In the age Jesus was born, Rome was at peace and Korea's Three Kingdoms were just dawning

The birth of Jesus, the starting point of Christianity, is usually treated as a purely religious event. Put it on the coordinates of world and Korean history, though, and a striking simultaneity appears. The few decades in which Jesus was born and taught were the years Rome was completing the framework of its empire — and the years the Korean peninsula's three kingdoms were taking their very first steps.

A child born in Judea, under Roman rule

Long before Jesus was born, in 63 BCE, the Roman general Pompey occupied Jerusalem and Judea came under Roman control. Rome governed indirectly, installing Herod as king of the Jews, and the Gospels place Jesus' birth at Bethlehem in the last years of Herod the Great's reign. Since Herod died in 4 BCE, scholars generally date the birth to around 6-4 BCE. There is an irony in this: the calendar era used worldwide today was devised by a 6th-century monk calculating the year of Jesus' birth, and because his calculation was off, Jesus now appears to have been born several years "before Christ."

That birth falls within the peace and prosperity known as the Pax Romana, under Augustus, who had taken power in 27 BCE. Rome's stable administration and well-built road network would later become an unintended foundation for Jesus' disciples, letting them carry his teaching across the Mediterranean quickly. The years of his public ministry, around 27-29 CE, and of his crucifixion, around 30, likewise fell under Tiberius, Augustus' successor, while the Roman peace still held.

The same era, and kingdoms only beginning to walk

Barely half a century before Jesus was born, Silla was founded in 57 BCE, Goguryeo in 37 BCE, and Baekje in 18 BCE. The three kingdoms of the peninsula were, during Jesus' lifetime, new states only starting to take the shape of kingdoms. While Rome enjoyed peace as a mature empire spanning the Mediterranean, the three kingdoms were still in their early growth, absorbing the smaller polities around them.

After the crucifixion and resurrection, the early church his disciples founded spread rapidly across the Roman Empire, beginning with Pentecost around 30 CE. Reaching the Korean peninsula in any serious way, however, would take more than another thousand years. Rome legalized Christianity in 313, by Constantine's Edict of Milan; at that date the peninsula was still divided among three competing kingdoms. The age of Jesus marks the starting point from which two regions, the Mediterranean and Korea, wrote their histories on strikingly different schedules.

What the comparison tells us

Setting the age of Jesus beside world and Korean history makes plain that the history of a faith is, in the end, human history unfolding in particular times and places. A new idea could sweep the Mediterranean because the stable order of a vast empire was there to carry it, and the spread of any idea or belief depends on the conditions of its age as much as on its content. That is also why the faith took several more centuries to reach the still-young kingdoms of Korea.

Christianity would not actually take root on the peninsula until more than 1,700 years after Jesus' lifetime. It began in the late 18th century, when Joseon scholars of Silhak, or practical learning, encountered Chinese-language Catholic texts in Beijing and took the faith up on their own initiative. That a religion carried swiftly across the Mediterranean by the great conduit of the Roman Empire reached a geographically much closer East Asia only after so long shows that the channels of exchange between civilizations are not set by distance alone.

Judea in Jesus' time was a Roman province, but it was also a multicultural, multilingual society in which Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic mixed. That complex environment was itself fertile ground for a new set of ideas.

At a glance

Year	Christian history	World history	Korean history
63 BCE	Roman rule over Judea begins	—	—
57-18 BCE	—	—	Silla, Goguryeo, and Baekje founded
27 BCE	—	The Roman Empire founded (Augustus)	—
c. 6-4 BCE	The birth of Jesus	—	—
c. 30 CE	Crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost	—	—