P
patrick457
Guest
Well, at the moment, I really can’t find much about the Capernaum centurion in later Christian popular belief. I’ve seen him connected with Cornelius of Acts, but IMHO this identification is quite unlikely historically.That makes a lot of sense; it would certainly be easier to visualize the Jews pleading for a Herodian gentile officer than for an actual Roman soldier.
Do we have any reliable (or semi-reliable) traditions of what happened to that officer later on, as with St. Longinus?
Now about the Romans in Judaea.
Judaea Province - comprising of Judea proper, Samaria and Idumaea (biblical Edom) - was originally the territory of Archelaus (one of the three sons of Herod the Great who received a part of his kingdom), but he proved to be too incompetent for Rome’s liking and so he was booted out in AD 6, with the area coming under Roman administration.
Now Judaea was the only area in Palestine directly governed by Rome; the Galilee and Peraea (the Transjordan) as mentioned earlier were Antipas’ lands, while Philip ruled over Batanaea (Bashan), Gaulanitis (Golan) and Trachonitis. (The Decapolis were self-governing city-states.)
The province was ruled by Roman prefects until Herod Agrippa (AD 41-44) came. Agrippa ruled over more or less the same territory as Herod the Great (he was first granted Philip’s tetrarchy, then gained the Galilee and Peraea after Antipas was banished; when Claudius - a friend of his - became emperor, he also gave Judaea to Antipas; so in effect he had more or less recombined Herod the Great’s old kingdom into one). When Antipas died in AD 44, the territories he had gained passed under the administration of Roman governors - this time procurators.
During the time of Jesus, Judaea Province was run by a prefect (we know this based on Pontius Pilate’s inscription, which give his title as praefectus Iudaeae) who was a knight of the equestrian order (ordo equester) - meaning that he did not have enough authority to command a legion, since normally only officers of senatorial rank (such as the legate of Syria) could command legions.
Since legions were out of the question, the prefect commanded auxiliaries - 3,000 of them. These auxiliaries were not Roman citizens, but recruits from nearby non-Jewish areas (say, Samaria, Syria). Most of these soldiers would have stayed with the prefect in the provincial capital of Caesarea Maritima (by-the-Sea); the rest were stationed across various garrisons within the province, for example the Antonia Fortress in Jerusalem. Unlike in the movies, where Roman soldiers constantly patrol the streets and harass the locals, in reality, they would not have shown themselves that much - Jewish authorities and elders ran daily government for Rome.
(The prefect-governed Roman Egypt - where senators were banned from entering - had a rather interesting loophole to the ban; there were legions within Egypt, who were commanded by their second-in-command, a senior tribune, who was inferior to the prefect in terms of equestrian seniority. When a legion passed Egypt, the legate commanding it could not literally enter the province on foot with them and had to detour.)
Some people have theorized that maybe a similar situation existed in Judaea - maybe the Judaean governor also controlled legions - but we really only have records of legions within the province during the Jewish-Roman War of the mid- to late-1st century - we don’t know what the situation was like during the time of Pilate and Jesus decades earlier. In fact, IMHO the suggestion seems unlikely to me.)
