Video: Empire and Epistemicide: Historical Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Peace and its Erasures

When is peace not peace? When does pluralism only seem like pluralism from the perspective of the people in power?

Christianity famously took form during the Pax Romana—an era of celebrated stability in the Roman empire—even as its message about the dawn of the messianic age and the coming of the kingdom of God resonated among those who saw the same age, instead, as a time of political oppression, cosmic upheaval, and eschatological unraveling. Likewise, to the degree that the Roman empire can be characterized by terms like ethnic “diversity” and religious “tolerance,” it was in a manner marked by massive erasures—both of knowledge and ways of knowing, pertaining to whole peoples. Arguably, a parallel dynamic marks Christian approaches to Jews and so-called “heretics” and “pagans,” with consequences for memory, forgetting, and archival amnesias especially with the empire’s Christianization—and with rippling effects that continue to shape our present.

In this session of "Religion and Just Peace | A Series of Public Online Conversations," which took place on February 3, 2025, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, reflected upon the perennial questions above using examples from these ancient religions and empires.

This is the second event of a five-part series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to the work of just peacebuilding.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Empire and Epistemicide-- Historical Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Peace and its Erasures, February 3, 2025.

I extend a heartfelt welcome back to our series of discussions on religion and just peace. Many of you are also with us last week for our rich discussion with Professor Shaul Magid. And some of you have joined us since then. We welcome all of you and are glad that you're participating in this conversation this evening.

I'm David Holland. I'm a faculty member here at Harvard Divinity School and currently academic dean and interim director of Religion and Public Life. I want to thank, again, Diane Moore, who is the originator and organizer of this series of events. And I'm grateful for the chance to host this evening's session. We're very grateful tonight to hear from my colleague, Professor Annette Yoshiko Reed, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and professor of New Testament and Early Christianity here at Harvard Divinity School.

Before saying more, we pause in recognition of land and people affirming that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusetts, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusetts tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusetts people.

As previously mentioned, this year's series of online conversations is the third installment in a recurring set of discussions designed to shine a light on the work HDS faculty do that has special relevance for the public challenges of our present moment. As Professor Reed will demonstrate here this evening, even the histories of antiquity have light to shed on the questions and the crises that we face in our 2025 world. And we need all the light that we can get on these challenges.

Previous iterations of the program address religion and the legacies of slavery and religion and climate crisis. This year's series focuses on religion and just peace, reflecting the HDS vision of studying religion in service of a just world at peace across religious and cultural divides. To that end, we are most fortunate to have the next hour with Professor Annette Yoshiko Reed.

Holder of the Stendahl chair here at HDS, Professor Reed is a world-renowned scholar of second temple Judaism, New Testament, and early Christianity, whose research has provided unprecedented illumination on the relationship of the early Christian movement to its Jewish origins and identities. Her highly influential books include Jewish-Christianity and the History of Judaism; Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism; Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity.

She teaches very popular courses here at Harvard Divinity School in these areas and beyond and is the teacher of our major required course Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion. She has fundamentally shaped the intellectual formation of our last two classes of HDS students in ways that they themselves readily recognize and deeply value, as do her colleagues.

Today, Professor Reed will look closely at the history of Pax Romana, a period of relative stability and ostensible diversity, but also a construct that obscured deep divisions and injustices. Professor Reed will engage this history to help us think about enduring questions, such as when is peace not peace? And when does pluralism only seem like pluralism from the perspective of the people in power?

Professor Reed, with that, let me turn the time to you.

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED: Hi. Thank you so much. I'm very grateful to be here. I'm grateful to be part of this webinar series for the entire RPL staff, to Professor Holland, and especially to Diane Moore, who invited me to be part of this. And I must admit, when I was first invited to be part of this, I thought I had nothing to say about it.

And it really gave me an invitation to try to think a bit differently about my work, including with this horizon and in conversation with my colleagues so far. So I wanted to express that gratitude, but also put that as a caveat. So the audience, you can decide whether or not it ends up worth saying at the end. So give me one moment, and I will share my screen. Thank you.

There are few sentiments that feel more universal than a yearning for peace. Much has changed about the practice of war throughout human history, from antiquity to our present. What resounds with poignant continuity, however, are responses to war and warlike circumstances, our reactions to brute traumas of physical harm, bodily endangerment, familial and communal rupture, societal upheaval, cultural loss, shattered landscapes, ecological devastation, archival erasures. To violence, we yearn for safety. To conflict, we yearn for unity. To chaos, we yearn for the quietude of order.

Our world has seen many kinds of war, countless sorts of battles, even more varieties of conflict that people have seen fit to describe using the language of war and metaphors of embattlement. What might strike us as universally human, however, is that yearning for peace, that ache for relief, for that moment when screams quell, the fear melts, the swords are put away, the bombs stop, the sky is empty of their noise and one can hear one's own breath again, quietly exhaling in a hush of relief, smoothed back into the calm of silence once again.

Across global literatures, ancient, medieval, and modern; East and West; Global North and Global South, there's certainly no dearth of poetry, songs, and literature that glorify war, and especially poetry, songs, and literature that glorify warriors. But even those quite often culminate with peace or at least the promise of peace that might be ushered in.

This pattern holds true even in the case of prophetic, apocalyptic, and other religious texts in which war is sanctified and sanctifying, if not divine. When ancient Jews and Christians, for instance, wrote about the Last Judgment and the end of time, they often yearned for divine violence and divine vengeance, lavishly describing those future wars that they hoped would finally bring justice to the Earth, even if it took consuming the entire Earth and raging even up until the heavens.

At the end, however, even there comes a promise of never-ending peace, 1,000 years of silence, a world without any sort of conflict at all, even between predator and prey, A messianic era Shabbat beyond all the Shabbat of historical and calendrical time. No need for swords. No need for spears. No need for the study of warfare. No tensions between peoples or at least not between those who still survive and gathered to one divine sovereign, ruling unchallenged in the peace that will be someday in total calm, total security, total safety, total power, stretching until eternity.

The stated aim of this webinar series to reflect upon religion and just peace may well feel so timely right now, in part because it speaks to an impulse that also feels timeless. That is our yearning for peace. It's in the spirit I speak here today.

I'm not a specialist in peace studies. And unlike the truly brilliant colleagues who I'm joining in this series, I have no training or any expertise in contemporary cultural or political phenomena. My academic research is not towards an activist horizon. And I'm not accustomed, in fact, to situating my research in relation to contemporizing terms at all.

Quite the contrary. In fact, I consider myself a historian in the very simplest sense of that term. My training and analytical gaze, moreover, focus on the religious history of the very distant past, specifically antiquity. I study ancient Jews and ancient Christians, especially in the tumultuous centuries between the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Christianization of the Roman Empire, beginning under Constantine.

What this historical purview may perhaps permit, however, is a bit of a long view onto the topic of our present webinar series, religion and just peace. The historical periods I study are fraught with battles of conquest, battles of expansion, those battles that reshape the cultures of those regions that we now call Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

But the people I study aren't the people who wage those wars nor even those who really strategized or often fought in them. They were those who lived through them, the people at the other end of the sword. To study the surviving literature for ancient Jews is to study the piety, experience, and memory of the people who lived under threat of conquest by Assyrians and Babylonians and under the rule of Persians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Romans thereafter.

The story of ancient Judaism is a story about religion and empire and, perhaps even more so, for ancient Christianity, which was forged within the crucible of the Roman Empire and eventually became remade within that empire as imperial religion.

In my time with you here tonight, I'd like to think with the Roman Empire in particular. As an ancient empire, Rome is well known for its massive military force and its delight in the spectacle and brutality of violence. Paradoxically, however, it is also well known for its rhetoric of peace, particularly surrounding the Pax Romana, the Roman peace.

And this paradox was perhaps nowhere clearer than for ancient Jews and ancient Christians living as minorities under early Roman rule. In fact, it was precisely at the times where Jews and Christians most experienced the violence of Roman imperial power that some of Rome's rulers were most vociferously claiming to bring peace and keep peace. Yet, it may be precisely this paradox that makes this ancient historical example, perhaps illuminating for the topic of this webinar series, in part because the closer we look, the more we see it may not be a paradox at all.

My questions then will pertain to the function of the rhetoric of peace at two pivotal historical moments. First is the advent of the Roman Empire with the fall of the Roman Republic in the first centuries BCE and with an especially dire impact upon Jews in the first century CE, the very period that also sees the origins of Christianity. Second is the Christianization of the Roman Empire, beginning in the fourth century, which also had quite a dire impact upon Jews.

In looking back to this history, my aim is not to mine the past for the origins of any presentist model of peace that I think we should follow. To my mind, in fact, the value of a long view and historical purview is perhaps precisely the opposite. It's an invitation to see differently and to know differently.

In my case, this case, my suggestion is that the historical examples from the ancient past may push us to interrogate the impulse with which I began. That is, our universal yearning for peace. It's a universal yearning or at least feel so universal, so visceral, so human, so unassailably beneficial that we may not question it at all.

Yet, ancient examples from the Roman Empire draw our attention to what this very yearning can also enable and erase, including about the dynamics whereby some can claim to bring peace and respite from conflict, albeit only for some at the expense of others, and about dynamics whereby some can claim to foster unity, tranquility, civility, and harmony, albeit at the price of silencing others.

To ask about just peace from historical perspectives is always to wonder, justice for whom, and peace for whom, at whose expense, and also with whose erasure? Jews and Christians today, in our scriptures and in our liturgies, encounter repeated references to peace all the time. We even greet each other with shaloms. Repeated so often, it might come to sound like a pithy positive or, at the very least, like a basic need, a basic value that needs no explanation. Who doesn't want peace? What's even to analyze or explain?

But Jewish and Christian liturgies, like so much of Judaism and Christianity as we now know them today, bear the mark of the very specific ancient historical context in which they took form. When reread with an eye to these historical contexts, the repeated hope for peace can sometimes ring a bit denser with meaning. And this is especially the case I'll suggest for those Jewish and Christian traditions shaped in and by Rome. Ancient Roman culture had long valorized military prowess, forced domination, and hyperviolent men, dismissing what we might call pacifism as mere weakness or cowardice.

During the transition from republic to empire, however, we see a new value placed upon peace, which included a ritual shift towards a divinization of peace as a distinctively Roman goddess, Pax. Under the reign of Augustus, who proclaimed himself first citizen but is remembered as the first Roman Emperor, the Senate commissioned a temple to the goddess peace in Rome in his honor, that is, the Ara Pacis Augustae, established in 13 BCE, which became the site of two annual sacrifices in the city of Rome thereafter.

Augustus's own memory making, moreover, framed his reign as the beginning of a new age of peace, Pax Augustus, shaping the Roman imperial ideal that we now call Pax Romana, the Roman peace. It's certainly true that civil war ceased in Rome after Augustus's victory at the Battle of Actium and under his reign. This much is well known and celebrated.

When we read Jewish and Christian literature from the same time, however, we see a different picture. For Jewish populations, in particular, the advent of Roman imperialism was hardly free of conflict. In fact, this was an age of devastating wars and brutal upheavals.

Like Rome, Judea had been roiled by civil war in the first century BCE. In this case, in the wake of conflicts over Hasmonean succession after the death of Alexander Jannaeus, which culminated with the entry of the General Pompey into Jerusalem in 63 BCE, marking the beginnings of Roman domination in Judea for centuries after.

Rome, however, did not bring peace to Jerusalem. From the standpoint of Jewish history and Jewish memory, the Pax Romana is best remembered, in fact, for the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, which formed part of the brutal quelling of a rebellion in Judea by the Romans 66 to 72 CE. In other words, 100 years after Augustus had brought peace to the empire, Jerusalem lay in rubble.

Yet, even this was not the end. The Diaspora Revolts erupted across the Roman Near East from 115 to 17 under Trajan, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt in Judea in 132 to 135 under Hadrian. Both were met with brutal Roman responses that remade landscapes, ruptured history, destroyed communities.

A flourishing Jewish community had lived in Alexandria within Egypt, for instance, since soon after its founding by Alexander. After the Diaspora Revolts, it disappears from our historical record. And after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, even the Jewishness of Jerusalem disappears, with the sacred city refounded anew as a Roman city dedicated to the God Jupiter.

It is because of the survival, however, of some of the writings of ancient Jews, including but not limited to the earliest writings from the movement surrounding Jesus, that we get a rare glimpse thus into the Pax Romana, as experienced on its provincial peripheries. And seen from these Jewish perspectives, the Roman piece does not look peaceful at all.

In fact, this is perhaps not accidental. The Roman victory against the Jewish rebellion fits a pattern noted by Roman historians like Brent Shaw, whereby unity and safety at the Imperial center often came at the price of violence at the provincial periphery, visible at the edges of the Roman Empire, and perhaps even staged as such there, as Shaw notes, was the threat of violent enforcement that underwrote the promise and proclamation of peace. Roman violence did not cease with the advent of empire. It was channeled.

To be sure, Shaw's assessment does not consider either the impact of religion on the rhetoric of peace or examples pertaining to Jews and Judea. His insights are arguably useful, however, for understanding both.

Vespasian and Titus, the two Roman generals sent to quell the revolt in Judea, father and son, were popular with the Roman army. And with the support of the army, both became Roman emperors, inaugurating a new dynasty, namely the Flavians after an uncertain era of succession had brought civil war back to Rome in 69 CE.

In their efforts at imperial legitimation, Vespasian, Titus, and their Flavian heirs turned their attention away from the center to the periphery yet again. As Caroline Barron notes, they sought to replace unsavory memories of civil war in which they had been involved with a unifying success of a victory, in this case, a victory against the Jews.

And central to this replacement, this channeling of the memory of violence from center to periphery and back to center again, where imperial acts of monumentalizing, whereby the failure of the Jewish revolt and the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem temple were made visible in the city of Rome.

To this day, visitors to Rome can see the Arch of Titus, which is prominent on the Via Sacra, and which features the image of a menorah and other looted vessels from the Jerusalem temple. But this arch was only one of the multiple commemorative structures built in Rome to mark this one victory, which, thus, took on a symbolic function. These include two other arches, neither of which survive.

But most significantly for our purposes, they also include a forum with a temple to Pax, the goddess peace, in which were housed those very sacred vessels, which had been looted from the Jerusalem temple. The parallels with the Ara Pacis Augustae are not accidental.

This pays into memory making legitimated his new dynasty, the Flavians, by drawing parallels to Augustus and especially as peacemaker. As a result, and in the process, spoils from the Jewish War were resanctified as votives to Roman peace. What Jews experienced as violence thus became part of a Roman religious landscape marked as peace.

It's difficult to think of a more poignant example of what Shaw posits in his recent essay on Pax Romana. "The Roman Pax was always a one-way settlement imposed on others, on the defeated or the surrendered." Roman culture, famous for its glorification of hyperviolent men, thus, maintained its valorization of the power to dominate, the power to subdue.

What changed with the advent of empire was the articulation of this power through a new idiom, peacemaking. And to Shaw's insights with Barron, we might add that this translation of violence to peace was enabled by acts of desanctification and resanctification, temple destruction, and temple building, with the religious elevation of Pax in Roman ritual and civic spaces that also commemorated war.

It's not just that vessels from the Jerusalem temple were brought to Rome, akin to how spoils of war were commonly brought into the Roman center as spectacles of power. The same message also circulated throughout the empire in the form of coins. Many of the Emperor Vespasian's coins, minted in the wake of his victory in Judea, featured images of the goddess peace.

And these circulated alongside coins that bore imagery of Judaea Capta, dramatizing the Flavian defeat and the subjugation of Judea-- two women, one resplendent, the other subjugated. And this to Vespasian's memory making was marked by parallels to Augustus, whose coinage included Aegypto Capta and Armenia Capta imagery.

The comparison, however, reveals a telling slip. Vespasian's victory in Judea was not a war of imperial expansion. Judea had been under Roman domination, as we have seen, since 63 BCE. What is celebrated as victory in this case was the quelling of a revolt. What we see here, in other words, is a repurposing of the rhetoric of peace and peacemaking to sanctify imperial violence and threats of force and violence by which the empire managed defiance and dissent within.

This dynamic then extends a feature of the Pax Romana that was noted already by Arnaldo Momigliano. The brutal and visible violence of Roman peace at the empire's peripheries came with consequences for those at Rome's center as well. Roman power demanded a new kind of subjectivity as the price of its peace.

Given the choice between a dangerous freedom and a slavish peace to use [INAUDIBLE] term, a good many Romans chose the slavish peace, so many that, Momigliano notes, a historian might wonder whether these many, these anonymous masses may be really the cause of the rise of an authoritarian empire in place of the older Roman Republic. Not the rulers, but these forgotten masses, legion in number, yearning for peace at any price.

To consider peace from the historical purview of the Pax Romana then is to be warned of the dangers that can lurk in the human desire for stability, order, quietude, a life lived with no conflict at all, the desire for silence even at the price of silencing, the desire for harmony even at the price of liberty.

To my mind, thus, this ancient example resounds with a note of caution. Our yearning for peace is not always this simple positive, it might seem. The desire for rest and respite from conflict can sometimes contribute to a world with more violence, more war, more inequity, more subjugation. Peacemaking can mean success at pacification through dominance. It can mean the creation of pacts that codify systems of domination or naturalized passive obedience to any tacit threat of violent enforcement.

Notably, this dynamic did not escape the Romans themselves. When the Roman historian Tacitus, for instance, muses about how Rome might look to those who resist its domination, he says, in the name of a chalcedonian chieftain, the Romans create a desolation and call it peace.

And other Romans two seem to have been curious to hear how Rome looked precisely from the perspective of those it conquered or at least curious enough that a number of learned elites from subjugated populations were pressed to write histories of their own subjugation for Roman readers, most famously with the Jewish historian Josephus. But even these remain within a Roman frame, functioning as akin to spoils of war brought into the city's temples as spectacles for the Roman gaze.

So far, I have talked a lot about empire, and I haven't said anything about the second part of my title, epistemicide. In using this term, I'm drawing upon a recent article by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, which attempts to reassess the impact of Roman expansionism and imperialism from the perspective of those conquered and subjugated.

Drawing on the postcolonial theorist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Padilla Peralta seeks to draw attention to the loss of local knowledge and Indigenous ways of knowing that accompanied Roman expansion and Roman conquest. In his estimation, the rhetoric of peace does not just hide the violence of war in the sense of battle and bloodshed. It hides a reality of mass enslavement and ecological upheaval that came with a staggering loss of epistemic diversity throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

Padilla Peralta doesn't focus on Jews. His interest is in those people whose memory, rather, are wholly beyond recovery. In his schema, thus, ancient Jews are an exception. The Jewish case, in his view, speaks to the survival of isolated cultural clusters among those scattered communities with success in cultivating a landscape of resistance as a counter to Roman hegemonic and epistemic projection, even if their attenuated survival, in his view, is hardly the equivalent of flourishing.

In other words, for him, ancient Jews are a counterexample, and this counterexample further reminds us that those communities that did not pursue textualization as a strategy for transmission of their cultural identities are those who invariably disappeared completely from our record.

There's a sense then that the survival of ancient Jewish literature means that we as historians get a rare opportunity. We can see the victors of history through the eyes of victims, the rulers through the eyes of the ruled. It's not just the piece of the Roman center that is remembered, but also the violence at Rome's periphery.

We get a glimpse onto Roman imperialism as it looked from subjects in the provinces, on the empire's embattled edges seen apart from the usual imperial frame. We can see some of what and who are otherwise lost to history and invisible from view.

To think with a cautions posed by Padilla Peralta, however, is also to notice that what survives of ancient Judaism is perhaps akin to an erasure that leaves some smudge upon a page. It helps us to imagine and reminds us of what else is surely missing. Reminds us of the extreme selectivity of our surviving archive for studying the ancient past and makes visible, even for one flickering moment, the imperial logics and imperial power and imperial violence that govern the selectivity of our sources and, thus, constrain our archive for studying the past, even when we're trying to seek to recover what and who are lost.

In the case of ancient Jews, it's also a reminder that Roman imperial violence had a destructive impact upon bodies and buildings and continuities and lineages and locales. But part of what survived was Jewish knowledge and Jewish ways of knowing, at least to some degree.

Within Jewish history, for instance, it's common to periodize Judaism on the pivot of the Roman destruction of the second temple, the Jerusalem temple, as pre-70 or post-70, with a latter period post-70 imagined to continue to this day. Scholars, thus, endlessly debate the degree to which the temple's destruction in 70 CE was really a watershed or not.

How it functions in Jewish memory, however, is as a striking resistance to any framing of the Jewish past as simply another part of the Pax Romana. It functions to resist any periodization that would subsume the Jewish past wholly back into Roman history. And it does so precisely by preserving a Jewish perspective, whereby what really matters is the temple from Jerusalem, the power of which resound even in their physical distance and absence. Time is not marked before or after Rome, but by Jerusalem and the memory of the temple.

As in the linear time of Jewish periodization, this becomes all the more clear in cycles of Jewish liturgical time. Within and beyond Jerusalem, after all, the temple's destruction is mourned every year on the fast day of Tisha B'Av. But it's not just Rome that's remembered. In fact, it's not Rome at all. The ritual structure of this morning functions to erase Roman perspectives and particularities by virtue of the denial of any distinctiveness to this one empire.

As also in Jewish apocalyptic and later rabbinic references to 70 CE, Rome blurs into Babylon. And both Rome and Babylon, moreover, are reduced to mere instantiations of a perennial conflict between Israel and the nations, whereby the true power is always only one-- the God of Israel. The only one who can really bring peace.

So far, I've focused on ancient Romans and ancient Jews. I'd like to turn now to include ancient Christians, bringing our story forward to the advent of the Roman Empire in the first centuries BCE and CE, to the beginnings of its Christianization in the fourth century, starting under Constantine.

After all, Christianity belongs both to the story of ancient Jewish resistance to empire and to the story of empire, and in both cases, the Roman Empire, in particular. And this doubling has consequences, including, I would suggest, for shifting Christian ideas about both Jews and Romans, both empire and peace.

Scholars have long noted how the earliest known narratives about Jesus in the New Testament gospels use much the same rhetoric that we find used of the Roman Emperor Augustus. This, in fact, may help to explain why the gospels of the New Testament are even called "gospels," a term not used in titles of texts at the time.

Where the term does appear, though, is in Roman imperial propaganda. In one famous inscription, for instance, Augustus is called a "Savior". And his birthday is proclaimed as good news. That is, the literal meaning of the Greek term of gospel, "evangelia."

It may not be a coincidence, thus, that the oldest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, introduces itself in precisely these terms-- as the beginning of the gospel, the good news, in this case, of Jesus Christ. The implication is quite subversive. Mark is revealing that the real good news does not actually concern any Roman emperor at all, but rather a Jewish man born in the same era at the far edges of the empire, out in the Galilean countryside. Namely Jesus.

It's within this frame, moreover, that Mark quotes prophecies from the Jewish scripture that he presents as predicting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, as Christos, alongside Jesus's parables about what is thereby claimed to be the true kingdom. That is, the kingdom of God.

All this proves all the more striking, inasmuch as the gospels took their textual forms in the very period we were just discussing, the end of the first century CE, in the wake of the failure of the Jewish revolt and the Roman destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Mark, for instance, seems to have taken shape in that very era when Vespasian was calling upon the memory of Augustus, and in which the Roman rhetoric of peace was thus further reinforced through the sanctification of the violence in Roman ritual practice and sacred space.

It's perhaps not an accident, thus, that these and other New Testament writings are peppered with claims about peace. As Philip Tite has noted, the word "peace" occurs in the New Testament 100 times. Among these attestations are verses that attest many different approaches to peace and articulate resistance to Roman imperial claims about peace in different ways.

Especially telling, however, for our purposes is Ephesians 217. This verse states that Jesus came and preached peace to those who were far off and peace to those who were near. Today, it's often quoted as a pleasant truism about unity, but it might become far more interesting when we read it in relation to the Pax Romana on the one hand and Jewish resistance to the Pax Romana on the other.

The question really is to what war or conflict Jesus brings peace according to Ephesians. The answer becomes clearer when we look closer at the second chapter of Ephesians in this context, which discusses local communal tensions between Jews and non-Jews from the perspective of a "Jewish we."

Consistent with biblical prophecy, these tensions are described in terms of a perennial conflict of Israel and the nations, to "ethne," a term in Greek that literally means the "nations," but can also mean gentiles in the sense of individual non-Jews. As in other Jewish literature of the time, these nations, these gentiles, are associated with polytheistic practices and, thus, with a world ruled by the demonic.

What is stressed in Ephesians, however, is that the coming of Jesus as Jewish Messiah revealed this truth to non-Jewish peoples who had no way of knowing otherwise before. It is in this sense that the gentiles, these non-Jews, are described as being far off, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

This is the peace that he makes, bringing non-Jews to the knowledge of God of Israel. The coming of Jesus newly enables unity, in part also by changing Jewish practice to enable unity as well. Jesus brings peace in the sense he resolves from both sides the tension between Israel and the nations, Jews and non-Jews, that tension that's assumed to have defined all of human history prior, with cosmic consequences for the war between the demonic and divine as well. Jesus brings peace, messianically ushering in an age in which this war too, the war of demonic and divine, will eventually be won.

Jesus, however, doesn't just bring peace, according to Ephesians. He is peace. Tacit is perhaps the claim that peace is not some goddess to whom sacrifices are offered on altars in Rome, whose face might be featured on Augustan, Flavian, and other Roman coinage circulating throughout the empire in the name of its rulers.

The real peace, the real divinized peace is a Jewish man who died crucified by the agents of this very empire, which is among the enemies in that very war, part of a non-Jewish world that depicts itself as peaceful and divine, but is actually demonic. And thus, it is perhaps not accidental that Ephesians voices all these claims within a Jewish we.

Part of what it might preserve, in fact, is a Jewish way of knowing, whereby the claims of the Roman Empire become strikingly subsumed and even erased. Rome is just another empire, readily conflated with the rest. The only ruler who matters is God.

What's striking about this verse, however, is its afterlife within Christianity, wherein this very erasure, this very Jewishness itself becomes erased, subsumed back into a Roman imperial frame. Most striking in this regard is the use of this verse in the fourth century by the church. Father Eusebius at the beginnings of the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

Eusebius is famous as the biographer of Constantine, the emperor who decriminalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, convened the Council of Nicaea, and sponsored the building of many churches. If peace had meant one thing to the earliest Christians who lived as a precarious minority in the first century CE, it came to mean something quite different to the fourth century architects of a new Christianity, now emergent as Roman imperial religion.

We see this beginning, at least in Eusebiuss' interpretation of Ephesians 217. In his Praeparatio Evangelium, Eusebius quotes Ephesians 217 as a proof text that Jesus brings peace. The context there are his aim is to show how Jesus has fulfilled Jewish prophecies that predicted the coming of days when righteousness would flourish and the abundance of peace, as in the Psalms; and when people shall beat their swords into plowshares, and nation shall not take sword under nation, and they shall not learn war anymore, as in Isaiah.

But you see, this claim is not about the messianic age or the coming of the end time judgment of God or the Last Judgment. Rather, he explains these verses as pointing to the cessation of war with the rise of Augustus as emperor, who, in his words, became sole ruler at the time of our Savior. That is, Jesus's appearance.

In fact, Eusebius rereads the references to peace in the New Testament back into the Pax Romana, harmonizing the two so as to erase any possible tensions between the Roman Empire on the one hand and Jesus's Jewish messianism on the other. Jewish prophets here are reread to predict both Jesus and Augustus, both messiah and emperor.

This is perhaps not surprising, given Eusebius's concern elsewhere to celebrate the military triumphs of Constantine and especially under the banner of Christ at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Here, two acts of war become reframed as peacemaking.

In this case, however, the peace is not just military. Eusebius depicts this battle as a pivotal moment in Christian salvation history as well. And he also repurposes earlier Roman rhetoric of peace to describe the results, including the silencing of all those Christians who he deems to be heretical. In his view and his account, this, too, is a peace that can only be because of imperial power.

We see this, for instance, in Eusebius's account of the Emperor Constantine's calling of the Council of Nicaea as written up in his Life of Constantine, whereby inner Christian differences of opinion are here demonized but also redescribed with idioms of war. The gathering of bishops of Nicaea's to determine the bounds of what does and does not count as orthodoxy is cast here by Eusebius as another of Constantine's victories, in this case a victory over christological and other doctrinal difference within Christianity.

Like the Pax Romana then, this peace, this Christian peace is a peace that quiets, but also a peace that silences; that calms, but also constrains; that creates a civility of consensus at the center by means of managing threats managed at the periphery.

That Eusebius means victory in a very Roman sense is clear from his emphasis on the name Nicaea as heralding a site of victory by virtue of its naming after the Roman goddess of victory, Nike. And so, too, I suggest with peace, he writes in Greek, but he means this term in a very Roman sense.

But we can see here in effect is a pattern akin to what Momigliano observes of the first centuries of Roman imperial rule. Roman power, including Christian Roman power, demanded a new kind of subjectivity as the price of its peace. And here again, the price is not just the willingness to cede liberty for peace, but also the celebration of that silence that comes from silencing with the valorization of those with the power to do so as peacemakers.

When we consider this dynamic, moreover, we also notice what, or rather, who, is missing in the treatment of peace that we saw earlier in Eusebius's Praeparatio. Namely, Jews. Eusebius quotes from Ephesians, which speaks from a Jewish we about the peace made by Jesus between Israel and the nations. But he raises precisely this perspective. For Eusebius, which Jesus unifies are Greeks and barbarians.

To be sure, Eusebius quotes from Jewish prophets and Jewish scriptures, but these become Jewish voices projected back into the Christian past, with Jews and Judaism thus reduced to those particular pre-Christian Jewish books that might be useful for Christians. When Jesus brings peace, it's a peace that pertains now to empire. And it is an empire in which Jews have not just been subjugated, but almost erased, projected into the past as mere preface to Christianity. That is, literally Praeparatio.

And this erasure is so total that Eusebius quotes Jewish prophets, but quite pointedly doesn't even call them Jews. Here, as elsewhere, he distinguishes those who he considers to be righteous men of the past as Hebrews, who predict Christ and Christianity and belong to Christian history, in contrast with the Jews of his own time, whom he treats more like the abject Judea of Roman imperial propaganda.

In Vespasian's iteration of the Pax Romana and its later Roman extensions, Jews exemplified a difference within. Eusebius shifts the focus onto heretics. But just as Vespasian's temple of peace showcased the sacred vessels looted from the Jerusalem temple, so later Christians like Eusebius cast the rise of Christianity as a decline of the Jews, while nevertheless delighting in showcasing Jewish writings for the Christian gaze, not just the scriptures that constitute the Old Testament, but also writings of Philo and Josephus and the words of all those otherwise lost Jewish authors selectively gathered and quoted precisely in Eusebius's Praeparatio.

In the case of the Christianized Roman Empire, thus, we don't find the valorization of hyperviolent men that marks the Pax Romana of earlier times. What we do find, however, is violence channeled. Part of the function of Roman imperial claims about peace before and after Constantine are, again, to naturalize whose comfort and security matters; whose pain, whose fear, whose lives do not; what differences can be united and what differences must be destroyed to keep the illusion of harmony.

The earliest Christians, as we saw, often adopted elements of Roman imperial rhetoric from within a stance of resistance and sometimes even in line with Jewish ways of knowing. Eventually, however, the rhetoric of Roman peace became so absorbed in the Christianized Roman Empire, repurposed towards a Christian imperial erasure of inner Christian difference on the one hand and Christian imperial erasure of Jews and Jewish ways of knowing on the other, both with tragic consequences.

The legislation of Christian emperors increasingly constrained Jewish life and the Roman Empire. And under its European heirs, Jews would suffer demonization and persecution throughout the Middle Ages, including within cultures that later, in turn, became some of the primary crucibles for modern anti-Semitism.

And arguably, it's not just our archives for the Christian past that suffer from the silences of inner Christian differences, thereby condemned as heretical. This perhaps affects the horizon of our present as well, whereby doctrinal difference continues to be demonized and heresiological habits continue to hamper the possibility of productive debate.

Part of what we see when we consider peace from historical perspectives of Roman Empire and episteme aside, thus, is not just the complexity of the relationship of peace and war. It's also the challenges that yearning for peace can pose for our attempts at pluralism.

How can we foster cultures in which a desire for peace does not come at the cost of a space for differences that are different enough that some conflict might prove unavoidable, differences that might include different ways of knowing, different perspectives, different temporalities and sanctities, and thus, the possibility of some disagreements that can't be harmonized or resolved into one position?

How do we avoid the temptation of imperial habits, whereby managing difference must mean making peace in the sense of imposing a dominant frame and erasing whatever and whoever doesn't fit. And how do we do so when so many of our archives and so many of our histories, so many of our ideas about what counts as peace and power, what counts as knowledge, and even our own ways of knowing are also shaped in and by imperial cultures that valorized domination, including Rome, but also the many modern states and cultures that look back to Rome and the Pax Romana as a model and ideal?

I, obviously, don't have the answer to these questions. I do think it might be a good time, though, to ask them, not just of our broader culture, but perhaps also of ourselves, especially, but not only those of us who teach and work within universities.

It was here at Harvard already in the 1920s, for instance, that George foot Moore offered the first extensive cataloging of the degree of the epistemic erasure that Christian tradition, after Constantine, in particular, had inflicted upon Jews as enshrined in ancient Christian supersessionist theologies, but also reinscribed in modern scholarly approaches to Jews and Judaism.

Moore's "Christian Writers on Judaism" is still read to this day, and rightly so. Indeed, not only does Moore point arguably and sadly still hold to this day. But the time into which it was written was one in which the consequences of the erasure he charted were actually particularly clear, including here at Harvard. This was the time, the time in which he wrote the 1920s, where Harvard's then president was seeking to impose quotas on the admission of Jewish students.

At first sight, the lesson of Moore's article might appear to be that nothing ever changes. Even ostensibly, objective acts of scholarship can too often serve to reinscribe and naturalize past erasures and inequities, as Moore so powerfully shows with respect to the Christian erasure of Jews and Judaism. Scholarly knowledge making can too often serve to naturalize epistemic erasure and, thus, also the violence that such erasure can enable.

On the other hand, however, Moore himself is a reminder that scholarship can serve other purposes too, even historical scholarship. A Christian scholar might notice what Christianity erases of the Jews precisely by drawing on historical knowledge and methods to diagnose the past and, thus, see the present anew.

Moore was a superb scholar. And it's tempting, thus, to credit his erudition and rigor with enabling him to see beyond centuries of erasure and also to see that very erasure. What's interesting, however, is that his insights may also have owed to something a bit more quotidian, but arguably more powerful. That is, friendship.

I've read Moore's famous article multiple times, but I didn't know it was written in the context of the debate over here at Harvard about limiting Jewish enrollment with quotas until I was in the archives here recently and encountered a letter in which Moore's Jewish colleague, Harry Austryn Wolfson, mentions this explicitly.

Moore was one of Wolfson's teachers and played a part in Wolfson's hiring here at Harvard, which led to the establishment of the very first chair in the United States dedicated specifically to Jewish Studies, the Littauer chair here at Harvard to this day. Moore, despite a Christian, moreover, wrote a history of Judaism that takes Jewish perspectives, including rabbinic sources, quite seriously, just as Wolfson famously wrote as a Jew about the philosophy of the church fathers, both with major impacts on historical scholarship.

When we go to their archives, however, we're also able to see a little story behind this bigger story. Their files are filled with many tiny scraps of paper, stray receipts, little pieces torn off of edges, onto which are written little notes between the two, between Moore and Wolfson. Tiny, but nevertheless saved and kept, notes that speak to friendship.

We live in difficult and unpredictable times, and it be tempting to yearn for a peace that we imagine as the victory of our ideas about how things should be. Examples from the past, however, speak to the dangers that can come with this yearning, the violence and the erasure. Dangers abound even in our yearning for peace, which makes hope harder to find.

And it can feel especially naive from the long view of those of us who are historians in a world whose histories are filled with war, a world in which even peace so often comes at the cost of violence. But I must confess, I felt some hope when working in the archives and finding these little scraps and little notes. Some hope within this smaller story, this local story, which resounds with a reminder that empires may proclaim peace and glorify war and erase difference.

But sometimes between individuals, it's possible to take on the harder, slower, and far, far more humbling work of talking across difference, letting conflict stand, taking differences seriously, letting more than one story or more than one perspective stand in tension as true, without assimilating one to the other, polarizing them into two sides or erasing them.

It's not quite a goal as lofty as just peace, but is perhaps one place to begin. Thank you.

DAVID F. HOLLAND: Annette, thank you so much for a remarkable presentation, ranging from Ancient Rome to 21st century Harvard, and addressing so many pressing and timely issues along the way. Just a remarkable presentation and a tour de force of erudition and interpretive insight.

One of the interesting conversations that often happens among political historians is the question of whether these fictional self-conceptions of different regimes, either as bringing peace or bringing equality or bringing prosperity, compound their opposite. That is, does the projection of a peace bringing regime actually make it harder to pursue peace?

Or does the projection of a regime as the bringer of peace provide a kind of conceptual standard against which the regime can be judged? That is, does the fiction make things worse or make things better? In your analysis of the ancient world and the Pax Romana, do you feel that Rome presenting itself as a peace bringer, does it create a discourse of peace that is ultimately useful as a criticism of the regime? Or does it simply obscure and suppress criticisms of the violence?

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED: I'm glad you asked a small question.

[LAUGHTER]

Look, I don't think-- I mean, I personally-- maybe it's because I'm a scholar who also deals with a lot of religious literatures. I don't necessarily think that the contrast is between fiction and reality. I think that when we're talking about Roman views of peace, that it's probably easier to describe as a frame.

There was a degree-- and I think Momigliano makes this very clear-- is there was a degree to which they gave what they promised. And that's at least what he posits where there's some notion of stability. But the question is, when we have the word-- we may want to just think about Pax as peace. But Pax is also word related to our word for pact.

So it's this idea is that it's not an absence of conflict. It's a relationship of dominance that enables those on one side, even at their price, to maintain some stability. So I think in that way, the-- well, I think it does-- we may not have known too much about the other view.

I mean, we hear about it. Sometimes-- I mean Romans, obviously, Tacitus thinks about it. And we hear about it, especially because we have Jewish and Christian sources that, in this case, religious history means the preservation of more sources than political history would have permitted us.

So I think that-- to my mind, it's not like a fiction and then it's used or something that in suppression. It's just a reminder that these two things are-- at least in our world, these two things often come hand in hand. So it's not that there's an actuality of war and a rhetoric of peace. But certain concepts of peace, including the Pax Romana, are actually entangled. They're the same thing. You can't separate them.

And this is one of the things I find really compelling. I mean, I study a lot of apocalyptic literature, like apocalyptic literature, dreams of violence. So the projection-- and it imagines the only kind of peace that's possible is in the end times. I hope that's not true. But in the ancient world, it's noting a set of dynamics that it does-- that fit also with what we see from the perspective of Rome.

So I think that the temptation there would be that-- there is a temptation, I think. And I think maybe to think in terms of rhetoric and reality. But I think the case is that the rhetoric makes the frames by which individuals interpret their reality. In this case, that's what we see.

And so it makes it-- it's a more depressing story. I'm sorry. [LAUGHS] I tried to end on a happy note. I was like--

DAVID F. HOLLAND: Sorry to bring us back to harsh realities, but that's a very helpful way of thinking about this. I appreciate the reframing of that inquiry. Very helpful. Thank you. We're about at the end of our time here, and I would like to reserve just a minute or two for questions you wish we had asked or things you'd like to say before we draw this to a close. Any final reflections?

ANNETTE YOSHIKO REED: No, I mean, I don't have a particularly final-- I'm very grateful for the questions and for being in this conversation. One of the things I will say to that, I mean, even thinking about along these lines also reflects my own capacities of being here at HDS and having conversations.

I mean, I'm so excited that Ahmad's going to be talking a couple of weeks because even thinking really seriously about issues about archives, knowledge, and injustices not as being something to really take seriously, I feel like times where I've taught and read his work have been a big part of that for me also.

Yeah, Tara and Sophia, Tracey Hucks, and we have so many people who are thinking along similar challenges and along similar lines that that's the joy, I mean, both of being colleagues, but having conversations, but also saying you can look at materials that feel like they've been discussed a thousand times or more a million times in the case of some of the stuff I talk about and then see them anew. And that's ultimately-- I hope that that's not just a delight of knowledge, but it can also have some type of ethical horizon as well.

DAVID F. HOLLAND: Wonderful way to conclude. And hopeful, in spite of the sometimes challenging subject matter of tonight's conversation. So please plan to join us for our next installment of this series on February 24.

So we've got a little bit of a gap between now and then when Professor David N. Hempton, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and Alonzo L. McDonald, family professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, will speak on the fog of religious conflict. We look forward to seeing you then. Take care everyone.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors-- Religion and Public Life, HarvardX, Center for Jewish Studies.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2025, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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