The New Testament bears ample testimony to the ancient faith of the Roman Christians. Rome marks the final destination of the Acts of the Apostles. Rome was the postal address of the first of St. Paul’s canonical letters.

And the ancient Romans treasured their heritage. They knew, with unerring Christian instinct, what the African Tertullian would say so eloquently in the third century: The blood of the martyrs is seed. If that is so, the Romans were blessed indeed to count among their martyrs the apostles Peter and Paul.

There is no legal document — not even a forged one — that names the successors of St. Peter as title-holders to the Church, bearers of the keys. But the ancient Christians required no other proof than the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition.

Writing probably in 69 A.D. (and surely no later than 96), St. Clement of Rome, the third successor of Peter, remonstrated the faraway congregation in Corinth, in Greece. Clement could do this because he spoke with Peter’s authority, which was granted by Christ Himself. As he concluded his letter, he urged the Corinthians to “render obedience unto the things written by us through the Holy Spirit.” And they did. A century later, the Greek church still hallowed Clement’s letter, as did other churches that counted it among the canonical scriptures and proclaimed its words in the liturgy.

Obedience to Christ in the person of His vicar: This is the common testimony of the Fathers. When the saints of East and West saw danger, they appealed to the pope. We find such pleas in the letters of St. Irenaeus (second century), St. Basil the Great (fourth century), St. John Chrysostom (early fifth century), and St. Cyril of Alexandria (mid-fifth century).

One and all, these were men with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Scriptures. So when they wished for an action that bore the authority of Jesus Christ, they knew where to send their petition. Sometimes they were disappointed by the papal response, but they maintained their faith in the papal office.

In the year 376, the greatest Scripture scholar in the ancient world, St. Jerome, addressed Pope St. Damasus I with a torrent of biblical seals of the papacy: “I speak with the successor of the fisherman and disciple of the cross. Following none but Christ as my primate, I am united in communion with Your Beatitude — that is, with the chair of Peter. Upon that Rock I know the Church is built. Whosoever eats a lamb outside this house is profane. Whoever is not in Noah’s ark will perish when the flood prevails.”

To be a Christian was — then as now — to obey Jesus Christ in the holy Scriptures. Thus, to be a Christian was to obey Jesus Christ in his vicar, the pope.

This was not just the teaching of churchmen who had a vested interested in papal power. It was the faith of the congregations.

The Roman people passed down many traditions of Peter’s ministry in their city. According to one story, during his imprisonment, the apostle preached to his jailers, who begged him for baptism. Finding insufficient water, Peter prayed and a pure spring bubbled up into the cell. Today we may see a most ancient testimony to this story on the walls of the Catacomb of Commodilla. There, the early Christians portrayed Peter as a new Moses, striking a rock wall and drawing forth water.

But, again, reverence for the papacy wasn’t just a Roman thing. A plate found in Montenegro depicts the prison baptism. A coffin in Arles, France, made around the same time, shows Christ handing on the Law to Peter.

Christ gave His Law to Peter with the grace of state. Peter passed it on to Linus, Linus to Cletus, Cletus to Clement, as John Paul passed it on to Benedict last year, while the whole world was watching.

Michael Barber has posted a moving and accurate profile of Bishop Donald Wuerl.

Chris Bailey has posted his soundings on the historical Arthur. He concludes this segment with St. Gildas the Wise, who usually made his appearances on the back pages of the old patrology manuals. Not to be missed! And if you like the blog, you’ll love the book: The Grail Code.

A fellow blogger of the Fathers has found a patristic connection for my untethered entry below.

I’m mourning the imminent departure of a dear bishop, Donal Wuerl, whom Pope Benedict has just named as archbishop-designate of Washington, D.C. Bishop Wuerl has been a great father to me, my family, and my neighbors. He’s been my bishop for most of my adult life.

Our nation’s capital, though, has gained a capital patrologist. Something in my memory tells me that young Donald Wuerl studied under Johannes Quasten at Catholic University of America. In the early 1980s, as Msgr. Wuerl, he wrote a lovely introduction to patristics, aptly titled Fathers of the Church. His catechism, The Teaching of Christ, co-authored with the great patrologist Thomas Comerford Lawler, is a model for integration of the Fathers in modern catechesis. A few years ago, in an interview in Pittsburgh’s diocesan paper, Bishop Wuerl let slip that the Church Fathers remain his favored spiritual reading.

May he prosper in his new home. Rejoice, all you lands of the Beltway.

A few weeks back I posted notice of the Maltz Jewish Museum’s exhibit titled “Cradle of Christianity: Treasures from the Holy Land,” which includes authentic artifacts from the lives of Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.

Now I see that Cleveland also recently played host to Prof. Lawrence Schiffman, a leading authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Schiffman is author of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran. His ventures in Ohio were reported by the Cleveland Jewish News.

According to Schiffman, the Scrolls, which were discovered in caves in Israel in 1947, have given us “a picture of Judaism that was practiced at that time that we simply didn’t have before … We’re talking about people who were all Sabbath observers and who followed the commandments … They had very strict purity laws and acted as if they were living as priests in the (Jerusalem) Temple.” Members of the Qumran sect observed ritual bathing and wrote of a ritual banquet at which a messianic priest offered bread and wine. Some men of Qumran practiced celibacy.

For Christians, the Dead Sea Scrolls have provided a glimpse of the Church’s deep roots in Judaism. They also may help us to understand a bit about the religious life of the Holy Family, the apostles, and their contemporaries. Prof. Schiffman, an Orthodox Jew, has been a critic of common Christian interpretations of the Scrolls. But his own scholarship has itself illuminated the religious life of that long-ago time and place.

A small portion of the Temple Scroll from Qumran is currently on display at the Maltz Museum as part of “The Cradle of Christianity” exhibit.

If you would like to see a great Christian scholar’s (very early) analysis of the Scrolls, grab yourself a copy of Cardinal Jean Danielou’s The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity. A more integrated (and recent) approach to Christianity’s Jewish origins is Oskar Skarsaune’s In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity.

The wages of sin can seem lavish when we look at the lifestyles of celebrities. Some openly profess to hate God, others merely flout His law, and yet they have won media renown and amassed tremendous fortunes. To a Christian struggling to pay the bills and live by the Church’s precepts, the situation can seem unjust. Then, bitterness and envy can creep in and impoverish a soul that was once rich in grace. St. John Chrysostom (d. 407 A.D.), preaching on 1 Corinthians, warns us away from such evil thoughts.

When you see an enemy of God wealthy, with armed attendants and many flatterers, do not be downcast, but lament, weep, call upon God, that He may enroll him among His friends. And the more he prospers being God’s enemy, so much the more should you mourn for him. For sinners we ought always to weep, but especially when they enjoy wealth and good times, even as one should pity the sick when they eat and drink to excess.

But some who hear these words are made so unhappy that they sigh bitterly and say, “Tears are due to me. I have nothing.” You said it well — “I have nothing” — not because you lack what another has, but because you think that things will make you happy. For this you are worthy of infinite lamentations. It is as if a healthy person should call “happy” a man who is sick and lying on a soft couch. The latter is not near so wretched and miserable as he, because he has no sense of his own advantages. Such is the result in these men’s case as well, and thus our whole life is confounded and disordered. For these sayings have undone many, and betrayed them to the devil, and made them more pitiable than those who are wasted with famine.

Archeologists in Jerusalem announced the discovery of hiding places of the Jews who revolted against Roman rule in A.D. 66-70.

JERUSALEM Mar 13, 2006 (AP)— Underground chambers and tunnels used during a Jewish revolt against the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago have been uncovered in northern Israel, archaeologists said Monday. The Jews laid in supplies and were preparing to hide from the Romans during their revolt … “It definitely was not spontaneous,” said Yardenna Alexandre of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “The Jews of that time certainly did prepare for it, with underground hideaways here and in other sites we have found.”

An early Church Father, St. Epiphanius, records that the Christians of the city received a prophecy of the coming destruction. So they fled to the city of Pella. When they returned after the devastation, they found Jerusalem reduced to rubble, except for the building that housed their “little church of God,” the upper room, which had been miraculously preserved.

ABC provides the rest of the story on the more recent news.

… is now ready for your downloading and listening pleasure. My co-author Chris Bailey and I speak with Spirited Talkers Michelle and Chad about our new book, The Grail Code. Don’t forget also to visit GrailCode.com, as Chris is promising to post his explorations of the “historical Arthur.” Coming soon!

In a feeble attempt to justify her addiction, my beautiful wife informed me today that sudoku puzzles are a remote descendant of the ancient “magical squares,” which may be Christian (or maybe not).

Magical squares are ancient puzzles that have been found in inscriptions from late antiquity. They feature rows of letters whose sequence yields a meaning — or several meanings — once you’ve figured it all out. The oldest known examples were discovered in the ruins of Pompeii. In that city, sealed by a vocanic eruption in 79 A.D., were two identical instances of a square made up of the Latin words: Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas. If this puzzle indeed yields a Christian interpretation, as many scholars believe it does, then that would mean Christianity had spread to Pompeii at a very early date. It’s certainly plausible, as “Sator Arepo” squares have turned up near the sites of other ancient Christian congregations. In Dura Europos, in Syria, archeologists found four of them, all identical to one another and identical to the squares in Pompeii.

Here’s the square.

S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S

It presents palindromes in every direction. And if it is a sentence, a rough translation might be: “The sower in his field controls the workings of his tools.” If we read it as a Christian allegory, the sower would represent God, and His “field” the earth. His tools are His faithful people, who do His will.

An alternative translation might be: “The sower [named] Arepo holds the wheels with care.” If the sower is God, then the wheels could represent the great cosmic vision of the Prophet Ezekiel. The bottom line is the same: God’s in charge here.

Read as anagrams, the lines can yield a horizontal and a vertical “Pater Noster” (Latin for “Our Father”). The two intersecting Pater Nosters, then, would form a Greek cross, with each beam capped by an A and an O, Alpha and Omega.

Wikipedia spells out these details fairly well — alongside a highly improbable satanic interpretation of the square, and a Petrine possibility, and still another Christian reading:

There are also several other possible combinations of the letters in a square form. One of them is as follows. If we take the letter o as the basis and then move on the grid as one would move the knight in a game of chess, we get twice the Latin words “Oro Te, Pater” (“I beg You, Father”). The unused letters are s, a, n, a, s, which form the word “sanas” (“You heal”).

The problem, of course, is that the puzzlers of antiquity were not wusses. So they didn’t post the answers whenever they posted a puzzle. Thus, they’ve left us with the enigma of this particular puzzle’s meaning.

As for me (and my house): I’ll lean, with the best and brightest, on “Our Father.”

Someone wrote last night to ask about the mosaic atop my blog. It’s from Ravenna, the Italian city whose art was the subject of a previous post. The question led me to more surfing, which led me to discover plenty more free images of the patristic era, in the Byzantine Art category at Wikimedia. There’s also new material in the Paleo-Christian category. Dazzling. Perfect for your screen-saver. And it’s all free.

I make much, in these pages, of the chains of teaching that lead us from the Apostles, through the Fathers, to our own day. A classic example is Polycarp’s discipleship to John, and Irenaeus’s to Polycarp, and Hippolytus’s to Irenaeus … And suddenly we’re in the middle of the third century! Kevin at Biblicalia makes another important connection tracing the famous “Two Ways” teaching from the earliest texts (Didache and Barnabas) all the way to Irenaeus. Check it out.

All of us who love the Fathers feel diminished by the passing of the great Jaroslav Pelikan — though we could spend a large chunk of our remaining years just catching up with the books he left behind on his way to heaven.

Pelikan was a Lutheran theologian through most of his career. He entered the Orthodox Church in 1998. May he rest in peace.

See Mark Noll’s 1990 interview with him in Christianity Today. Visit Pelikan’s web page at Yale, too.

And do read him, especially his The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600 A.D.) and his Gifford Lectures.

Hat tip: Biblicalia.

Known as “the Mother Church” by Byzantine Chrisitians, the Church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), stood for 900 years as the center of the Empire and of Eastern Christianity.

The Emperor Justinian knew he was building a church for all time. He nearly bankrupted Constantinople to build it. The city watched one fountain after another dry up — all the pipes had been melted down to make gutters for the new church. The teachers in the schools were starving. The poor were poorer, and the rich complained of being somewhat less rich. But the church was going up, and for a while Justinian hardly seemed to care about anything else.

His architect, Anthemius, was a brilliant but slightly eccentric engineer. Anthemius invented a kind of searchlight, and he used it to play practical jokes on his neighbors. He also invented a steam engine, but it was only a mechanical toy. Anthemius was just the sort of mildly unbalanced architect who would try something just because it was supposed to be impossible, and just the sort to build the most magnificent church in the world — or die trying.

The impossible problem was this: how do you give a building both light and space? The bigger the building, the heavier the roof. The heavier the roof, the thicker the supports it needs, and the less space there is for letting in light.

Anthemius’ answer was a huge, shallow dome. It ought to have been impossible. Nothing like it had ever been done before — a big dome usually has to be tall, like the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome or the Capitol in Washington, in order to hold itself up. Even if the dome could be built, the supports for it would have to be so thick that they would ruin the effect of light and space.

But nothing seemed impossible for Anthemius. He solved the problem by setting the dome on half-domes, so that the whole structure could rest on four widely spaced piers. Around the circumference of the dome were so many windows that the dome seemed to float over the church. Provincial visitors sometimes believed the story that the dome hung from heaven on a golden chain.

Anthemius had solved the impossible problem—at least so it seemed. When Justinian finally entered the finished church, he looked up at a mosaic picture of Solomon. “Glory to God,” said the Emperor, “who has found me worthy to finish such a great work — surpassing even you, Solomon.”

A few years later, the impossible dome fell down.

Even making the dome slightly taller didn’t solve the structural problems. But the dome was too beautiful to give up on. When it was rebuilt for the last time, the builders took no chances. Exceptionally holy men came to spit some of their holiness into the mortar. A saint’s relic was built into every twelfth course of bricks. And every brick was stamped with the initials of the verse, “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved.”

With all that supernatural help, the dome stayed up. Earthquakes, sieges, and periods of neglect have taken their toll on the building, but with the help of occasional emergency repairs, the dome is still there today — though the building the Turks call “Aya Sofia” is now a state-run museum. The last liturgy was offered there in 1453. Afterward, the building was converted to a mosque.

The Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople hosts a lovely website of high-quality photos of the Mother Church. Don’t miss it.