The Assyrian International News Agency reports on China’s famous eighth-century Christian monument.

In a country that has displayed a positive obsession with recording its history on plaques and standing stones over thousands of years, China’s so-called Nestorian Monument is still its best-known inscribed tablet in the West. Unearthed in Xian in 1625, it’s dated 781 and pays tribute, in 1,800 Chinese characters and passages written in Syriac, to a “luminous religion” and its propagation in the Middle Kingdom. It bears a cruciform design above its title and describes a belief system that had come to China from afar and included a three-in-one god, a virgin birth, an evil force called Sadan, and ministers who traveled the earth and, making no distinction between rich and poor, brought the good news to all and sundry.

This has always been understood as referring to the Nestorian Church, a branch of Christianity that held a dissenting view of the dual nature (both man and god) of Jesus, and was widely active in Asia during the first millennium. Genghis Khan’s mother was a Nestorian Christian, and the church used Syriac for its liturgy. A notably tolerant attitude to imported religions held sway under several emperors during the Tang Dynasty, but suddenly all foreign religious sects were proscribed in China in the years 842 to 845, and the inscribed stone was probably buried then in order to hide it.

All this is lead-up to a review of Michael Keevak’s book The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916.

The London Telegraph tells of a 1,400-year-old Lombard warrior skeleton discovered, buried with his horse, in Italy.

In my book of historical sketches, The Resilient Church: The Glory, the Shame, and the Hope for Tomorrow, I speak at length about the Lombards, who were a thorn in the side of Pope St. Gregory the Great. It’s quite possible that this equestrian corpse was one of those very thorns. The years match up.

Here’s a snippet of my telling:

When Gregory heard that he had been elected, he was dismayed. It would be hard to imagine a more difficult time to become Pope. The savage and heretical Lombards were doing their best to turn Italy into a wasteland, and the Emperor’s exarch (the Greek term for a governor) at Ravenna had thrown up his hands and admitted that he could do nothing to protect Rome. The river Tiber had overflowed into the granaries and ruined Rome’s food supply. The unsanitary conditions after the flood bred the epidemic that had killed Pope Pelagius. With all these disasters facing them at once, the people of Rome expected more than leadership from their new pope. They expected miracles. No wonder Gregory tried to run away! …

These Lombards were a particularly vicious sort of barbarian, at least to their enemies. They massacred everyone in their path, except for the few who might be useful as slaves. The Lombards who weren’t pagans were Arians, so they had no qualms about plundering the orthodox churches and slaughtering the clergy. Cities emptied as they approached, and soon Rome and Ravenna were the only substantial cities left in the northern half of Italy…

Biting your nails? Find out how the story ends. Order the book now and read the rest (and feed my children).

That ancient Christian obelisk, looted by Mussolini from Ethiopia, is being re-erected in its homeland — an archeologically delicate operation:

The site is sensitive because the obelisk is the second of a group of six that may have been carved when Christianity first arrived in Ethiopia in the first half of the fourth century. Believed to be enormous tombstones, they range from 17 to 33 metres in height, each one unique, but all carved to resemble a block of dwellings several storeys high. Archaeological excavations of the site revealed a dense underground network of burial chambers and connecting tunnels.

For related links, visit this page in our archives.

While at RBTE in Chicago, I bought a lovely, small Ethiopian cross that’s now a constant in my line of sight, right by the computer.

There was much buzz two years ago when National Geographic brought together a crew of academics to announce the newly discovered Gospel of Judas to the public. Now the Chronicle of Higher Education asks: “Did a ‘dream team’ of biblical scholars mislead millions?”

Jim Davila points us to an interesting series on the history of the synagogue. There are problems with his links, and I can find only part III, which covers the heart of the patristic era, the fourth through seventh centuries. Especially interesting is the discussion of the rich Jewish iconography of that period — a subject well treated in this wonderful book.

Jim also leads us to a photo gallery of Derulzafaran Monastery, the Syriac “Saffron Monastery,” including shots of several inscriptions.

I’ve adapted this from last year’s Memorial Day post…

This weekend, in the United States, we mark Memorial Day, an observance that honors the dead, especially those who served and died defending the country in wartime.

How did the ancients keep this holiday? Well, they didn’t, of course, since it’s a nineteenth-century innovation of American origin.

But there’s a sense in which the early Christians kept every day as a “Memorial Day.” They called the Eucharist an anamnesis, a “memorial” of Christ’s death — a God-willed remembrance through which Jesus became really present.

And they marked not only Christ’s death, but also the days of the saints who died in Christ, especially the martyrs. Very early, the Church’s calendar began to teem with feast days honoring the dead, and the living Christians gained some notoriety for their treatment of the deceased.

Cremation had long been the norm in most societies of the pagan Roman Empire. Jews, however, followed the custom of burying their dead. Christians did, too, and looked upon “Christian burial” as an expression of their faith in the resurrection of the body. Such an oddity was this practice that, in many locales, it earned Christians a derogatory nickname: “The Diggers.”

Yet the pagans also honored their dead, often with lavish funeral rites. One common component, in Greek and Roman cultures, was the funeral banquet. The empire had many laws regulating the practice of funerary societies, clubs that would guarantee a decent send-off and a festive memorial for their members. Benign local officials sometimes chose to look upon Christian churches as funerary societies, since they seemed to fulfill the same purpose.

Roman families actually hosted severals banquets to honor their recently deceased: one at the gravesite the day of the funeral; the second at the end of nine days of mourning; others on specified religious holidays; and one major banquet on the birthday of the deceased. (See the excellent discussion of these meals in Dennis E. Smith’s From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World. It’s a fascinating study, in spite of its very low-church conclusions.)

Christians adapted the ancient rites as their own — or saw no reason to abandon them completely after conversion. Like the former pagans themselves, the pagan customs were thoroughly converted — baptized, as it were, purified and rendered a new creation. One major Christian difference was in giving bodies a decent burial. This is abundantly evident in the recently discovered catacombs in Rome, where hundreds of corpses were found well dressed and placed with reverence.

Christians also kept the custom of funerary banquets. In some places they may have taken the form of an “Agape,” or love-feast, as we find recorded in the New Testament Letter of St. Jude. Another possibility is that the funeral Eucharist was observed as part of a fuller banquet, a practice we find in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter 11). In some churches the funeral was certainly marked by a Eucharist at the gravesite. We have a very early record of the graveside practice, from the mid-second century, in the apocryphal Acts of John. These funerary banquets or Masses may also be the meals we find depicted on the walls of the catacombs.

By the fourth century, the gravesite celebrations — sometimes called refrigeria, or “refreshments” — had gained a reputation in some quarters as raucous, drunken affairs. This was especially true of the festivals of popular saints, where the temptation was strong to knock one back for every glass poured out as a libation. When St. Monica moved from North Africa to Italy to be near her son Augustine, the Milanese bishop, St. Ambrose, discouraged her from observing the refrigeria at all — even in a pious way.

The great liturgical scholar Joseph Jungmann noted that the earliest recorded graveside Masses were offered on the third day after the Christian’s burial. The third day — what a stunning symbolic fulfillment of our life in Christ — how beautiful, how poignant, how utterly incarnational and sacramental! Jungmann sees this custom as the ancestor of our current practice of votive Masses for the dead. And he notes times and places where various churches traditionally observed the seventh day, the ninth, the thirtieth, and the fortieth as well.

Some people see the gorgeous farewell passage in Augustine’s Confessions as a turning point in ancient attitudes. There, Monica, who had once avidly marked the refrigerium, now asks her son to remember her in the Mass. It is, they say, at this moment in history that popular sentiment had begun to turn from the rowdy festival to the solemn Mass. That’s a nice thought, but it seems contradicted by later practice, as Christians continued to mark festive banquets at gravesites throughout the era of the Fathers.

Two years ago, while researching these customs, I had a “Christmas Carol” moment straight out of Dickens. Googling around, I landed on one of the many lovely sites devoted to the Roman catacombs. There I learned that, in the area called St. Miltiades in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, there is a “Crypt of Refrigerium.” It is very near, the website told me, to the so-called “Cubicle of Aquilina,” which bears the inscription “Aquilina dormit in pace” (Aquilina sleeps in peace). Last year I saw that inscription with my own eyes.

May that inscription one day be true of me, and may it this day be true of my ancestors, whom I remember, as the holiday requires.

The London Times tells of ancient Scotland’s links to Christian Egypt — and the archeological evidence.

The origins of Scotland are enveloped in the mists of antiquity. The earliest written accounts are to be found in the works of the Roman historian Tacitus, whose father-in-law invaded southern Scotland with the 9th Roman Legion in 81 AD.

At that time Scotland was inhabited by tribes of Celtic origin, notably the Picts, about whom very little is known but who left behind many distinctive stone carvings.

Around the 6th century, the Picts converted to Christianity and some of their carvings show links with the Middle Eastern Coptic church. This image (left), of two hands receiving a loaf of bread from a raven, depicts StAnthony and StPaul the Hermit in the desert. It is found on a monastery wall in Egypt and a Pictish stone at St Vigeans, Dundee.

Originally referred to as Alba or Alban, the name Scotland is said to derive from the Scots, a warlike Celtic race from Northern Ireland who invaded southwestern Scotland in the 3rd and 4th centuries and established the kingdom of Dalriada. The first king to unite Scotland was Kenneth MacAlpin, who seized power in 843 AD and ruled all the country north of the Forth.