The principal goal of this engaging and clearly written book is to shed light on how early Christ followers “imprinted aspects of their Christ devotion onto various media of their world” (3). Bruce Longenecker brings significant experience to the pursuit of this goal: the present book builds and elaborates on a series of prior studies by the same author, including, among others, two earlier monographs—The Cross Before Constantine (2015) and The Crosses of Pompeii (2016)—along with more recent studies of Christ devotion at Ostia and Pompeii. As in his previous work, Longenecker’s focus in this book is less on “Christianity” as a discrete category than on “Christ devotion” and “Christ followers,” terms that indicate for him “some form of adherence to Jesus Christ” without necessarily denoting either consistency or exclusivity (10). In contrast to his earlier work, however, Longenecker’s area of investigation here is broader: he is concerned not only with crosses, nor with a single site, but rather with a comparative study of the artistic innovation exhibited by Christ followers across four locations in the Roman Empire. A series of investigations of these four sites—Ostia and Pompeii in the west and Smyrna and Dura Europos in the east—forms the primary structure of the present book.
Following a brief introduction and a chapter on the variety of cross signs in early Christianity, Longenecker treats the four sites in reverse chronological order, beginning with Ostia in the late third or early fourth century and concluding with Pompeii in the first century CE. At each site, Longenecker does two things. First, he looks for signs of Christ devotion in the material record, beginning with the clearest cases before proceeding to less evident (and hence, more controversial) examples. Second, having established a base of possible artefacts relating to Christ devotion, Longenecker asks what kinds of people may have created and interacted with the artefacts and what may have motivated their devotion. For this latter endeavor Longenecker employs not only the artefacts themselves, but also additional sources that bear on the social and political environment of the particular site and period under investigation (regrettably, most of the book’s quotations from ancient literary works cite neither edition nor translation).
Ostia (Chapters 3 and 4) may serve to illustrate both what the author has in mind by artistic innovation and his general approach to identifying and querying such innovation. Here Longenecker focuses his attention on a set of cryptic mosaic designs found on the floor of a room in a large bath complex in Ostia. Based on the room’s sparse decoration and its location within the bath complex (situated within reach of the bathing rooms but next to an outside exit), Longenecker argues plausibly that it served as a waiting room that was occupied by the enslaved servants of the bath’s patrons; the designs on the mosaic floor were not original but were added during work on the pipes beneath the floor of the room.
And what of the designs themselves? Following Giovanni Becatti and Jan Theo Bakker, Longenecker contends that a cruciform design near the center of the room is in fact an ingenious double spelling of the Latin word Iesus, written so that it can be read from two opposite angles. Building on this witness to the presence of Christ followers in the room, Longenecker argues that many of the other mosaic designs in the room may also be interpreted as artistic innovations by early Christ followers. A bunch of grapes, for example, may be taken as an allusion to the wine of the eucharist, while an equilateral cross may show either the cross of Christ or the Greek letter chi (as the first letter of “Christ” in Greek). In similar fashion, Longenecker interprets another figure, shaped like a swastika with a half circle added to the central vertical line so as to make a Greek rho, as a type of staurogram in which the letter tau has been replaced by a gamma repeated four times. Perhaps the most ambitious interpretation in this section relates to a group of four enigmatic letters on the floor; these Longenecker expands imaginatively into a word puzzle containing a prayer to and/or for a local Christian named Aurea, whom later tradition identifies as having been martyred in Ostia in the third century.
Reading the mosaics against the backdrop of local persecution of Christians in Ostia, Longenecker suggests that the mosaics were the product of an agreement between the bath manager and a local group of Christ followers, who used the room to meet together when the bath complex was closed, perhaps even using the baths themselves for the purpose of baptisms. The cryptic nature of the mosaic designs on the floor, Longenecker concludes, was due in part to the group’s caution in the face of recent persecution; at the same time, the fact that they put the designs in a relatively public space indicates that they were not entirely concerned to keep their Christ devotion secret from others. Nevertheless, Longenecker stresses that the designs were not meant for others but for the Christ followers themselves, expressing their confidence in the “power of the crucified deity [who] might protect them from those who would seek to harm them” (82).
The book’s second section, on Dura Europos (Chapters 5–8), is the longest section but also perhaps the most familiar to many readers due to the fame of the Christian building at Dura and its richly painted baptistry. Here Longenecker, engaging with the work of Carl Kraeling along with more recent studies by scholars such as Sanne Klaver and Michael Peppard, provides a solid overview of the historical context of Dura and the content of the paintings in the baptistry before turning to speculate on the types of Christians who may have populated the baptistry. Based on local epigraphy along with fourth-century Syriac sources, he identifies three categories: “Hearers,” “Neophytes,” and “Solitaires” (Longenecker’s designation for sexual renunciants, corresponding to the Syriac terms iḥidāyā and bar/ba(r)t qyāmā). In an intriguing move, Longenecker maps these three categories onto three rooms in the Christian building, arguing that each category of people would have occupied one room during baptismal services. Since, of the three categories, only that of neophyte is attested locally (the other two are attested more than a century later), it is uncertain whether the Christ followers at Dura would have neatly divided themselves into these categories. In any case, however, Longenecker’s proposal represents a stimulating thought experiment.
The third section of the book, on Smyrna (Chapter 9), concentrates primarily on a handful of graffiti found on recently excavated walls in the city’s agora, dating probably to the late second or early third century. Roger Bagnall, who edited the graffiti, showed that some of them were certainly of Christian origin. Longenecker extends Bagnall’s conclusions, focusing in particular on a single enigmatic word square found copied in two locations. Through a series of creative experiments with isopsephy—the practice of encoding meanings in sequences of letters based on the numerical values of the Greek alphabet[1]—Longenecker builds a plausible case for interpreting the word square as containing, among other things, a numerical cipher for the Christian keywords pistis and kyrios.
In the final section of the book (Chapters 10–12), Longenecker revisits material from his previous publications on Pompeii.[2] His analysis centers on three artefacts: a graffito that appears to show the Latin letters viv above a cruciform shape, an ornate cross-shaped relief on the wall of a bakery, and another multi-line graffito that may contain the letters Christiani or Christianos (both readings are conjectural). Longenecker offers detailed discussions of each of these artefacts, arguing that they are in fact artistic innovations of Christ followers in Pompeii prior to the town’s destruction in 79 CE. For many readers, this section will come across as the most speculative of the book. None of the artefacts discussed are physically extant today; the latter two survive only through nineteenth-century records, some of which disagree with one another. Unlike at the other sites, there is no external corroborating evidence for the presence of Christ followers in Pompeii beyond the artefacts themselves. The debate over whether the artefacts are “Christian” continues to the present day and, in the light of the present evidence, is unlikely to reach a conclusion.[3] For his part, Longenecker reserves some of his strongest critiques of other researchers for this section: scholars of Pompeii who do not accept the identification of the cross-shaped relief on the wall of the bakery as a cross of Christ due to the co-presence of shrines to household lares are viewing the material through an anachronistic filter of Christian exceptionalism that draws an overly rigid boundary between Christianity and polytheism. Such scholars, Longenecker states, “have not yet received the memo” that Christ devotion in antiquity was neither necessarily exclusive nor opposed to the use of apotropaic devices (209). Perhaps not. One suspects, however, that a primary ground for scholarly disagreement with Longenecker’s conclusions—whether with respect to Pompeii or to other sites—lies in his tendency to continue pushing past the point where other scholars would simply declare the evidence insufficient for any conclusions to be drawn; to pile, in a sense, possibility upon possibility until the cumulative weight of the thought experiment concretizes them into probabilities.
It is, nevertheless, a testament to Longenecker’s argumentative skill that most of the interpretations he puts forward do come across as at least possible. As Longenecker sums up in his conclusion, “To one degree or another, these case studies in social history have exhibited notable degrees of creative dexterity and theological acuity in the imagination of some early Christ followers” (259). And, one might add, laudatorily, in the imagination of the author. Whether or not one accepts all of his conclusions as probable, they are certainly thought-provoking, and in this sense the book remains a model of scholarly curiosity and creativity. At the same time, it is also a significant achievement that, despite the intricacies and variety of his material and his arguments, the book remains accessible to a broad audience. These two features in themselves make The Materiality of Early Christ Devotion recommended reading for students of early Christianity.
Notes
[1] In keeping with his reader-friendly presentation, Longenecker provides a lucid explanation of isopsephy for readers unfamiliar with the concept. In this case, however, the explanation is hindered by the fact that the first example provided, Ψλα, is misprinted as Αλα (171).
[2] An additional cross-shaped inscription from a Pompeian curbstone, not mentioned in his earlier book, appears in the first appendix of the present work. Conversely, in a second appendix, Longenecker explains that he has since changed his mind about some of the crosses presented in his 2016 book The Crosses of Pompeii, concluding that they are in fact nineteenth-century surveyors’ marks. This material is accordingly excluded from the present book.
[3] See, e.g., John. G. Cook, “Alleged Christian Crosses in Herculaneum and Pompeii,” Vigiliae Christianae 72: 1–20; Bruce. W. Longenecker, “Pompeian Artifacts and Jesus-Devotion: The Contours of the Issue in the Early Twenty-First Century,” Vigiliae Christianae 73: 271–96.