"Gaius Octavius was born in 63 B.C. in Rome" noted John Coleman, a Fox News contributor about the towering contemporary of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
"When his maternal great uncle, Julius Caesar, was assassinated for subverting the Roman Republic, the young Octavian, only 18 at the time, became his heir. .... Deifying his great uncle and renaming himself Augustus, Octavian brought down the ancient world's greatest Republic and rebirthed it an empire. Brilliant and ruthless, Octavian did so in a way that created stability and positioned the realm for growth -- creating a 200-year period of unprecedented peace and strength known as the Pax Romana."
Two millennia later, he is still a very significant historical figure but is primarily remembered for a brief mention in the Biblical story of Christmas:
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register. 4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. -- Luke 2:1-5
"Two of the greatest men in history lived at the very same time. They walked very different paths," Coleman wrote.
That baby was born to an outcast teenager and her carpenter husband. He came into this world in a dirty stable in an unimportant province without fanfare or notice. Because of a prophecy, he would eventually be hunted by the King of that region -- thousands slaughtered in his pursuit -- and live as a refugee in a foreign land. When he returned, he would grow up in obscurity, spending more than a decade practicing his father's blue-collar profession. While the smallest details of Octavian's life are recorded, that baby's life would go mostly undocumented except for his last three years of ministry.
During those three fateful years beginning when he was 30, "the boy born in Bethlehem would begin preaching to the poor and disenfranchised in small towns and forgotten places," Coleman noted. "He would begin communing with prostitutes, foreigners, laborers, and the diseased. He would offer healing and hope to those people the world rejected and eventually inspire envy and hatred among his era's religious and political elite. He would be betrayed by one of his 12 closest friends, then executed on a cross under Octavian's successor, Tiberius. He would die penniless, homeless, and a criminal, completely unknown to the powerful emperors under whose rule he lived."
But in their legacies, the tables were turned. The man called Jesus, "a poor unfortunate" in the estimation of a friend descended from a line of rabbis in Aleppo, Syria, emerged as a towering historical figure:
After his death, it was those same poor and outcasts who kept his memory alive, even as the oligarchs of the Empire ruled. The murdered man's followers would be persecuted but mostly overlooked until their numbers grew large enough that emperors like Nero tried to stamp them out. ....[A]lmost every authoritarian for 2,000 years has tried to commandeer, corrupt, or destroy that faith. But today, more than two millennia after Augustus forced that poor family on a journey to Bethlehem, billions of people around the world will sing not to Octavian but to that frail little boy the world simply cannot forget. ....
"Augustus is still remembered," Coleman wrote. "Scholars study him. ... Were it not for a baby born during his reign, he might be the most famous man of his time. But God and history had other plans. Augustus is now a member of the supporting cast in the greatest story ever told -- the very dates of his birth and death marked in relation to that night in the manger."
"Two billion of us now believe that baby was God made man, a message of hope and healing to all of us who are broken. Jesus is an assurance that God all-powerful isn't careless, hurtful, and vicious like the gods of Ancient Greece and Rome, but that instead, he cares infinitely for each human heart. .... That is the message of Christmas.