My book Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols was lavishly and lovingly illustrated by the artist Lea Marie Ravotti. Lea has put together an exhibit of the works, and so far three large parishes (all with schools) have hosted it. The most recent location was St. Alexis Parish in Wexford, Pennsylvania. I couldn’t be there, so Lea sent photos.
Surely the most way-cool discovery in the last couple years — and the rare discovery whose hype has withstood scrutiny — was the “world’s oldest church” dug up by prisoners working at the jail in Meggido, Israel (the biblical Armageddon). It came with intact inscriptions hailing the divinity of Christ, and even an altar.
Now Haaretz reports that Israel is going to open the site to tourists.
Megiddo prison, surrounded by prison guards on horseback supplemented by guard dogs, is not a place that many people would care to approach. But if a plan now in the final stages comes to fruition, it could become a tourist attraction drawing Israelis and tourists from around the world.
Behind the prison walls, the remains of the oldest Christian house of worship ever discovered were unearthed four years ago in the course of prison renovations. The plans that are coming together call for the relocation of the prison to a site a short distance away so that the archaeological site can be opened to the public.
Some prisoners, including both common criminals and security prisoners, were allowed to dig below the prison – jailbreak style – as part of the archaeological research. The ancient finds on the site have led to an agreement in principle involving the prison service, the Megiddo Regional Council and the Antiquities Authority for the relocation of the detention facility.
In 2005, work was undertaken to replace a tent encampment for prisoners with detention cells, and because the Megiddo area is known for its rich archaeological finds, the Antiquities Authority required a salvage dig be carried out.
At the edge of the site, a magnificent mosaic floor featuring important inscriptions, including a reference to Jesus, was found, along with the foundation of a building from the 3rd or 4th century C.E.
The finds were evidence that the site was used for Christian religious worship before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, and it is thought to contain the remains of the oldest church in the world.
Officials involved in the dig explained that the finds show a link between the Roman army that encamped there then and communal Christian activity. At the center of the site remains of an altar or prayer table were found.
The site is also identified with the Talmudic-era Jewish village of Kfar Otnai, mentioned in Hebrew sources. The headquarters of the sixth Roman legion was established there along with the town of Maximilianopolis, which is mentioned in historical sources.
According to Hanan Erez, head of the regional council, “the discovery of the finds created great excitement in the Christian world and among researchers of early Christianity. The discovery was even a main topic of a conference of researchers in Washington three years ago.”
Shortly after the discovery at the site, the Antiquities Authority quickly recommended the relocation of the prison so the site could be opened to the public. An agreement to that effect is now being worked out.
Megiddo council head Erez said: “On the site, a tourism complex is to be built, the central focus of which will be the ancient house of worship, alongside, of course, the Tel Megiddo archaeological site, which is also a significant site for the Christian world.”
He noted that the plans for the funding of the project have been presented to the Finance Ministry. The plan calls for the state to guarantee the financing package.
The construction of the new nearby prison is part of a larger plan to build new prison facilities around the country.
Biblical Archeological Review has been posting some interesting and well-illustrated content.
Readers of my book Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols might enjoy The Enduring Symbolism of Doves by Dorothy D. Resig.
Faint writing seen on Shroud of Turin
Syrian archeologists unearthed a Roman and Byzantine-era cemetery.
An update on that Israeli cave quarry: “Among the markings were crosses that were carved into the stone … the site had once served as a monastery or place of refuge between the years 1 – 600 CE.”
The Crux Vaticana — a 6th-century reliquary containing what is revered as fragments of the cross on which Jesus was crucified — has been restored to its Byzantine-era glory.
Ancient churches: interiors and artworks. (Thanks, Binks!)
One of my all-time favorite books is Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church, a noted art historian’s study of Rome’s fourth-century Church of St. Agnes Outside the Walls. Regular readers know that I’m deeply devoted to St. Agnes, having both a mom and daughter who bear her name. Last week I thrilled to learn that Margaret Visser has taped a feature-length documentary on the church. You can view excerpts here. The program’s not available on Amazon, but I learned that it’s for sale on DVD from Les Productions Colin Neale, Inc., in Quebec. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to purchase it online.
I’ve never visited St. Agnes Outside the Walls — yet — though it’s been a dream of mine.
It will be a dream come true, God willing, next May when Scott Hahn, Kimberly Hahn, Steve Ray, Elizabeth Lev, and I lead a pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi. It would be awesome if you could join us.
You’ll find an itinerary and registration details here.
Many apologies for my neglect of this patch of land. I’ve been writing and speaking, and more than usual. Busy season is upon us.
There’s been interesting news in the archeology of early Christianity:
MercatorNet ran an interesting analysis of the recent Saxon discovery: Let’s Have Done with the Dark Ages.
The New York Times discussed Counting Coins to Count Rome’s Population.
BMCR has been reviewing interesting books:
Gregg Gardner, Kevin L. Osterloh, Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World. Reviewed here.
Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era. Reviewed here.
By now you’ve probably seen this: a fragment from the world’s oldest Bible (Codex Sinaiticus, fourth century) was found hidden the library of St Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.
From Turkey comes news of a documentary film about the tunnels under Hagia Sophia:
Chasing 1,700-year-old secrets hidden beneath Hagia Sophia is no easy feat, but documentary filmmaker Göksel Gülensoy has navigated the labyrinths, ancient and bureaucratic, and will soon release his cinematic chronicle of the subterranean adventure.
Gülensoy’s team of two divers and four spelunkers searched the reservoirs connecting the famous Byzantine building to Topkapı Palace and the Yerebatan Cisterns. The spelunkers tried to find the secret passages said to extend from Tekfur Palace, next to the old city walls, to the islands of the Marmara Sea.
Polycarp at The Church of Jesus Christ is giving away my book Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols.
Roger Pearse leads us to a Russian site that stockpiles patristics Greek and Syriac texts.
Archeologists have dug up a paleochristian church in Algeria’s capital. (Hat tip: Jim Davila.)
This is the kind of review an author dreams of. It’s by Kim, a 27-year-old geologist/anthropologist, no doubt wise beyond her years, and it’s on her very cool blog Transitus Tiber. She’s reviewing Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols.
Allow me to give a backstory to this review: I received this book by Mike Aquilina in the mail on Saturday. I started reading it at 9pm, and by 11am Mass today, I had finished it. And that includes time to sleep, eat, bathe, and so on.
I really had a hard time putting this book down. I’ve never read anything by Mr. Aquilina before, but I was surprisingly captivated by the book. Not surprisingly, it’s all about Christian symbols (the fish, the cross, the dolphin, etc) and how they came to be used in Christianity, and where there roots are, such as pagan and Jewish traditions. I learned an awful lot on the symbols I’m used to seeing, and I saw Mass in a different light because of it. Monsignor has a chi ro on the back of his vestments. There’s a chi ro with a crown flanked by two olive branches in the nave of our Church. I knew that the chi ro is for Our Lord of course, but they knowing the history really helped me see things differently. Interestingly enough, our Church has a TON of little Crosses that I never really opened my eyes to see.
The chapters range from short to medium in length, and I think Mr. Aquilina and the illustrator, Lea Marie Ravotti did enough justice to the symbols without overkill or Deep Overwhelming Theology. Each chapter discusses a symbol – the common ones like the cross, the fish to the more uncommon ones, like the peacock, the dolphin, the ankh. I was reading bits and pieces to Greg in the form of trivia and it’s really astonishing how little we both knew about the symbols around us.
If I had the money, I would buy multiple copies of this book and give it out to everyone I knew. It’s broad enough without being watered down, it is narrow enough without missing the point or giving Boring Details That Are Irrelevant. It would be perfect in an “Introduction to Christianity” type college course, or even a nice “welcome to the Church!” gift to converts and reverts. I highly recommend this book.
Carrie at Quite the Normal Life has posted a nice review of my book Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols.
This Rock magazine, published by Catholic Answers, has posted full text of my article The Christian Code: Ancient Christian Symbols Speak to the Here and Now.
My parish church arose during the Catholic building boom of the early 20th century: a Gothic monument in concrete block, stone, and stained glass. These materials were then in abundant supply, as were immigrant laborers, many of them Catholic, many of them willing to volunteer a daily shift after they had worked their night shift in the steel mills.
Literacy was still a luxury, so there are few texts on the walls or windows of old St. Agatha’s. Faithful to the traditions of the Church and their craft, Christian artisans relied on the power of symbols to teach and confirm the faith. And so these simple and mysterious images crowd the windows: a fish, a lamb, a lamp, a dove, a crown, a sword, a burst of flames, a ship, a vine, a hand, a loaf of bread. The designers and builders—and, of course, the pastors—lavished attention on these small details. Why? Because they knew that a single small symbolic image could evoke a warehouse full of meaning; a single symbol could trigger the accumulated devotion of many generations.
It was a big week for archeological discoveries and announcements. We’ll skip over Berlusconi’s boasts to his mistress about owning thirty Phoenician tombs.
These, however, are significant for patristics nerds. Read up:
An ancient mosaic of an angel’s face has been uncovered at Istanbul’s Haghia Sophia.
CNS’s Cindy Wooden filed a cute story on Fabrizio Bisconti’s new Vatican appointment:
Indiana Jones and the Christian catacombs? Not quite
By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Sometimes a job is just a job, even when from the outside it looks like it involves the stuff of an Indiana Jones movie.
Fabrizio Bisconti is the newly named archaeological superintendent of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which oversees the upkeep and preservation of 140 Christian catacombs from the third and fourth centuries scattered all over Italy.
Most of the time, he said, the job is just work and study.
Staff members can spend a full month with surgical tools and cotton balls cleaning a third-century sarcophagus, but then there are those stunning, shocking, awe-inspiring moments of discovery.
Mid-June brought one of those “wow” moments when restorers cleaning a ceiling in the Catacombs of St. Thecla found what turned out to be the oldest known image of the apostle Paul. The fresco was hidden under a limestone crust.
Bisconti said treasure hunting and exploring were not his passions as a youth; he was into literature. But as a university literature student, he took an archaeology course “and fell in love.”
“Certainly, there is great emotion when you find something new, but for us archaeology is our job, the subject of our studies,” he said.
Bisconti said most of what he and his fellow archaeologists do all day involves very slow, painstaking precision care of the oldest intact Christian monuments and artwork.
Very little remains of any Christian church built before the fifth century, but the 140 catacombs in Italy offer clear evidence of how early Christians worshipped, how they lived and, especially, what they hoped and believed about death.
Because the catacombs are underground and were filled in with dirt in the fifth century — when people began burying their dead in cemeteries within the city walls — the catacombs remained remarkably intact, Bisconti said.
Deciding which catacombs to excavate and whether or not to open them to the public is a process that takes years and tries to balance the values of preservation, scholarship, education and Christian devotion, he said.
“Opening a catacomb means allowing its degradation,” he said.
As soon as the dirt in a catacomb is removed, the frescoes and inscriptions start fading and decaying. Human visitors, who sweat and breathe, add moisture to the air, which speeds up the growth of mold and the flaking of any painted surface, he said.
The catacombs are technically the property of the Italian government, which under the terms of the 1929 Lateran Pacts with the Vatican, entrusted their care and oversight to the Vatican.
Most of the 140 Christian catacombs in Italy are in Rome, and only five of those are open to the public: the catacombs of St. Sebastian, St. Callixtus, Priscilla, St. Agnes and Domitilla.
“There are many, many other catacombs,” he said.
For Bisconti, the most interesting of the closed catacombs is one on Via Latina in Rome. “It was discovered in 1955 and we have found more than 100 frescoes of scenes of the Old and New Testaments, but also of pagan myths,” he said.
The most popular Old Testament stories are Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Jonah in the belly of the whale, the story from the Book of Daniel about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace — “all of these gave support and comfort to Christians because they are examples of salvation,” Bisconti said.
Most of the catacombs were built around the tomb of a martyr because other Christians wanted to be buried near a hero of the faith. Even after the catacombs were no longer used for burial and were filled in, paths leading pilgrims to the martyr’s tomb were left open for several hundred years.
Most of the catacombs demonstrate the early Christian preoccupation with the equality of all believers, he said. The bodies were sealed into niches carved out of the earth, usually with very simple inscriptions.
Slowly, however, decorations were added and wealthier Christians were buried in sarcophagi or thick marble caskets.
Bisconti said his office is two or three years away from allowing the public to visit the Catacombs of Pretestato, located near the Catacombs of Domitilla. Never before opened to the public, the Pretestato burial grounds are the site of more than 1,000 sarcophagi, many still intact.
“It was very snobbish, very chic” to be buried there, Bisconti said.
The superintendent added that, whether dealing with a sarcophagus or with a simple niche in a catacomb, if a sealed tomb is found, Vatican workers leave it closed out of respect for the deceased.
Bisconti said it is true that the art and symbols found in the catacombs repeat the same things, “but that is because it was catechetical art. They were advertisements to convince people to convert. They were a way to repeat a message and demonstrate the conviction that it was true.”
I love Bisconti’s The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions. I have reviewed it in several places, most notably here.