“(May you be well, Apollo, my beloved lord and sweetest) father, and I pray to god that you are in good health and have a prosperous journey and that I receive you healthy among your relatives. For also before I have informed you that I am sad about your absence from among us, lest happens to you what should not be and we do not find your body…” (P. Oxy. 14.1680, translated by Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord, 32).
A 5th century AD Coptic amulet for a man named Mina, son of Euprepi and Zoe. Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (K 08635 Pap)
The Joys and Anxieties of Life
The ubiquity of death in the ancient world led to much anxiety. The papyri from Oxyrhynchus offer a view into the daily lives and anxieties of ancient Christians. Community members, like Apollo and his son, joyfully raised their voices in church through hymn, singing “Father and Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer, ‘Amen, amen. Strength, praise [and glory forever to God], the sole giver of all good things. Amen, amen.'” At home, they decorated their houses with luxurious textiles depicting dancing, revelatory figures, as seen in the Coptic textiles with their Dionysiac imagery. Their letters, however, indicate an acute awareness and anxiety of death, as Apollo’s son writes to his father hoping for his good health. When dead, they were buried in their tunics, wrapped in household linens, and given palms so as to guide their passage to heaven.
Staying Alive
To stay healthy, many ancient Christians wore amulets of protection. Some, like Mina’s amulet, invoked Jesus Christ as a healer to ward off illnesses. These amulets would have been tightly rolled and bound into a small case so that they could be worn as necklaces. Other Christians wore cross pendants, which could similarly safeguard the wearer from all sorts of woes—from headaches to demon attacks!
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- A decorated cross pendant, probably worn on a necklace, with dotted decoration. From either Syria or Egypt, and dated 5th-7th century AD, Currently housed at the Princeton University Art Museum (y1968-164).
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- Late antique amulet from Palestine depicting Jesus raising Lazarus and ritual words; holed so as to be worn. Currently housed in Jerusalem, BIble Lands Museum.
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- The commonly called “Christian hymn with Musical Notation” or “Oxyrhynchus Hymn.” Discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in the 1920s, the papyrus contains the Greek lyrics of a 3rd century Christian hymn, along with musical notation. It is currently housed in Oxford’s Sackler Library.
Recommended Readings
- AnneMarie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
- Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith (eds.), Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Note on the music: The Christian hymn from Oxyrhynchus is perhaps the earliest example of musical notation and Christian musical performance. For more information, see Charles Cosgrove, An Ancient Christian Hymn with Musical Notation: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1786: Text and Commentary (Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).
Paul and the Resurrection
Writing to the ekklesia of Corinth in the first century AD, the apostle Paul explained the resurrection of the dead in literal, physical terminology. For Paul, the dead were fated to return in their corporeal capacities. Paul based this model of resurrection on the disappearance and resurrection of Christ’s own body from the tomb. There is nothing lost in this process. For the Corinthian community to whom he was writing, this very physical return of life and limb may have echoed the very physical votive body parts given in thanks to the healing god Asklepios at his temple.
Terracotta body parts from the sanctuary of Asklepios in Corinth, on display in Corinth. Photo from the Votives Project.
35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36 Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body. 39 Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. 41 There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. 42 So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is[f] from heaven. 48 As one of dust, so are those who are of the dust, and as one of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the one of dust, we will also bear the image of the one of heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:35-49, NRSVUE)
The Return of Flesh
Other early Christians followed Paul’s interpretation of physical resurrection. In On the Resurrection, traditionally attributed to the second century AD Christian writer Justin Martyr, the author fortifies Paul’s insistence that the body itself returns from death. Not only does the body return in its physical form, but its disabilities and wounds return fully healed as well. Of course, early Christianity was not a monolith. In The Treatise on Resurrection, a fourth century text found with the gnostic Nag Hammadi texts, the author offers some differences around the resurrection process. The author recognizes that, while the body may decay and die, the thought and mind of the Christian last beyond death, and they are joined at last with the body in its resurrection.
The Resurrection of Lazarus (6th century) in the Church of Saint Apollinar, Ravenna). Photo from Bridgeman Images.
Recommended Readings
- Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
- Laura Nasrallah, “On Grief: Roman Corinth and 1 Corinthians,” in Archaeology and the Letters of Paul” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 141-176.
- Yannis Papadogiannakis, “Individuality and the Resurrection in Some Late Antique Texts,” in Individuality in Late Antiquity, eds. Alexis Torrance and Johannes Zachhuber (New York: Routledge, 2014), 129-142.
Note on the music: “Christos Anesti” or the Paschal Troparion is a traditional Easter hymn sung in Eastern Orthodox churches. It seems to have been sung in the late antique period, making it one of the oldest Christian hymns. For more information, see Derek Krueger, “The Transmission of Liturgical Joy in Byzantine Hymns for Easter,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, eds. Bitton-Ashkelony and Krueger (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Dying for God
In the first few centuries after Jesus, Christians faced persecution. Christian practices of ‘martyrdom’ emerged out of three different points of cultural contact: The Jewish tradition of dying for the faith like the Maccabees, the Mediterranean tradition of ‘noble death’ (suicide for virtuous or honorable reasons), and Greek performances of tragedy. The Christians who died for their faiths came to be called ‘martyrs,’ coming directly from the Greek word μάρτυς, meaning ‘witness.’ After the encounter with a Roman official, the state murdered the Christian martyr in an extravagant public spectacle. In one case, two Christian women Perpetua and Felicity were forced to fight wild beasts in an arena in Carthage like criminals or gladiators. In John’s Revelation (6:9-11), an apocalyptic New Testament text, the author recounts how, after their deaths, the martyrs lie in wait of the resurrection underneath God’s altar in heaven, as if sacrificed like an offering.
Martyrdom, Memory, and the Ekklesia
A sixth/seventh century terracotta oil lamp depicting Thecla, center, surrounded on either side by the beasts who spared her life in the arena. The Louvre, Paris (MNC 1926).
How do Christians remember their dead martyrs? Besides writing the now-saint into the literary records, passed down through the ages in codices, many Christians inscribed memorials of the dead onto objects. Thecla, one of the early followers of Paul, appears as a figurine on numerous hand-sized lamps. While not as extravagant as the Greek funerary remains that call the dead back to the present, envisioning the ‘witnesses’ of God alongside their tragic ends on objects calls back the dead as a token or memento. In this way, the martyrs could become mobile, with their memory spread far beyond the territory of their death and out beyond the ekklesia.
Recommended Readings
- Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
- Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
- Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
- Sarah Griffis, “Christian Interaction with Greek Tragedy In the Second and Third Centuries,” The Classical Outlook 95, no. 3 (2020): 93-104.
Note on the music: “Aeterna Christi munera et martyrum victorias” (the eternal gifts of Christ and victory of the martyrs) is one of the oldest Christian hymns, apparently composed by Ambrose in the fourth century. For more information, see the hymnary.org, which offers history and translation of Christian hymns across time.
