JERUSALEM; ROME; REVELATION - The Preterist Archive

alive as living torches to illuminate the night. Suchlike persecutions soon spread from the
city of Rome throughout the Empire, where it dangerously threatened the continued existence
not just of Christians but even of Pagans and finally of Jews too. In one word, the very
survival of civilization - or what was then left of it - was at stake. Only Christianity
enabled civilization to keep on surviving (and later on to flourish again as never before)
throughout the Roman World.
192. It was not only Judaea in the East and Rome at the centre of the Pagan Roman
Empire which suffered during the seven-years-long “Great Tribulation” of A.D. 63 to 70. So
too did South Britain, in the far West of that Pagan Roman Empire.
193. The Pagan Roman Emperor had invaded Britain in A.D. 43. Within the next
decade, he captured the great British General Caradoc (whose family seems to have included
Christians). Also the Pagan Roman Historian Tacitus (Annals 13:32) refers to “Pomponia
Graecina, a distinguished lady...from Britain...[who] was accused of some foreign religiosity”
widely believed to be Christianity - during Nero’s second consulship. Interestingly, Paul’s
helper the A.D. Clement (cf. Philippians 4:3) records in his circa A.D. 97 First Epistle to the
Corinthians chapter 5 that Paul himself had “taught righteousness to the whole [Roman]
World and come to the extreme limit of the West” - thereby apparently meaning Britain. See
Williams’s Antiquities of the Cymry and Paley’s Horae Paulinae (p. 40) and Lewin’s Life and
Epistles of St. Paul (II:492).
194. Tacitus’s Annals 14:33-39 records that the Free Britons slew seventy thousand
Romans and their allies in London and their British colony Verulamium (the later St. Albans) -
before the Romans (with the help of two thousand German legionaries and eight cohorts of
auxiliaries and a thousand cavalry) in retaliation slaughtered the British Queen Boadicea and
her armies. Nero then sent his spokesperson Polycritus to Britain. “But to the [British]
enemy, he was a laughing-stock. For they still retained some of the fire of liberty!”
195. In his Agricola (11 & 16f & 28), Tacitus again remarks on the Britons’ “religious
belief” and “strongly-marked British religiosity” and “spirit.” Indeed, “had Paullinus, on
hearing of the outbreak in the [new Roman province of South Britain], not rendered prompt
succour - Britain would have been lost” to the Roman Empire also because of “the valour of
the enemy.... Many of the Britons...sought to defend their property. Often victorious, though
now and then beaten, they were at last reduced.”
196. Yet even as late as A.D. 69, records Tacitus (Annals 12:40), the British King
“Venut(ius) of the Brigantes...was pre-eminent in military skill... A sharp contest followed,
followed instantly by war...towards us.” Indeed, Tacitus adds in his Histories III:45,
“Venutius retained the kingdom; and we had the war on our hands!” See too F.N. Lee:
Common Law, chapters 10 & 11 (at www.dr-fnlee.org).
197. The famous Judaistic Historian Josephus records the speech of the (Acts 26:1f)
Judaean King Agrippa to the Jews at the start of the A.D. 63 to 70 Romano-Jewish War.
There, Agrippa is reported to have warned his people: “The power of the Romans is invincible
in all parts of the habitable Earth.... All Euphrates is not a sufficient boundary for them on the
- 34 -