Introduction

"There is something to be said about each legal system, that they represent some fingerprint that gives it a peculiar character and even if that system is warmed up and rebaked in other centuries later, one can trace the fingerprint back to its original inventors. 

 

The code of Justinian became a handy tool in the hands of the successors in ecclesiastical circles in Middle-Age legal systems. This biased legal system led to the persecution of many people during the period between 538-1798.

 

When the new Catholic Canon Law came out, the role of Justinian in its design was fully recognized.

Justinian was the great compiler of a legal system that brought together ecclesiastical related matters to the civil law from the time of Constantine to his own and presented his world in 534 A.D. with a code mixed with Christian religion and state matters. 

He recognized only one religion and that is the Christian Orthodox religion with the supreme head at Rome. 

He became increasingly disinterested in state affairs and studied himself into Systematic Theology and the area of Christology.
--By 538 A.D. he publicly laid down his interest by declaring that he is no longer chief in Staff for the army but a theologian and that is how his image on the coins should look like. 

This religious fire in him brought him in trouble with many and he abused his imperial power for his own goals. It is very likely that the evils that he and his wife did (according to his biographer Procopius) were true and that their conscience plagued them every night and in order to squash the inner voice of self-acknowledged guilt, so that they embarked upon a religious overdrive, giving themselves the license to steal from the rich (with a robin-hoodism rationalization) and give to the ecclesiastical poor in many forms, which included the building-programs of 37 enormous churches throughout the empire. Many scholars have written about this imperial couple but none have made the iconography on the coins of 538 A.D. the pivotal point of investigation to understand Justinian in the context of a broader picture relevant also in our own times. 

 

The date 538 A.D. is fixed archaeologically by numismatics and with

the clear marker XII of twelve year of Justinian on it, which is significantly the first time they appeared. 

Why this happened and how it happened and what the consequences were for the shift in the life of Justinian was to produce a paradigm shift from Pagan Rome to the Holy Roman Empire. 

 

The more Justinian tried to be the Elijah preparer of the way for the millennium of the Messiah by building projects all over the empire, by trying to unify every aspect of the empire, politics, nations, religion, spreading Christianity, building Constantinople rather than
Jerusalem to impress Him, the more suspicious he had the papal See and them all concerned that he was playing in the hands of the Antichrist. 

*Procopius gave evidence of these eschatological concerns in those days. According to Procopius in Anecdota VIII 13-21 there is a correlation between the Antichrist connections of both Domitian and Iustinian. In this paragraph Procopius depicted the demonic aspects of Justinian that someone saw that he was suddenly headless and then the head appeared again. 

 

The relevancy of the investigation of the role of 538 A.D. in the life of Justinian, the papacy and prophetic interpretation is part of the modus operandi of this research.

Abstract

The year 538 A.D. became the turning point in the history of the Roman Empire since so many aspects on political, administrative and economical levels were already switched off that when Justinian declared himself to be a theologian from this year and no longer a soldier, he crossed the barrier of his mandate between what is purely civil obligation and what is religious obligation, similarly to Constantine before, and entered in competition with the papal function and this role is evidence of Justinian’s ongoing caesaro-papism. 

 

The quest for unification of the empire by unification of the church, the fever for church-building projects with his wife

Theodora, the persecution of enemies of the church and heretics, his disdain with the Sabbath although his second name was Sabbatini, his support for suppressing any eschatological fever in line with the church fathers and Oecumenius and yet trying to build the ‘Kingdom of God’ on earth, all this indicate the problem 538 was for the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. 

 

Archaeological and historical original sources of Justinian and contemporaries of popes, biographer of Justinian and a commentator on Revelation (Oecumenius) are very revealing of these times and the shift or transition of what belonged to the Roman Empire handed over since 538 A.D. to the church and the papal function. 

 

The Code of Justinian was a persecuting instrument. 

 

Justinian upheld the supremacy of the papacy. 

--He permitted through the Council of Orleans actions to be done on Sunday that Constantine prohibited like travel and preparation of food and cleaning the house. 

--In Novellae CXLIV Justinian instituted a Seventh-day Sabbath persecution. 

--He changed the times and laws ad hoc as his Novellae XLVI and coins of 538 A.D. (XII year) indicate. 

--Private gatherings were persecuted. 

--He had church-manual laws. Justinian studied Systematic Theology on the nature of Christ and wrote homiletical rules for preachers. 

--He gave text- critical advice to Jews and condemned their doctrinal deviations. 

 

This theological hobby of the ruler of the once mighty Roman Empire was to be taken over by a more theological competent power that would eventually lead to papal-caesarism until the unsettling of this new aggrandizing paradigm in 1798 by Napoleon. 

 

The prophetic embedding of the 1260 days as “years” prophecies in both Daniel 7 and Revelation 12 definitely started in 538 A.D. contrary to W. Spicer’s (1918) suggestion of 533 or 538 as two alternative dates or any other dates suggested by other scholars in the history of interpretation in historicism. 

 

It is also not just a case of history of interpretation hermeneutics but data solidly supported by archaeology, iconography and original historical sources that coincides with the parameters provided by exegesis of the rest of the Books of Daniel and Revelation added with the exegesis of the detail of the passages under consideration. 

 

A necessary ingredient for the historical researcher remains to be the faith that God 

can predict the future and He did 

and that the data as well as the prophecies 

of the Biblical Text are evidence of that.