Bible Person
Male · 2 cross references
Claudius is the Roman emperor during whose reign a famine is noted and Jews are expelled from Rome, affecting the missionary context of Acts. He belongs to the imperial backdrop against which the early church spreads. First appears in Acts 11:28.1
AI summary: Claudius matters because the cross references place imperial policy and historical circumstance directly into the New Testament mission story. His reign shapes movement, hardship, and opportunity, from famine relief to the relocation of figures like Aquila and Priscilla. Taken together, the material presents Claudius as an emperor whose political decisions form part of the providential environment of the early church.1
Central Figure
Claudius
The fourth Roman emperor.
The fourth Roman emperor. He succeeded Caligula (A.D. 41). Though in general he treated the Jews, especially those in Asia and Egypt, with great indulgence, yet about the middle of his reign (A.D. 49) he banished them all from Rome (Acts 18:2). In this edict the Christians were included, as being, as was supposed, a sect of Jews. The Jews, however soon again returned to Rome.
During the reign of this emperor, several persecutions of the Christians by the Jews took place in the dominions of Herod Agrippa, in one of which the apostle James was “killed” (12:2). He died A.D. 54. 3
AI-assisted summary prepared for ai-BIBLE and stored as page content, based on dictionary material, person metadata, and linked Bible cross references.
Alistair de Blacquiere-Clarkson, “ai-BIBLE Bible Names JSON Factsheet Aggregating Material from Smith’s Bible Dictionary & Hitcocks’s New and Complete Analysis of the Bible.” ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
M.G.Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ai-BIBLE electronic edition, version 1.0.
Robert Rouse, “Theographic Bible Information,” Theographic-Bible-Metadata, 2020, https://github.com/robertrouse/theographic-bible-metadata.