Quote:
Originally Posted by Sister Alvear
The early church voted in no elections...maybe our choice should be the same.
|
Please don't take this as being disrespectful.
If the early church people were here today, we cannot be so sure that they would get involved with elections. At the same time, we cannot be sure they would not be involved.
Some of them lived in the time of Julius Caesar who was declared "Dictator for Life". IF the Jews could have voted for someone less dictatorial, I think they probably would have voted. There were "elections" but it is speculated that many times they were "rigged" in the sense that mostly only the elite and wealthy were the voters...See the bolded area below....Thankfully, Poor Folk don't have to travel far today to vote and it is my thinking that all should exercise that right.
This is from Archibald Robertson, The Origins of Christianity, International Publishers, 1954, rev. ed. 1962.
CHAPTER IV
THE JEWS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The Roman Empire was the most successful and lasting of the ancient experiments in imperialism. The Roman ruling class of wealthy nobles, who under the republic all but monopolized office and filled the senate, won their empire not by an attempt (which would have courted speedy catastrophe) to exploit whole countries to enrich a single city, but by linking their own interests (not without friction and struggle, but to a progressively greater and greater extent) with those of the ruling classes elsewhere.
This policy evolved from small beginnings by a snowball process. Rome owed her political rise in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. to her leadership of other Latin cities first against the Etruscan power, then against the hill tribes of central Italy, then against Celtic invaders from the north who threatened to submerge them all.
She consolidated her power by granting citizen rights in the Roman state to her Latin allies. Since only the richer Latins could travel to Rome to vote, this involved no danger to the Roman ruling class. Far from swamping them, it reinforced them against the Roman plebs, while Rome in return protected the rich Latins against the masses in their respective cities.