The Love That Puzzled an Emperor

In 362 AD, Emperor Julian — whom history remembers as "Julian the Apostate" — sat in his palace writing a frustrated letter to a pagan priest in Galatia. The emperor had spent years trying to revive Rome's old religions, but he kept running into the same maddening problem: the Christians.

"These impious Galileans support not only their own poor," Julian wrote, "but ours as well." During plagues that swept through Roman cities, when pagan priests fled and temples emptied, it was the Christians who stayed behind. They carried water to the fevered. They buried the dead when no one else would touch the bodies. They fed strangers who had no claim on their charity.

Julian understood military power. He understood political strategy. But he could not comprehend a community of people who loved so recklessly that they would risk their own lives nursing sick neighbors — including neighbors who had persecuted them.

What Julian witnessed was exactly what Jesus described on the night of His betrayal in that upper room. "By this everyone will know that you are My disciples," Jesus told His followers, "if you love one another." Not by their doctrine. Not by their rituals. By their love. The early Christians took those words so seriously that even an emperor who despised their faith had to admit: something about these people was unmistakably different.