Words Worth Noting - October 25, 2026

“On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle [Paul] were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could be quite as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that govern the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. And the very heart of the city, the lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’ Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, and their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’, was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World