The Archaeological Quest for the Earliest Christians Part 2 by Douglas Boin, February 01, 2018
Extract text and photo of bowl – In part one of this series, I debunked the idea that the Christian fear of making objects or images grew out of the Second Commandment of the Hebrew Bible. In this post, I challenge the idea that Christians left so few archaeological traces behind because they couldn’t afford to make them. While the church’s mission to the poor and disenfranchised may be one of Christianity’s most ethically admirable stances today, in antiquity, not all of Jesus’ followers were part of a shiftless underclass.
The Catacomb of Pancrazio – Paragraph and image below are from this very interesting Italian website where there are a lot more images and info.
Rome, Catacomb of Priscilla. Sandstone Gallery
Origins of the Catacombs
The catacombs were founded in Rome between the late 2nd and early 3rd century AD, during the pontificate of Pope Zephyrinus (199-217), who entrusted the deacon Callistus, who would later become Pope (217-222), with the task of overseeing the cemetery on the Appian Way, where the most important pontiffs of the 3rd century were buried. The practice of burying the deceased in underground spaces was already known to the Etruscans, Jews, and Romans, but with Christianity, much more complex and extensive underground burial grounds arose, to accommodate the entire community in a single necropolis. The ancient term for these monuments is coemeterium, which derives from the Greek and means “dormitory,” thus emphasizing the fact that for Christians, burial was nothing more than a temporary moment, awaiting the final resurrection. The term catacomb, extended to all Christian cemeteries, defined, in ancient times, only the complex of San Sebastiano on the Appian Way.
