Digest will give a very incomplete picture of classical law. It is thus not Byzantine, and only partially classical Roman law. Another astonishing consequence of the approach of the compilers of the Digest is that fiercely Christian Byzantium appears godless. In the body of the work there is not one single reference to Jesus, apostles, saints, fathers of the Church. In all, there are twelve references to ‘god’, and in none of these can we tell from the wording whether this is the Christian God or a Roman pagan god. The Roman jurists were all pagans. Things are no different in theInstitutes. No references to Jesus etc. God appears only in the last text which deals briefly with criminal law (J...). There is here rhetoric but nothing of particular legal or religious significance. There is rather more of Christianity in the Code. But this is not much of an alleviation of the problem. The Institutes first, then the Digest, took up the first four years of legal education. The fifth -- optional -- year was devoted to the Code. By then the students, who were intent on further education, would have their mind-set fixed.44 Yet there is here still another oddity. At the outset, only theCode, the collection of imperial rulings, was envisaged. At the end of the enterprise the position of the Code had dropped, to be the subject matter of the final, and optional, year of legal education. Again, it is worth emphasizing that the Roman jurists, with the exception of Pomponius and Gaius, were little interested in legal history. The Digest title ., The Origin of the Law and of all the Magistracies and But we have said this much about criminal actions for you to have touched the subject with the tip of your finger and almost with your forefinger. For the rest, with the help of God a fuller knowledge will come to you from the larger volumes of the Digest or Pandects. 44 For more detail see Alan Watson, Law Out of Context (Athens, Ga, 2000), pp. 40 ff.
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