J ctt1kft8j0 4

Yale University Press
Chapter Title: Introduction: January 18, 1932, Excavation Block M8
Book Title: The World's Oldest Church

Book Subtitle: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria
Book Author(s): Michael Peppard
Published by: Yale University Press. (2016)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1kft8j0.4
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivatives 3.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Funding is provided by Knowledge
Unlatched.
Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
The World's Oldest Church
This content downloaded from 147.188.128.74 on Mon, 15 Jan 2018 09:25:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Introduction: January 18, 1932,
Excavation Block M8
C l a r k H o p k i n s r e f l e c t e d on a momentous day in the east

Syrian desert and penned in his diary: “In the fresco room in front of the
tower south of the Main Gate the dirt came off one section and showed
5 people in a boat—2 standing below, one on a bed on the shore. Above, a
god on a cloud.”1
Over the next three days, Hopkins and Henry Pearson, professors
in Yale University’s departments of classics and fine arts, respectively, would
dig, scrape, and brush away seventeen hundred years of the past. Working
with their Armenian foreman, Abdul Messiah, they found that each wall
of the rectangular room contained a different painting: a shepherd with a
flock of sheep; a male and a female figure near a tree and a serpent. Shortly
thereafter, they found the first inscriptions amid the frescoes, one of which
read, “Christ, remember me, the humble Siseos.”2 Suddenly the paintings
took on a stunning symbolism. That “god on a cloud” was not an image
from Syrian or Roman mythology. It was one of the oldest depictions of
Jesus Christ. Hopkins and Pearson had uncovered the world’s oldest ex-
tant Christian church—dating from about the year 250.
As field director of the excavations at Dura-Europos, one of the most
successful and revelatory archaeological efforts in the Middle East,
Hopkins had become rather used to such discoveries. During several seasons
of excavating the fortified city, perched on a cliff above the western bank
of the Euphrates River, the teams from the United States and France were
uncovering buildings, artwork, artifacts, and inscriptions at a seemingly
unprecedented rate. In his letter of January 22 to Michael Rostovtzeff,
professor of ancient history and classical archaeology at Yale University,
2 Introduction
Hopkins described how “one extraordinary discovery [has] followed an-

other with startling rapidity.”3 But it was not always easy to know what
exactly they were discovering. In the official buildings, public temples, and
private dwellings, there were scenes of sacrifice to unnamed gods, paint-
ings of birds descending toward unidentified regal figures, and processions
of men and women on the feast day of—who knows?
Ancient archaeology in general suffers from such unknowns. Doing
ancient history is like assembling a borderless jigsaw puzzle for which we
have only a small fraction of the pieces and no box lid to provide a picture.
Historians work by a combination of scientific data collection and induc-
tive analysis, but even then, occasionally a new puzzle piece emerges that
seems to stand alone. Such was the case for Hopkins and Pearson, who had
discovered the only extant church building from before the age of Constan-
tine. To what should this place be compared?
While some aspects of the Christian building were correctly identi-
fied at first glance, others were not. Consider this excerpt from the diary
on January 20: “Pearson and I uncovered frescoes in the morning. The
lower right-hand side of the room showed two men, one with a wand like a
small palm tree in the right hand and a bowl in the left, the second with a
stick or sword in the right, bowl at breast in the left, both advancing left
toward large white building, pediment style, with a great star over each
gable.”4 This particular painting (plate 1) occupied a major portion of the
room that would come to be called the baptistery. It was probably the dom-
inant feature of the church’s artistic program. But who are these men,
what are they carrying, and where are they going?
In the entry of February 2, Hopkins refers to the painting as the
“fresco of the Three Kings,” apparently deriving his hypothesis from the
starlit building to which the figures were processing.5 But a different idea
was offered on March 14 by M. Henri Seyrig, the director of the Ser vice
des Antiquités of Syria and Lebanon. He had come out to the site from
Beirut for the partage—the division of items from that season’s campaign.
This painting’s men were not men at all, he suggested. Rather, the pro-
cession depicted the women approaching the tomb of Christ to anoint his
Introduction 3
body on Easter morning.6 Hopkins was convinced. The deal for the part-
age was made. Syria kept most of the season’s finds, but the Yale team ne-
gotiated to keep all the frescoes from the Christian building. Seyrig soon
returned to Beirut, but he had left behind a mustard seed of an idea.
The identification of the processing figures in the Dura-Europos
baptistery as the women approaching the tomb of Christ—though it had
notable skeptics in the 1930s—would eventually come to represent the
consensus view of the artistic program. Once the frescoes were taken to the
United States, Seyrig’s seminal proposal branched out to support further
hypotheses and theological interpretations about the meaning of the art in
this ritual space. The historical assessment of early Christian initiation
became partially rooted in the identification of the motif of death and res-
urrection at the Dura-Europos baptistery. Through the frescoes’ installa-
tion in the Yale University Art Gallery, complete with official placards and
interpretations, the views on each of the surviving paintings solidified.
Encyclopedia entries were written; meanings were anthologized. Who
would question an encyclopedia entry or the accuracy of a placard in one
of the world’s great art museums? Accordingly, the final archaeological
report of 1967 seemed to be just that—final. When the humidity of New
Haven, Connecticut, rendered the art materially unfit for further display,
it was removed from its gallery in the late 1970s. Critical reflection on the
consensus views continued to fade away. Fewer than fifty years after it was
unearthed, the baptistery seemed to have been reburied.
Yet questions remain. What are the women carrying in their hands?
What was thought initially to be a wand, or a stick, or a sword, came to be
recognized correctly as a torch. But why are these women carrying torches,
when none of the Gospel texts denotes or even implies such a thing? Why
do no other artistic depictions of the women at the tomb—from late antiq-
uity to the present—portray them in this way? And to what are they pro-
cessing? All initial field reports describe the white structure in the fresco
as a building, and indeed it is taller than the figures of the women. So why
did it come to be seen as a sarcophagus—a coffin (not) containing the corpse
of Jesus on Easter morning? What are those stars hovering above the white
4 Introduction
structure? Why are the women veiled and dressed all in white? Finally, a
question I ask myself: Is it really possible that some paintings from this fa-
mous site have not been identified correctly?
In the pages that follow, we return once again to the murals of the
third-century Christian building from Dura-Europos. In an auspicious
coincidence, some of them are also back on display at the renovated Yale
University Art Gallery. A lot has changed since the archaeological report
of 1967: new textual sources have emerged; previously spurious patristic
texts about Christian initiation are now assigned to legitimate authors; ne-
glected artistic comparanda can be brought to the fore; and noncanonical
traditions are treated with greater respect by historians of early Christian-
ity. Methodological changes have been just as important. For example, art
historians no longer look primarily for one-to-one correspondences
between texts and images but think more creatively about the polyvalent
modes and meanings of viewing. Textual scholars no longer presume sta-
ble traditions of transmission, nor do we reinforce a firm canonical barrier
when investigating pre-Constantinian Christianity. Finally, scholars of
both art and text have begun to discern how the presence of ritual in a given
space affects our interpretation of surrounding materials.
In other words, the meaning of what appears on these walls may be-
come clear only when we imagine what happened between them.

J ctt1kft8j0 4

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

J ctt1kft8j0 4

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

J ctt1kft8j0 4

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Introduction: January 18, 1932, Excavation Block M8

Book Title: The World's Oldest Church

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

C l a r k H o p k i n s r e f l e c t e d on a momentous day in the east

Hopkins described how “one extraordinary discovery [has] followed an-

You might also like