Claudius Expels Jews from Rome

In his Life of Claudius, written about AD 120, the biographer Suetonius lists among the emperor’s dealings with foreign peoples one sentence about the Jews of Rome: since they “constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus”, he expelled them from the city (Suetonius, Claudius 25.4). He says nothing more about the disturbances or about Chrestus.

Acts mentions such an order. When Paul came to Corinth he found there a Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, “because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome”. Paul stayed and worked with them, since they shared his trade of tentmaking (Acts 18:1–3). Acts does not say what caused the order or whether the couple were already believers in Jesus.

Two later writers add to the picture, and complicate it. Cassius Dio, in the early third century, says that Claudius did not drive the Jews out, because their numbers would have made that hard to do without a riot, but ordered them not to hold meetings while keeping their ancestral way of life (Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.6.6). The Christian historian Orosius, early in the fifth century, repeats Suetonius’s sentence with the name written “Christus”, dates the expulsion to the ninth year of Claudius, and adds that it cannot be determined whether the emperor acted against Jews who were rioting against Christ or meant Christians to be expelled as well (Orosius, History against the Pagans 7.6.15–16).

Who Chrestus was is not settled. On one reading the name is a form of “Christus”, and Suetonius has passed on a confused report of disputes among the Jews of Rome about Jesus. On the other he means a man named Chrestus who was in Rome at the time. The dating note names a work for each reading. If the first is right, there were believers in Jesus in Rome within about twenty years of the crucifixion. Neither Suetonius nor Acts says so.

Paul’s letter to the Romans, written some years later, greets Prisca and Aquila and the church that met in their house. The letter is addressed to a community that he had not founded and had not yet visited (Romans 16:3–5) (Romans 1:8–13) (Romans 15:20–24).