Abstract
When a third-century house church was unearthed at Dura-Europos in the 1930s, it attracted considerable scholarly attention, especially the wall paintings or frescoes that decorated the church's baptistry. But just as the frescoes faded in the humid climate of New Haven, Connecticut, where they had been relocated, they also slipped from the minds of scholars of early Christianity over time. Michael Peppard's recent revisiting of the archaeological record of the church, no matter what one may think of his interpretation of it, serves as a needed reminder to the field. His book reintroduces this important site, and the book's title, The World's Oldest Church, underscores how significant the find is.
Another much-needed service Peppard provides is to bring the material record from that site into conversation with contemporary approaches to artwork and what we now know about Syrian Christianity. While Carl Kraeling's final report (1967) on the house church continues to have great merit, ancient sources have come to light in the last fifty years that give us a fuller, more accurate profile of Christianity at the eastern edge of the Roman empire. Older interpretations of the frescoes treated them individually, tied them to a biblical text, and stressed their symbolic or allegorical meaning. The approach today is quite different, as art historian Thelma K. Thomas notes:
These scenes constitute a single, enveloping program centered not on texts but on the people undergoing the ritual of baptism inside the room [“Art Historical Frontiers: Lessons from Dura-Europos,” Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos, ed. J. Y. Chi & S. Heath—New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 2011, p. 45].
Adopting the notion of ritual-centered visuality from Jas Elsner, Peppard plans to take readers through the baptistry and its frescoes through the eyes of an ancient initiate, with the goal of creatively imagining what the initiate would have encountered. Instead of a text-centered interpretation of the frescoes, Peppard proposes a ritual-centered, experiential approach.
This innovative reading of the frescoes is not successfully executed, however, because Peppard allows a text-centered approach to overshadow what he intends to do. While he rightly notes the polysemic or polyvalent nature of images and the fluidity of texts in oral culture, Peppard permits an assemblage of ancient Christian and biblical writings, over which he shows considerable control, to dictate how he reads the frescoes. The fresco of David and Goliath, for instance, which Peppard initially links with empowerment—an entirely fitting connection in the context of a Roman garrison town—becomes emblematic of anointing and shepherding. Why? Because Syrian Christian writers characterized David that way, not because the fresco actually suggests it. Moreover, because the literature also celebrated David as the psalmist par excellence, Peppard ties the David and Goliath scene to the image of a shepherd and his flock portrayed over the baptismal font. He reads the scene through Psalm 23, finding the sheep drinking water, even though the fresco itself shows the sheep grazing, not drinking. No initiate encountering these images for the first time would have made the connections Peppard does.
A text-centered reading also dominates Peppard's treatment of a key fresco on the wall adjacent the baptismal font: three torch-bearing women arriving at a structure that has defied identification—tomb? temple? house? sarcophagus? bridal chamber or tent? A highly fragmentary fresco on another wall of five women processing suggests Matthew's parable of the ten virgins (25:1–13) to Peppard. In it the five wise ones have secured extra oil for their lamps (or torches) and are ready when the bridegroom arrives. Unlike the five foolish virgins, they are welcome to the wedding banquet, which is what the torch-bearing women are approaching, according to Peppard. Yet if the frescoes are polysemic, as Peppard insists, we likely have allusions to several events: women (three, according to Mark 16:1) approaching Jesus’ tomb, which is a longstanding interpretation of the fresco; a Greek wedding procession to the groom's abode, as evidenced by the torches; as well as the reading that Peppard offers. There is no one correct interpretation.
Such textual interference overwhelms any attempt at a ritual-centered, experiential reading. It does not help that Peppard fails to provide an adequate theoretical basis for doing so. He proposes to ground his analysis in the latest ritual studies but cites only two decades-old works: Victor and Edith Turner's volume on pilgrimage (1978) and Turner's Forest of Symbols (1967). Moreover, his use of ritual theory from these studies is perfunctory. Worse, he cites the Turners to support his claim that pilgrimage and baptism both exhibit a liminal phase, ignoring the fact that they turned to Christian pilgrimage precisely because they did not find genuine liminal phases in the various rites of Christianity, including baptism.
Consultation of scholarship on religious experience, such as the Experientia volumes from SBL, along with attention to social art history and the anthropology of art might also have prepared a foundation for a ritual-centered, experiential reading. John R. Clarke's Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans (2003) could have supported a much-needed exploration of the frescoes’ social location: what does the artwork indicate about those who commissioned it and those who encountered it? A book such as Alfred Gell's Art and Agency (1998) could have provided the basis for articulating how the frescoes interacted with baptizands.
Because the book is so thinly grounded in ritual theory—in theory generally—readers will have to look elsewhere for an interpretation of the Duran baptistery frescoes that takes their ritual context seriously.