Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight, we're gonna be talking about the catacombs. In 1849, a 27-year-old Italian archaeologist named Giovanni de Rossi was searching for ancient Christian artifacts along the Appian Way, which runs into the city of Rome and runs out of it. Well, one day he was looking through the grounds of a vineyard that lay just outside the city of Rome alongside the Appian Way, when suddenly he spied a piece of broken marble. It wasn't very large.
It was something that perhaps you and I would have overlooked. Well, he picked it up and studied it. Of course, he knew Latin, and he noticed on it that there was an inscription in Latin, although the piece of marble was broken and so part of the inscription had been lost. But what was there said. Hmm, Neelius martyr. And that's where the broken piece of the marble had fallen off the front part of the word melius. So he was trying to fill out that word, Cornelius. Okay, now who was a martyr named Cornelius?
Well, there's a Cornelius in the book of Acts, but he didn't die as a martyr. Ah, but he remembered there was a bishop of Rome who died in the year 253, who had died as a martyr. He also knew that this bishop had been buried somewhere along the Appian Way. So he felt pretty certain that he had found the tomb, or at least that the tomb was pretty close to where he was of that martyred bishop. Now, of course, that was in itself quite an interesting find.
But he was really excited when he realized the implication of what he had probably uncovered, because he knew from the ancient records from like the fourth and fifth century that Cornelius had been buried just outside of the main, very large Christian underground burial site that we know as the catacombs. This was the one that was called the cemetery or catacombs of Callistus, who was another bishop of Rome. But what could he do with his find? This was somebody else's property.
I assume he had permission to be wandering about it looking, but they certainly weren't gonna consent to his digging up all of their vineyard in order to try to find the catacombs. So he went and talked to the Vatican office. He was a Roman Catholic, and they agreed to go ahead and buy the vineyard. So once they did this, then he could carry out a formal excavation. And yes, he found the tomb of Cornelius.
And within a few years, he had found the cemetery or catacombs of Callistus, the largest catacombs in the world. But what exactly are the catacombs? Well, they are subterranean cemeteries, that is a cemetery that's entirely underground. They were created by the early Christians to bury their dead. And they are primarily located outside the city walls of ancient Rome. They were created by digging out a certain type of rock known as tufa.
Now, this rock is a very soft, porous, sedimentary rock that you can literally dig out with a shovel or a pickaxe quite easily, like you're digging through, say, clay, something like that. And so it was very easy to excavate just with hand tools, dig out the tufa rock, and create a chamber where you could lay the deceased person's body. But the interesting thing about TUFA is that once it's exposed to air, it becomes very hard.
And so instead of just digging one place and then having to leave that, they could dig down, say maybe 20 feet down, and then start going horizontal into the tufa and create passageways. And then along the walls of the passageway, they could dig out places to place the remains of the deceased. And then over time, what they dug out became very hard and they could dig out even further. And because it had hardened, the chamber didn't collapse. It was in fact quite strong because they're still here today.
Now I want to talk about the word catacombs. What does this mean? Well, most people are quite surprised when I tell them that there is no mention whatsoever of the catacombs in the writings of the early Christians. The reason is because the early Christians didn't refer to their burial places as catacombs. They simply called them cemeteries. In fact, did you know that the word cemetery was actually coined by Christians? Our English word cemetery comes from the Greek word koimit, which means a place to sleep.
Like the New Testament writers, the early Christians usually referred to death as sleep because they had a strong faith in the resurrection of the dead. So their term that they coined was cemetery, a place of the sleeping. That's what they call these places. So then where did the word catacombs come from? Well, actually, originally, it was simply a geographic term, didn't have anything whatsoever to do with the early Christian cemeteries. In fact, the name was there before these cemeteries were even created.
Ancient maps of the city of Rome and the area around it carried a notation on a certain area along the Appian Way. The notation in Latin is oddacumbas. This notation referred to an area around the Appian Way where the land dipped down where there were underground hollows and the ground was somewhat soft. In fact, odd cutacumbas is simply Latin for near the hollow. And as I said, this name was given to that region long before the Christians ever built cemeteries.
Now, not too far from the catacomb of Callistus, there is another underground cemetery that was named after a saintly Christian called Sebastian. Now, in the late fourth and fifth centuries, this was after the time of Constantine, a lot of pilgrims came to Rome to view the underground burial chambers where they felt a lot of martyrs had been buried. And so maps and guides were made to give to these pilgrims who came from all over to see the catacombs for themselves.
Of course, they weren't called catacombs, they were called cemetery. Now, in these guides and these other documents that were made for the Pilgrims, the Sebastian Cemetery, which is, you know, maybe 100 yards, 200 yards from that of Callistus, was given this name in Latin. Cemetery, cotticumbus, od sanctum, Sebastianum via Appia, which means simply the cemetery of the catacombs, the region that area was called for the Holy Sebastian along the Appian Way.
The name, the notation, was merely giving the location of this cemetery so somebody could find it. But somehow during the Middle Ages, when knowledge of Latin was lost on the average individual, it was certainly the language of the learned. Well, during the Middle Ages, primarily through ignorance, people started referring to all of these underground cemeteries as the catacombs, where we get our English word catacombs. So it was actually an accident, but that's how the name got started and the name has stuck.
Now, I've already mentioned that the term cemetery is actually of Christian origin, but I need to also point out that during the first few centuries after Christ, the very practice of burying the dead was especially attached to Christianity and to Judaism. Now, we've all read the various passages in the New Testament that talk about the burial of the dead.
For example, Matthew 14:12, we read," Then His disciples came and took away the body and buried it and went and told Jesus." This was talking about the body of John the Baptist. Or again, Acts 8:2," And devout men carried Stephen to his burial and made great lamentation over him." Like I said, we've all read those passages and certainly the passages concerning the death of Jesus. But I know in my case, I never thought very much about those passages because today, burying the dead is commonplace.
It's the normal thing. But I have found through my studies that the Romans, the ancient Romans, did not usually bury their dead. They cremated them instead. And the bodies of criminals and the poor were very typically just thrown in the garbage dump, where they would either burn up along with other refuse, or they would be eaten by maggots or scavenger birds and dogs. But the early Christians weren't comfortable with this practice.
They believed that since the body was the creation of God, and because it had been the repository of the soul during a person's life, that it should be treated with dignity, even after death. No doubt, the apostles and the first disciples, well, we know they were all Jewish, and no doubt they brought this custom, this respect for the body of the dead into the Christian church, where it then became the custom of even Gentiles who otherwise would have normally burnt their dead, cremated them.
Now, I want to read to you some passages from the early Christian writers. We're going to read just three or maybe four or five here. So you can hear from themselves from their own lips how they viewed burial and the role that it played in ancient times versus the pagans. For example, Mark Minucius Felix, who was an early Christian apologist writing about the year 200. If any of you have read the book," We Don't Speak Great Things We Live Them" that Scroll Publishing puts out.
Well, his apology is one of the works included in that book. Anyway, you can find this in the Ante-Nicene Fathers in Volume 4, page 194.
He says," We do not, as you, meaning pagans, believe, fear any loss from cremation." So he's saying," You pagans think that we don't practice cremation because we're afraid of losing the body." He says," Rather, we adopt the ancient and better custom of burying in the earth," which indeed was an ancient custom because we find it even before the law of Moses that certainly among God's people, they buried their dead in the ground. Tertullian writing about the year 210. This is in volume three, page 545.
He says," I on my side must deride the pagan custom still more, especially when it burns up its dead with harshest inhumanity, only to pamper them immediately afterwards with gluttonous satiety, using the self-same fires to honor them and to insult them." So the pagan custom was normally they would burn their dead and then they would cook their meal, maybe on the same fire and have a big celebration.
Tertullian as well answers that accusation that Christians didn't want to burn up the bodies of their dead because they were afraid they were going to lose their bodies forever. This is in Volume 3, page 228, he writes," There is, however, another way of accounting for this pious treatment. Perhaps it is not meant to favor the relics of the soul, but to avert a cruel custom in the interest even of the body. For being human, the body itself does not deserve the same end that is inflicted upon murderers.
Nagini writes in volume 3, page 565," It is on a like principle that embalmed corpses are set aside for burial in mausoleums and sepulchers in order that they may be removed there from when the master orders it." So it was, I think, a very nice custom, one that reflected faith in the resurrection.
I mean, they knew the body would decay, but it would be nice to place somebody's body where the skeleton would perhaps still be there when Jesus returned, and then that person could be resurrected and rise right out of that same place. Origen writing in the year 248, this is in volume four, page 553, says," We are not at all distressed by the assertion of the pagan Heraclitus that dead bodies are to be cast out as more worthless than dung.
For in harmony with those laws that are based upon the principles of equity, bodies are deemed worthy of burial with the honors accorded on such occasions. So far as it can be helped, no insult should be offered to the soul that dwelt within by casting out the body like it was that of an animal." Now, I don't want you to get the wrong impression. The practice of burying the dead was not unheard of among the ancient Romans.
In fact, often they would have a family cemetery that would be sort of a miniature catacombs where they would dig out just a few burial niches in a small tunnel and the members of the family would all be buried there. But this wasn't the normal custom. It was reserved primarily for the rich and for people of rank. But for most of the people, and particularly the poor, which were most of the people, slaves, well, their families couldn't afford to purchase a burial plot for them.
So like I say, their bodies were simply cremated. And even often, those are the rich. They saw no point in keeping the body around, and so they would cremate them often as well. Because of their views on burial, one of the ministries of the early Christians was to make certain that a proper burial was provided for all of their fellow Christians, even if their family or relatives were too poor to pay for the burial. Let me read to you just a few sample quotations from the early Christian writings.
The first one is from the Apology of Aristides, which was written about the year 125. You can find this in volume 10, pages 276 and 277. Here we read about Christians," Whenever one of the poor among them passes from this world, each one of them gives heed to him according to his ability and carefully sees to his burial. If any righteous man among them passes from this world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God.
They escort his body as if he were setting out from one place to go to another nearby." A work of Dionysius of Alexandria, written about the year 262. You can find this in volume six, page 109 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. We read this on the issue of burial. He says," They took the bodies of their fellow saints on their upturned hands and on their bosoms and closed their eyes and shut their mouths. And carrying them in company, they lay them out decently.
They clung to them, embraced them, and properly prepared them with washing and with clothes. A work entitled The Disputation of Archelaus and Manes, written about the year 320, says this, volume 6, page 180. To all these charities, Marcellus added yet larger deeds of piety. With a large band of his own household, he went to oversee the burying of the bodies of those captives who had died on the march. He secured an appropriate burial for as many of them as he could find in whatever condition.
Finally, I read to you from Lactantius. It said volume 7, page 177, and this quote goes back to sometime between the years 304 and 313. He said," The last and greatest office of piety is the burying of strangers and the poor. We will not allow the image and workmanship of God to lie exposed as prey to beasts and birds. Rather, we will restore it to the earth from which it had its origin. And even in the case of an unknown person, we will fulfill the office of relatives.
For what does the nature of justice consist more than to render to strangers through kindness whatever we would render to our own relatives through family love. So the early Christians not only made sure that the bodies of their fellow Christians obtained a proper burial. They performed this same ministry to strangers and other non-Christians as a final act of love and mercy to those individuals.
Now, how large do you suppose the city of Rome was at the time of Tertullian and other early Christian writers of his age? That is around the year 200. What would you guess its population to be? 10,000? How about 50,000 people? Maybe 100,000 people? Well, historians and archaeologists estimate the population of Rome in the year 200 to have been about a million people. So it would rank up with our large cities right up there with our large cities today, even though this was thousands of years ago.
Okay, so the population of Rome was a million people. How many Christians do you suppose were there say in the year 200? Well, we don't know, but I can almost guarantee that it was at least 10,000. That would have been only 1% of the population. And undoubtedly, it was considerably more than that because when we read the works of Tertullian, he indicates that Christians made up a very large part of the population in the cities.
So, for example, if Christians made up 10% of the population, and if they weren't that largely a group in the year 200, they more than likely were by the year 300, well, that would mean there were 100,000 Christians in Rome, say by the year 300. Now imagine trying to find a way to bury all of those believers. It wasn't an easy task. So the church in Rome acquired some land. No doubt it was donated to the church by a wealthy Christian. This land was along the Appian Way, which is where burials so often took place.
As I may have mentioned, the Roman law forbade the burying or cremating of anyone within the city walls. So all of the burial places of the pagans, of the Jews, of Christians were all outside the city. And many of them were alongside the Appian Way. In fact, for some distance from Rome, if you walked along the Appian Way, you would see monuments on both sides to various people who were buried there, or perhaps had been cremated in a monument built to their memory at that place.
However, as I've mentioned before, it was generally only the wealthy Christians, or rather the Romans, the Romans of high rank, who could afford to purchase a burial ground. There were no public cemeteries anywhere. All of the cemeteries were private, so most people were cremated. But as we said, the Christians preferred to bury their dead rather than to cremate them. So they had to find their own burial ground if they were going to do that.
So the first one that we know of that was actually owned and operated by the church was what is today called the catacomb of Callistus. Now, from what archaeologists have been able to tell, this underground cemetery, this catacomb, started off probably as a private burial ground for members of a family.
You see, even when people buried their dead, just the members of the family, because the underground rock was so soft, it was very easy to just excavate an area and build niches in the wall where you could place the body and then seal it up, and you could have a whole family buried underground in one location, and they would build steps where you'd go down to the burial chamber.
And where you have one of these that just were like one family, it's not called catacombs, it's called a hypogeum, but it's the same principle. So archeologists, their guess is that the catacombs started off. It was just originally one family, a private hypogeum for that family. And then the family made the land available to the church where they could dig out other hypogiums for Christians in general who died.
And then at some point, people began building passageways from one hypogeum to another, and you basically had the beginnings of the catacombs because that's what they consist of. There's little burial rooms, and then there's long corridors, passageways, where you walk alongside, then you'll come to another burial room. But what is unique on the catacombs is all along the passageways, they had excavated niches, if that's the right term, in the wall. These would have been large enough to lay a body.
And then they would brick the area up and cover it with plaster. So inside the walls is where people were buried. Now, you need to understand that none of this was done secretly. For one thing, the laws of Rome required that a person own the tract of land under which he was doing excavating. And you couldn't go down from your land and then tunnel under the land of everyone around you. You had to keep your underground excavations within the same area as the land that you owned on top.
Furthermore, a cemetery like this had to be registered with the government. So the Roman authorities knew where this first burial ground as this first church-owned cemetery was, it wasn't any secret or anything like that. Now I mentioned that this first cemetery or catacomb is known today as the catacomb of Callistus. And I'll give you a little bit of the history why it's called by that name.
Callistus, in fact, isn't even buried there in the catacomb, but he was the deacon in the church in Rome who had been appointed to oversee the catacomb, to supervise the excavation and arranging for people to be buried there. So it wasn't just done nilly willy, but there was an organization to it. And obviously some engineering knowledge had to go along with it. I don't think he had any engineering knowledge. He was a former slave, but obviously care was used.
The fact that these catacombs have now lasted nearly 2,000 years despite earthquakes and landslides and everything else, they're still there. They haven't collapsed. Anyway, this first cemetery is actually mentioned in the early Christian writings in a work of Hippolytus, and this work is entitled A Refutation of All Heresies. It's very interesting because this Callistus was somebody that Hippolytus did not care for at all. Hippolytus was an elder or presbyter there in the city of Rome.
And many people thought that he should be appointed as the next bishop of Rome when Zephyrinus, the current bishop in his day, died. But instead it was Zephyrinus' right-hand man, Callistus, who had been his deacon, was made the bishop of Rome.
And Hippolytus was so disgusted with this with many things that he felt were very lax in both doctrine and practice under Callistus, that he started a reform group, a schism, if you would have it, there in the church at Rome, where for a while you had two groups there in the city, but both Callistus and Hippolytus were martyred, and that brought reconciliation after that. Anyway, Hippolytus says this. It's just a brief one sentence reference.
He says," And after Victor's death, now Victor had been the bishop of Rome before Zephyrinus, after Victor's death, Zephyrinus, having had Callistus as a fellow worker in the management of his leadership, paid him respect to his own damage. He's saying this wasn't to the benefit of Zephyrinus. So then transferring this person as Callistus from Antium, he appointed him over the cemetery. So that's the earliest reference that we have to the cemetery there in Rome, which is known today as the catacomb of Callistus.
Now, this is the only catacomb we have that's called by the name of the deacon who was originally in charge of it. Most of the catacombs are named after the person who donated the land, such as the catacomb of Priscilla, the catacomb of Domitilla. These are all, they were wealthy Christian women who donated the land to the church for burial. Usually they're buried there and so were their fellow Christians.
Other ones are named after perhaps a famous martyr who is buried in the catacomb and other ones are named after a geographic location. But before going any further about the catacombs in general, I think it'd be good if I cleared up some of the popular myths about the catacombs. When they were rediscovered in the later centuries, the catacombs became a very popular subject of speculation by persons who knew very little if anything about early Christianity.
Now, when you visit the catacombs, when you go down inside of them, one of the first things that impresses you is how easy it would be to get lost in them. I would hesitate to venture in them without a guide and without a flashlight with just a little oil lamp or something like that. I think you get lost there and maybe never find your way out.
For example, just the catacomb of Callistus alone, which is the largest one, but there are 39 other ones there in Rome, it alone contains 12 and a half miles of winding passageways. And these are on four different levels. Of course, when you're in there and you realize, boy, it'd be easy to get lost in here. You also realize it would also be very easy to hide in here if you were wanting to hide out. In fact, if you look at all 40 of the catacombs in Rome, their passageways extend out over hundreds of miles.
So in the later centuries, people began to speculate, and it's not an absurd speculation, that the catacombs were built so that Christians could hide in them during times of persecution. Well, not only that, then people began to imagine that Christians held their meetings in the catacomb. I remember visiting the catacombs when I was a boy of eight years old, when my family visited Rome. And I remember being told then that the early Christians had met there in the catacombs.
Now, the rumor that Christians were worshiping there probably came from the fact that there are a number of rooms called galleries in the catacombs that were carved out of this soft tufa rock that were for the purpose of worship. However, these were mainly built after the time of Constantine, which we're going to talk about in just a few minutes. Anyway, the idea was created that the Christians of Rome were under continual persecution from the time of Nero until the time of Constantine.
So as a result, they had to always meet secretly. And so they dug out the catacombs so that they could sneak down there and the authorities couldn't find them and that they were literally an underground church. And even if a Roman soldier had ventured into one of the openings, he would never be able to find his way to them in the maze of corridors, and he would never be able to find his way out either. Well, all of that makes for interesting novels, but it's certainly not the truth.
The actuality is that the Christians in Rome usually did not have to meet in secret. They often did to be sure, and their meetings were often not open to the general public. But in most years, they didn't have to hide the fact that they were Christians or where they were meeting. Now, it is true that from the end of the first century, until the edict of Milan in 313, that it was illegal to be a Christian, and Christianity was an illegal meeting. And you could be put to death merely for being a Christian.
So that was always hanging over your head, but it was one of those laws that the Roman emperors and governors very rarely enforced. In fact, most of the persecution usually broke out at the popular level. Mobs of people would be upset at the Christians. Usually when something went wrong, there was a drought. Ah, this must be the fault of the Christians or a flood or anything like that.
And then they decide," Let's get the Christians." And the authorities, see, wouldn't protect the Christians because they were illegal, and often the authorities would join in and would be part of it. But I say most of the time, the Christians didn't have to sneak around and hide, particularly not in the catacombs. And when persecution did break out, it was in different places. Sometimes it would be North Africa, sometimes in Gaul, sometimes in Rome, sometimes in the Middle East.
It really wasn't until about the year 250 that you got an empire-wide persecution. So it wasn't that often that the early Christians had to hide from authorities or meet in a place that nobody knew about. In fact, when persecution broke out, quite often the authorities would close the Christian burial places. This happened, for example, in the mid 200s during the empire-wide persecution that I just referred to.
Now, the reason the burial grounds were confiscated was not because the authorities were afraid the Christians would hide in their underground cemeteries, because after all, the authorities also confiscated above-ground cemeteries as well. Rather, the purpose of confiscating them was to punish the Christians by denying them the basic rights of citizenship. And they particularly picked on their cemeteries because they knew Christians considered it very important to be able to bury their dead.
For example, Tertullian mentions how the authorities in North Africa banned Christians from burying their dead there in the burial grounds they owned.
He writes," When there had been some agitation about places of burial for our dead, the cry arose, no burial grounds for the Christians." And then he continues, he says," Yet it came to pass that their own grounds, their threshing floors were wanting, for they gathered in no harvest." So when they denied Christians burial grounds to bury their dead, he said," God denied them threshing grounds because they had no harvest that year." So rather than hiding in their catacombs or cemeteries, the early Christians were
often banned from using them during times of persecution.
But you may wonder, why did the early Christians in so many places bury their dead in these subterranean cemeteries instead of simply burying them in open air graves like we do today? Well, to be honest, we really don't know why. One theory is that maybe it was more economical to bury their dead this way.
By building these mazes of interconnected passageways that went on several different levels, they could bury far more bodies under the same surface area than they could if they were burying them in open air graves. Incidentally, even though the largest catacombs are around the city of Rome, Christians all over the Mediterranean world constructed catacombs in their locales. In fact, there are even catacombs in Paris France.
But we particularly think of Rome when we think about the catacombs because there are so many there. In fact, there are 40 catacombs in Rome that have still survived to this day. And most of these catacombs are far larger than the catacombs found in other places. I should also mention that there are even one or two Jewish catacombs near Rome. However, the vast bulk of the catacombs are Christian.
Now, if you're like me, you'll be surprised to know that a considerable portion of the catacombs, in fact, it could be the majority of the passageways and galleries in the catacombs were dug out after the Edict of Milan, that was in 313, when Constantine legalized Christianity. In fact, it may be that the majority of the persons buried in the catacombs were buried there after the time of Constantine.
But now I want to talk to you just a few minutes about the history of the catacombs after the legalization of Christianity. In fact, Constantine not only legalized Christianity, he also made it the favored religion of the Roman Empire. Now, 50 years later, the Roman Empire made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, the state religion. Constantine only made it the favored religion. But as a result of Constantine's actions, there were masses of pagans who began thronging into the church.
They were baptized, but there was no evidence whatsoever of any genuine new birth in their lives. And in a few decades, having these masses throng into the church without truly being converted, without truly being regenerated, it obviously changed the whole character of Christianity. And one of these changes, and there were many that came in after Constantine, was the near worship of the martyrs from the early pre-Nicene period. Now, the early Christians had always held their martyrs in very high esteem.
And it was very common in most churches that on the anniversary of the date of martyrdom of somebody from their church, that they would have a commemoration service. But that's all it was. It was esteem and honor paid to these heroes of the faith. But now in the fourth century, that is the 300s, after the period of Constantine, after his reign or during his reign, you see something else emerging.
And that is the idea that these martyrs, which eventually became the saints of the church that we know of today, there was this idea that they could help the living. And that's a radical change from simply honoring somebody and approaching them like they have some sort of divine status.
To give you an illustration, let's say here in America, most secular Americans would admire the heroes of this country, the fathers of this country, people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, men like that, but nobody, certainly nobody in the secular world, I don't think anybody anywhere would think that those men could help the country right now. Well, it seems the same thing.
The early Christians held out their martyrs as being heroes of the faith and paid them the sort of esteem that the secular world and unfortunately even Christians would pay to their national leaders. The Christians paid that sort of respect to the heroes of the faith. But they didn't pray to them, and they did not think that they could somehow help Christians today.
But it's in this period after Constantine that this whole system of the saints that is so predominant in the Roman Catholic religion, the Eastern Orthodox religion, that's when it came into being. And of course, the saints at that time would have been the martyrs. And so you had people beginning to pray to the martyrs of old, and obviously they wanted to come in and view their graves.
In fact, the Christians in the fourth century began imagining that there would be some sort of merit to be buried next to the martyrs. So everyone wanted to be buried down in the catacombs where the martyrs were, because in their minds, they were thinking most of the people in there had died as martyrs, when really only a very small percentage of them actually had. In fact, the majority of the graves in the catacombs are those of infants because you had a very high infant mortality rate in that period of time.
Well, Damasus, who served as the Bishop of Rome during the years 366 to 384, was particularly devoted to the veneration of deceased martyrs. So he ordered the catacombs to be extended, more construction to be done to make more rooms in them. He commissioned the building of larger stairways, the construction of many light shafts to provide light down there underground. He also ordered larger galleries or rooms to be built within the catacombs so that services could be held there.
And pilgrims flocked from all over the Roman Empire to view the catacomb.' Cause I say, we were now in a period of Christianity that had dramatically changed from what had come before it. And there was some idea in the minds of people that there was some merit. It would do something for them to go on a pilgrimage and view the relics or graves of the martyrs of old. And so it became quite customary for special communion services to be held in the catacombs.
But this was during the period after Constantine when this was primarily done. However, in the later centuries, I'm talking about the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, those centuries, when the catacombs were rediscovered, well, visitors and archeologists going down there saw these rooms that clearly bore evidence that communion services had been held there. And so they imagined that this was during the time of persecution, that Christians had worshipped there in the catacombs, that that was their place of worship.
But that was, as I said, a total misunderstanding because they had no knowledge of early Christian history. Now, getting back to the fourth century, I was telling you how the catacombs were extended, so more people could be buried there. They were widened, the stairways, bigger rooms were built down there to hold services. And that continued on until about the year 410. And that's when Alaric the Visigoths sacked Rome. Now, he went on after sacking Rome, he and his troops, they left.
But the people of Rome, who at that period of time were all professing to be Christians except perhaps for some Jews, they no longer felt secure outside the walls of Rome. They didn't necessarily feel that secure within the walls, but outside, they realized how vulnerable property outside the walls were. And so they quit using the catacombs for burials because the catacombs were all located outside of the walls of Rome.
During the fifth and sixth centuries, wave after wave of invaders swept throughout Italy, and many of them came to the city of Rome. And some of these barbarian invaders broke into the catacombs and desecrated some of the graves that were in there.
As a result of this in the eighth century and the early part of the ninth century, the various popes of Rome had all of the bones of the martyrs and any that they considered to be" saints," removed from the catacombs and brought within the city walls, and then they were buried underneath various churches within the city wall of Rome, and that's where they still are.
And then after that was done, the catacombs were pretty much abandoned because the whole reason Pilgrims went there was to view the relics of the dead martyrs in so-called saints, because now the term was being used to refer to Christians who were particularly godly instead of referring to all Christians the way the term was used in the New Testament and in the pre-Nicene period. So once they quit using them, over a period of time, there would be rock slides that would cover up the entrances.
Vegetation grew over them. And within a century, nobody even knew where they were again. In fact, they were totally forgotten about after that. It wasn't until the latter part of the 16th century, about 1,000 years later, that the catacombs were rediscovered. This was by an archaeologist named Antonio Bosio who uncovered 30 of the surviving catacombs of Rome. And he tried to do it in a scientific manner, although he made a number of mistakes guessing who certain graves were for and things like that.
But after his death, any semblance of scientific exploration of the catacombs simply disappeared. And people went down into them, but they really didn't know what the catacombs were. I mean, they were obviously burial grounds, but that's about all they knew. And they didn't know that the popes had already removed the bones of all of the martyrs and saints, putting saints in quotation marks there, from the catacombs. So they imagined that these were still bones of various Catholic saints or pre-Nicene saints.
And so they took these bones out and then they would sell them as relics or pass them on to churches. And there became a whole trade involved of relics from the catacombs. They also took out portions of walls that had paintings on them to be sold or used in worship service as something that might have some kind of sanctifying grace to it.
So they did a lot of damage to the catacombs, tore open, like I say, a lot of the graves because after a person was buried, we'll talk about this more in a minute, their grave was bricked over or covered up with wood and then plastered over. And like I say, most of these coverings that covered the places of burial were torn out. And then you just had the open exposed bones there, which then often were taken.
And in the early 1800s, you had gangs of neo-pagans who broke into the catacombs and wrote some graffiti on some of the walls and did further damage. So it wasn't until the mid-1800s that scientific exploration of the catacombs began again. And this was under the direction of Giovanni de Rossi, who I spoke to you about at the beginning of this message. Now I want to give you a brief, very brief armchair tour of the catacombs.
And I'll use the catacomb of Callistus as a model since nearly all of the other catacombs follow the same pattern. First, you go down a flight of stairs, which takes you underground. The stairway that's there today was built in modern times, but it was built directly over the staircase that Bishop Damasus had built in the middle of the fourth century. Well, right away, once you get to the bottom of the flight of stairs, you notice how much cooler it is down there than it is at the surface.
That's because the catacombs stay at a constant temperature of around 60 degrees year round. Well, the first room that we came to on our tour is called the crypt of the popes. Now, a crypt is simply a word for an underground chamber that is used as a burial place. But now the name Crypt of the Popes is a bit anachronistic since the title Pope wasn't used by the men who were buried there in that room.
Who were buried here were many of the bishops of Rome who lived in the second century, or rather the third century in the 200s. Interestingly, their names are written at the place where they were buried in Greek, because at that time in the 3rd century, Greek was still the official language of the church in Rome. Now later, Latin became the official language.
Now the next room we came to when we left that crypt, walked down a narrow passageway, was another crypt or underground burial room, which is known as the Crypt of Saint Cecilia. Now, here I was quite surprised to find a large icon of Christ painted on the wall. It's in the stylized art pattern that characterizes all Eastern Orthodox icons today. And Christ has a nimbus or halo at the back of his head. Now this really puzzled me because having read the early Christian writings, I knew that they didn't paint icons.
But I wondered, are maybe the catacombs revealing something that the early Christian writings don't bear witness to? Well, I found out very quickly that that icon was painted in the ninth century. And that's a very important lesson that I want you to be aware of. Just because a painting or statue is in the catacombs doesn't mean that it rather dates back to the pre-Constantinian period of the church. So don't put too much stock in something if you see a picture in a book.
It says it's from the catacombs and it goes against everything you know about primitive Christianity. More than likely, it is not a painting or sculpture from the early Christian period, which I consider to be the period up until the time of Constantine. But you may wonder, well, how do you know when it dates back to? Well, I don't think any of us can know just by looking at it, or at least not at a first glance.
But while I was there at the catacombs once I came out from underground, they have a bookshop there that I went into. And there I was able to purchase a fairly scholarly book that contains reproduction of most of the art that's there in the catacomb of Callistus. And with the pictures, it also gives the approximate date that the pictures date back to.
And this would be based on where in the catacombs the picture is, because the catacomb of Callistus, like the other catacombs, was originally was started in the third century, but then a lot of the chambers there were added after the time of Constantine. And generally, as you go lower, you don't go back to a more primitive time like you do when you're digging in the earth. The lower down you go, the earlier the date usually is.
But in the case of the catacombs, as you can quickly see, you of course started off at the first layer, the topmost layer, and then you went down underneath that and dug a second layer and so on. So as you go down to the later layers, you're going to a more recent period of time. So if the art is down there, then we can know pretty certain it's not from the pre-Constantinian period of the church.
Actually, I found that most Roman Catholic scholars today are quite intellectually honest when writing about historical or archaeological subjects. If it's being written on a scholarly level, you have to be real careful about books written for laypersons, books written by apologists. But like I say, just scholarly works written by Roman Catholic scholars, to be read by other scholars, for example, are usually pretty honest.
And after a while, you or I can fairly easily tell by looking at a picture of the approximate time period it came from. Because like you say, when you look at enough of the pictures from the third century, and then you suddenly see an icon as they appear today, you know right away, this is incongruous. This doesn't fit the other pictures. This must be from a different time period. And the scholars agree with that. Okay, anyway, back to our armchair tour, leaving the crypt or gallery there of St.
Cecilia, you walk down very narrow passageways that are lined with burial niches. These are recessions that were dug into the walls where the person's body was laid. And one of the things that immediately catches your attention is how small these niches are. Of course, many of these held the bodies of infants and children. That's why they're so very small. But even the adult burial niches are noticeably smaller than what you would expect.
And the reason for that is that people in ancient times usually were not as tall as people today. No doubt diet had something to do with that. And on top of that, the Romans were not large people. They were noticeably smaller, for example, than their Germanic counterparts of the same time period. Now, to help you visualize the layout of these catacombs, I have submitted a photograph of one of the corridors in this catacomb of Saint Callistus to be reproduced in black and white on the front of this CD.
So if you're listening to this in a CD format, hopefully on the front will be a picture from one of the corridors in the catacomb of Callistus. In fact, the plan of Scroll Publishing Company is to launch a new website that will be www scrollpublishing.com and that it will contain, among other things, some photos from the catacombs so that people can see with their own eyes what these look like, even if they perhaps will never have the opportunity to visit there.
Now, at this moment, the website is not up, but the plans are to have it up by, say, September 1st, 2002. I think these photographs will enable you to see why burial in the catacombs was more economical than burial in open-air graves. For example, one of the photographs shows five burial niches, one on top of the other, one above the other, I should say, along the walls of one of the corridors.
When you multiply that by four levels that are there in the catacomb of Callistus, you can see that you could bury 20 persons in the same above ground space that if you were doing an open air grave, you could only bury one person. So no doubt, this is one reason why they use this method of burying their dead. Now, most of the niches where people have been buried are very plain. There's not even an inscription of who's buried there or any artwork. And today, they've all been opened up.
The little walls of mud or bricks that had covered in the remains of the persons have been broken open, and none of the bones are there any longer. They were all removed by the Roman Catholic Church. I think it was in the 20th century when that happened, so that visitors wouldn't steal them away as souvenirs. Anyway, as you go down these long, dark passageways or corridors, you eventually come to various small rooms or galleries, which can usually hold, say, around 25 people.
And these rooms usually have vaulted ceilings, and there are graves all along the walls in these rooms. Sometimes there are graves underneath the floor that you're standing on. In some of them, the ceilings have been painted, and it's here that you find the oldest samples Christian art. Now, most of the art in the catacombs are frescos. And these are watercolor paintings that are made on the last coat of plaster on a wall while it's still wet. The name comes from the Latin word fresco, which means fresh.
Now, the interesting thing about this technique of painting that I'm sure the ancients probably didn't know, is that the calcium in the plaster combines with carbon dioxide in the air to form a thin membrane of calcium carbonate over the painting, which helps to preserve it. And that's why these pictures are still here today, nearly 2,000 years after they were painted. I don't mean that all of them are there.
Many have been vandalized or taken away as souvenirs, and others have flaked off and things like that, but quite a number have remained. Now take a guess at what the two most popular figures are in the catacomb. If you're Roman Catholic, you'd probably guess Jesus and Mary, but that's only half right. The two most common figures in the catacombs are the Good Shepherd and the Orant. The Good Shepherd probably doesn't need much explanation. We all know that Jesus called Himself the Good Shepherd.
And the catacombs contain numerous frescoes, etchings, even statues of the good shepherd. He's nearly always represented as a young Roman shepherd dressed in a tunic the way the Romans dressed and carrying a lamb around his shoulders. Now you never see a nimbus or a halo around the head of the Good Shepherd. It's always a simple natural drawing or etching. The other common figure in the catacombs is the orant. And orant comes from the Latin word that means to pray.
And so what we call an orant is simply the figure of someone praying. And they all look rather similar. The person is standing with his or her arms partially outstretched so that the hands, which are spread open, are about the same height as the forehead. And this is the posture in which early Christians pray. For example, when Paul said that he wanted the men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, well, that's exactly how they did pray by lifting up their hands in prayer.
But apparently not lifting them all the way as far as they could extend, but just up to about the height of the forehead. When the orant is a female figure, she is depicted as praying with a veil covering her head, because this is how the early Christian women pray. This was in obedience to 1 Corinthians 11:5, which says that every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head. What does the orant represent?
We don't know for certain, but most scholars believe it represents the soul at peace. And that's why you see this figure so much in these burial chambers. As with the Good Shepherd, the orant is represented as a natural, realistic person. There's no nimbus or halo around the head of these praying figures. But those are the two most common representations in the catacombs. But some of the other common subjects you see there are biblical scenes and also symbols of the Christian faith.
Some of the Old Testament biblical scenes you see there are Moses striking the rock, which made water come out of it, which represents Christian baptism. You see depicted Jonah in the belly of the fish or about to be swallowed by the fish. You can also find the three Hebrews being thrown in the fiery furnace. Now, Jonah, being in the whale of the great fish, represents the soul being in Hades, and Jonas being released from the fish represents the resurrection. So that's why it's very appropriate in the catacombs.
And likewise, the three Hebrews being thrown in the fiery furnace is like going into Hades, and then the resurrection is being delivered from there. Two of the New Testament biblical scenes that I noticed are Jesus multiplying the bread and the fish, and also Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well. Now, there are more symbols that you see there than you do actual paintings. And so let me just mention some of the common symbols.
These are often just etched on the walls or on a piece of marble that was maybe put there to mark who was buried in that particular spot. Sometimes they're painted on the walls. But anyway, some of the more common ones are a fish either drawn out as a painting or the Greek word for fish being written there, which was Ichthys. Also you see in many places a dove with an olive branch in its beak.
Some of the other common symbols are the Chi-Rho insignia, a fisherman, an anchor, the Greek letters alpha and omega, and a fish with loafs of bread next to it. You're probably familiar with the meaning of most of these symbols, but let's just go through them quickly. We'll start with the symbol of the fish. The Greek word for fish is ichthys.
And one of the early Christians discovered that if you take each letter in that word for fish, it makes an acrostic that says," Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior." I'll go over that with you. The first letter, if this is what we call" I" in Greek, it was iota, which is the first letter in the name Jesus in Greek. The chi or RCH is the first letter in the Greek word for Christ. The theta or th is the first letter in the Greek word for God.
The Y or U being the Greek letter upsilon is the first letter in the Greek word son. And finally, the letter sigma is the first letter of the Greek word Savior. Once again, if you put it all together, then you have Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior. And so Christians often painted the symbol of a fish with that meaning behind it or wrote out the words. The Chi-Rho symbol, you've probably seen it before. It looks like an English capital P overlaid with a capital X.
And these are two Greek letters, chi, which corresponds to our X and Rho, which corresponds to our R. It looks like a capital P, but it's the letter R in Greek. And these are the first two letters of the word Christ. So just putting Chi-Rho, the Christians knew what that stood for. The alpha and omega you see there, I think we all know about that because it's mentioned in the book of Revelation. Alpha and Omega were the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet.
Likewise, Jesus is the first and the last, the beginning and the end, as Scripture says. The dove with an olive branch in its beak, I think we all know that represents peace. The anchor represents faith and hope. The fisherman either represents Jesus, who was a fisher of men, or perhaps it represents all Christians who should be fishers of men. The bread and fish remind us of the miracle of the multiplication of the fish and the bread, and perhaps was also a symbol of communion and the agape meal.
Now, even though this artwork is simple, the pre-Constantinian art in the catacombs is quite important. One thing it perfectly corroborates the Christianity that you read about in the early Christian writing. So you have two witnesses, but its primary significance is in what is not there. What you won't find in this art of the 3rd century, that's of the 200s are any icons.
Now, the Eastern Orthodox will try to tell you that Luke painted the first icon and that Christians have always had icons in their churches and in their homes and have used them in worship. But the catacombs show that this is a false claim. Because if the early Christians had used icons, well, you would certainly see them all over the catacomb. But the only occasional icon you see there are ones that were painted long after primitive Christianity had ended.
Another thing you don't see in the art of the third century is the halo or nimbus. Now you can find this symbol in the pagan art of the third century. I saw plenty of it in the city of Rome, but you don't find it in Christian art of that period. It's simply a pagan symbol that was later brought into the Catholic Church sometime after the Edict of Milan in 313. Finally, you find almost no pictures of Mary in the art of the third century.
And once again, if the church had actually venerated Mary from the beginning, as some Catholics claim, and had always prayed to her, certainly you would see plenty of pictures and statues of her in the catacombs, just like you do in most Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches today, but you don't find hardly any. In fact, the only one that I saw in the entire catacomb of Callistus was a painting that dates back to around the year 300.
And it's a painting of the biblical scene of the Magi or the Three Wise Men, as they're called today, bringing gifts to Jesus. Now, the picture is badly decomposed, but you can barely make out the figure of the three wise men presenting their gifts to Jesus and Mary. Mary is seated on a chair with a high back, and Jesus is in her lap, the baby Jesus. It's simply a biblical scene. There's nothing in there to indicate it was put there as part of devotion to Mary or anything like that.
Well, in a nutshell, what have we learned over the past hour? Well, we've learned that the catacombs were underground burial chambers built by the early Christians. We've seen that they were constructed as a ministry of the church to provide proper burial for all Christians, no matter how poor they were, no matter whether they were free men or slaves.
We've learned that the early Christians didn't hold their meetings there as popular myth has it, and there's no evidence that they'd even hid out there during times of persecution. We've learned that the art in the catacombs is from both the pre-Constantinian period and the post-Constantinian period. So the existence of a painting or a sculpture in the catacombs of itself doesn't prove anything. It certainly doesn't show that that was part of primitive Christianity.
You first have to find out to what century the picture dates back to. Finally, we've seen that the art of the pre-Constantinian period in the catacombs is free from pagan symbols and is free from veneration of Mary and the saints. It gives us an important window back to a time when Christianity was simple, when all Christians were brothers and sisters, and when Christianity was still biblical.