’s letter to the Romans could not depict his experience in Rome, but his multi-year experiences in churches like Ephesus and Corinth comes through. During these tenures, there is much which is not recorded, but piecing them together reveals what these early congregations were like. They were culturally and religiously diverse, they were inclusive. They all shared a belief in Jesus as the Christ, the promised messiah of Hebrew scripture, though from differing perspectives. It’s not like a modern church. In what evangelical church are Christians practicing Judaism? Additionally, we know that these religiously diverse congregations experienced amazing signs and wonders through the power of the Holy Spirit. People were healed, and many came to faith, so there was a strong basis for curiosity and belief and this is where the Super Bowl metaphor breaks down.

“And God was doing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his skin were carried away to the sick, and their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.” (Acts 19:11-12)

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Easter would have taken place while Paul was in Rome under house arrest. Paul would travel to cities and go to the Jewish temples and teach and preach. This work was accompanied by miraculous signs from the Holy Spirit. While many would come to believe in Christ, others would reject him and start trouble as they did in Ephesus, where a riot was started which almost got Paul killed. Like a modern college campus, Paul taught despite many protestors. Easter in Rome must have been similar where Paul would teach and Preach, but he was literally kept on a short leash.

Paul’s house arrest originated in Caesarea when the Jews were intent on killing him once and for all, claiming what else, but that Paul deconstructed religion and was defiling the temple by bringing Gentiles into it with him. Many evangelical pastors on their instagram feeds sound just like the religious leaders of Paul’s day, when taking on deconstructionists.

“Men of Israel, help! This is the man who is teaching everyone everywhere against the people and the law and this place. Moreover, he even brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place.” (Acts 21:28)

Paul was arrested by the Romans who governed that area and flogged and that’s when he appealed to Roman leadership as a citizenship he had purchased. After this appeal, he is ultimately transported back to Rome, the whole time, the religious Jews were working to prevent his “hate speech.” Once back in Rome (around AD 61) he was put under house arrest during a period when Emperor Nero was persecuting Christians and the entire region was in tremendous upheaval. One timeline shows Paul being released after two years and travels but is then re-arrested and put into a Roman jail and then killed around AD64.

I share these historical shapshots for a couple of reasons. First their chronology and historical records are irrefutable combined with the archeological, and extra biblical records from the era. This lends such a profound credibility to the veracity and trustworthiness of these biblical accounts. Second, the fact that all the trouble is recorded is another evidence to their trustworthiness. Thirdly, if we divorce the historical backdrop from these letters, we lose the theological and spiritual power of Paul’s message.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Easter in Rome was Paul in chains under persecution of Nero, who is clearly the biblical Antichrist (see my study for biblical evidence). Easter wasn’t a time of religious freedom, Easter egg hunts, paper maché rocks, flying angels, and special music guests. Like many of my audience, belief came with consequences, and Paul would be dead within a few years of this letter. Yet he never backed off of his message. Despite the ground swell of persecution against these “God fearers” from many religions, who all held faith in Christ, Paul wanted nothing more than to help people find God in the midst of mass political and economic chaos. What a valuable mission. Within a few years of Paul’s death, the temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed by Rome on Easter’s 28th anniversary. Imagine being freed by Paul from religion just prior to that happening.

I know that most pastors want to talk about the resurrection and substitutionary atonement on Easter, but today, while we are virtually in Rome reading Paul’s letter before he gets here, Easter hits differently. For Paul, Easter was everyday. Easter was the Good News that all humanity could become free of their over-identification with tribal religion, political affiliation, and racial divides, and become healed of the corrosive mindsets (demons) that caused hatred, competition, and strife. Easter was on display and hated because it revealed how diverse communities could coexist and serve one another in love, generosity, and compassion. The Easter message, on its 25th anniversary, subverted every institutional power that convinced people they were something other than a beloved family of God. We need this today.

It’s my prayer that this Easter will cause us to sit virtually with Paul in his Roman Easter. What if our freedom in God were to cost us our cultural freedom? How many today would choose chains because we keep taking about Jesus being alive within us? What would a diverse community look like if the Holy Spirit miraculously showed up with signs and wonders, healing people, and freeing us who have left our religious frames behind, threatening the religious and political establishment so much that they were willing to kill us to stop it? Can you say this of your community church? It’s my hope that we consider this historic Easter as we go into Romans 3 and following. Paul is not letting up, and we must ask ourselves, what is he saying to the religious mind that is getting him in so much trouble? And why has this message been silenced over two-thousand years of church history?

May this contemplation press against our modern Easter experience. How is the Easter that religion and tradition have embraced, one which our world can easily ignore with a marshmallow peep and a chocolate bunny?

If Paul were alive today, I can assure you, we’d be getting a letter. And no doubt, contemporary Churchianity would want to kill him for it.