The Galileans Who Shamed an Emperor

When plague swept through the Roman Empire in the third century, wealthy citizens fled their estates. Physicians bolted their doors. Parents abandoned sick children in the streets. The dying were dragged outside city walls before they had drawn their final breath.

But a strange group stayed behind. The Christians of Alexandria — shopkeepers, freedmen, widows with almost nothing — moved toward the suffering rather than away from it. Bishop Dionysius recorded how believers nursed the sick, washed infected bodies, and carried the dead to proper burial. Many caught the plague themselves and died. They knew the risk. They stayed anyway.

A century later, Emperor Julian — who despised the Christian faith and worked to restore pagan worship — wrote a furious letter to a pagan priest in Galatia. "The impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well," he fumed. Rome's own temples couldn't match what these ordinary Christians were doing with bread, water, and bare hands.

Julian never understood what he was witnessing. He saw a social program. What he was actually seeing was John 13:34-35 lived out in real time — a love so peculiar, so costly, so unmistakably different that even an emperor hostile to the faith couldn't look away.