I enlisted in an all-volunteer force. Nobody drafted me. I was also promised pay and benefits before I signed anything I could be held to. Anyone who has been through MEPS knows both are true, and that “volunteer” doesn’t mean what a civilian hears.
What “Volunteer” Meant in the First Century
Harnack and Cadoux both lean on the word. Harnack points out “A general conscription did not exist in the empire, and the number of troops was not large compared with the population. The legions recruited from volunteers; only in quite special cases of need were individuals pressed into service” (48). His footnote asks who would force a Christian unwilling to serve to enlist, or to stand in as a substitute (48 n.1, quoting Neumann).
Cadoux says the emperor “hardly ever found it necessary” to levy conscripts and “could get all the soldiers he needed by voluntary enlistment” (16–17). The chain is: voluntary, so nobody forced them, so Christians simply didn’t join, so no soldier question.
That chain has three problems.
1. The dates. The legal evidence in Harnack’s footnote comes from Karl Johannes Neumann, who quotes an imperial jurist (Arrius Menander, in Justinian’s Digest 49.16.4.10 [p.837 in the item]) from about the time of Septimius Severus, around A.D. 200. It says the numeri are mostly filled by volunteers. Neumann adds that since Severus, Italian citizens had been barred from service. Antipas’s Galilee was around 30 C.E. And on the best current reading, the soldiers of Luke 3 and 7 served in Herodian or Syrian auxiliary forces, not in the legions that Harnack’s sentence is about.
2. What volunteering meant. According to Christopher Zeichmann, as I summarize in God Is a Grunt (ed.1, pp.95), auxilia were recruited into long terms with basic pay, good food and, at discharge, Roman citizenship. Local numeri “might have been conscripted against their will” or “incentivized by monetary or other rewards.” Legionaries, whom Rome couldn’t entice with citizenship, got higher pay and frequent bonuses. Those are incentive structures, and John’s “be content with your wages” (Luke 3:14) reads to me like a line for men whose wages were why they were there.
3. Jews and service. Harnack’s footnote says Jews were exempt from Roman service (Josephus, Ant. 14.10.6, for Caesar’s time, and “with good reason” presumed later) and that the auxiliaries conscripted in Judea belonged to the non-Jewish population (49 n.). Four pages later he thinks the Luke 3 soldiers were probably Jews in Antipas’s army (53). He doesn’t reconcile the two. Cadoux repeats the exemption (16, 20). Zeichmann says there is no indication it stopped Jews from serving “of their own accord.”
What this shows and what it doesn’t.
It doesn’t show that Christians enlisted. It shows that “nobody forced them” isn’t the same as “nobody in their situation would have gone.” The idea that early Christians avoided the army because avoiding it was easy rests on a third-century picture of recruitment applied to the first century. It also ignores why people enlisted. What’s missing is the recruit’s side: what pay meant, and what the alternatives were. The primary-source work on recruitment for client-kingdom forces still has to be done, and this series isn’t there yet.
