7 vs 8

022023

When the remote Roman fortress of Dura-Europos, overlooking the Euphrates, came under attack in the mid-third century C.E., the residents hastily fortified the city’s vulnerable western wall. They piled up a massive dry-fill buttress that covered the numerous buildings directly inside the wall, including a house-church and a synagogue. But their desperate efforts were not enough: The Persian Sassanian army besieged and conquered the city in 256 or 257 C.E., and Dura-Europos was abandoned to the desert sands.

While the dry fill failed to save the city from the Persians, it did help later archaeologists by preserving the buildings it covered. Excavators have discovered beneath the fill a carefully laid-out city, with the best-preserved Christian 024house-church and baptistery from antiquity.¹ As I shall show, the intriguing painting that has survived, in part, in the baptistery may best be understood as part of a major dispute between Jews and Christians over which day—Saturday or Sunday as we would call them—is the proper day of worship.

Just down the street from the house-church stood the synagogue, both larger and much more lavishly decorated than the Christian building. These were not the only religious buildings in Dura-Europos, which had at least a dozen other religious centers, including a mithraeum (a temple dedicated to Mithras) and temples dedicated to Zeus, Adonis, Artemis, Atargatis, Aphlad, Bel and still others. All this and more came to light during excavations that began in the 1920s, extended for more than a decade and have now resumed.

Greek settlers established the city on the western bank of the Euphrates (in modern Syria) in about 300 B.C.E., a generation after Alexander the Great. They called it Europos. At some undetermined time, the Aramaic-speaking residents knew the city as Dura. Hence scholars created the hyphenated name, Dura-Europos; for simplicity’s sake, we will call it Dura.

Dura changed hands often. The Romans captured it from the Parthians, who captured it from the Romans, who captured it from the Parthians, who captured it from the Greeks. In the mid-third century C.E., it was serving as a fortress for a Roman army garrison and as a caravan stop on the way to various Persian and Roman empire destinations when the Persian Sassanian army conquered it for the last time.

Dura’s population in the years just before its destruction came from diverse ethnic backgrounds and spoke several languages, including Greek, Aramaic, Latin and Persian, as we know from the written remains. The population practiced a wide variety of religions. The many religious establishments in town competed for members. With so many different temples in this multi-ethnic society, a small Christian assembly would not have needed to operate underground. In fact, secrecy would have been difficult to achieve in a garrison town. A Roman bath operated near the baptistery, and it is quite possible that some members of the Christian congregation were soldiers. In any case, no evidence of persecution 025of Christianity was found at Dura.²

In this setting, religious art had the dual function of teaching the religion’s members, many of whom would have been illiterate, and of attracting new members.³ These functions need not be contradictory since stories, aspirations and rituals of religious groups can be presented to members and to prospective members in similar ways. As noted by Elias Bickerman, “the Synagogue and the Church…needed the means of art to acquire new worshippers and to secure the fidelity of the flock. When a rustic temple of Dionysos pictured the majestic and saving deeds of this god…Jews and Christians had to show that their prototypes of salvation were no less attractive and powerful.”⁴

The church and synagogue paintings were also part of a polemic between Christians and Jews at the time.⁵ Specifically, the paintings depict and reflect a debate over the superiority of worship on the seventh-day Sabbath or on “the Lord’s day,” Sunday. This was not the paintings’ only theme, but, as I will show, it is surely a major one.

The Sabbath/Sunday polemic is expressed in the paintings in number symbology, a common practice in ancient art as well as in ancient texts. In the Dura synagogue paintings, we find frequent references to the numbers twelve and seven, just as we do in the Hebrew Bible. A careful examination of the art in the Dura house-church reflects special attention to the number eight, as the Christian congregation considered Sunday the eighth day.

Let us look more closely at the two buildings. Like the house-church, the synagogue had originally been a private home, but the synagogue had been twice remodeled and redecorated as a house of worship. The synagogue building could hold twice as many people as the house-church, suggesting that Dura’s synagogue membership was larger and longer-established than the church group.

Graffiti (inscriptions scratched on a surface) and dipinti (painted writing) preserved in the two buildings indicate another distinction between the two congregations. The most frequently used language in the synagogue is Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew. Several names familiar from the Hebrew scriptures, such as Samuel and Abram, appear in the synagogue. But Greek predominates in the Christian building, and no definitely Jewish names appear there, providing one indication that the church congregation was not Jewish-Christian.

The only manuscript found in the dry fill of Dura that can be clearly identified as Christian is a parchment fragment of the Diatessaron, a retelling of the four canonical gospels in one continuous narrative. Tatian, who composed the Diatessaron (meaning “through the four”) in about 170 C.E., produced two versions—one in Greek and one in 026Syriac (a Semitic language akin to Aramaic).⁶ The copy found in Dura is the Greek version.

The only definitely Jewish manuscript to survive at Dura is a prayer written in Hebrew. (Many of the other parchment and papyrus texts preserved by the dry fill are records from the Roman army cohort stationed there.)

The Christian building has no depictions of the Temple, the Ark of the Covenant or the seven-branched menorah, another indication that the congregation was not composed of Jewish-Christians.

Indeed, as we shall see, the artistic program of the Dura Christian building represents a rejection of the Temple and synagogue, an attitude incompatible with Jewish-Christianity.⁷ While this does not exclude the possibility of Jewish-Christians in the entire city of Dura, we can conclude that at least this house-church was not established by Jewish-Christians. And this is the case even though some Jewish-Christian communities certainly did exist as late as the third century.⁸ (Remember, the Christianization of the Roman empire, begun under the emperor Constantine, had yet to occur.)

Many varieties of Christianity flourished in the mid-third century. If the Dura church’s congregation was not Jewish-Christian, how shall we describe this small, Greek-speaking community?

Was it orthodox? It is debatable whether we can meaningfully speak of orthodox Christianity as early as the mid-third century. (Perhaps they were proto-orthodox.) The books of the New Testament had all been written, but they had not yet been 027gathered into a closed canon. Marcionism, an influential Christian movement at the time, totally rejected the Hebrew scriptures (and many of the books that were finally incorporated into the New Testament). Paintings in the Christian baptistery such as that of David slaying Goliath indicate that the congregation was certainly not Marcionite.

Were the Dura Christians influenced by gnostic writings? Gnostics taught that secret knowledge was the key to redemption, to being saved from a corrupt world. (The Greek term gnosis means “knowledge.”) In the New Testament, the Gospel of John comes closest to being gnostic: “Know the truth and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). But the proto-orthodox church condemned Gnostics as heretics for excessively emphasizing knowledge as the means of salvation. We will return to the question of possible gnostic influence.

First, let’s compare the artistic programs of the synagogue and the house-church. The synagogue’s 029extensive series of paintings emphasizes acts of God that distinguish Israel’s history from its neighbors’. The holiness and power of the Ark of the Covenant is a prominent theme as is the Temple, which the synagogue itself, in some respects, emulates or temporarily replaces.

The defeat of Israel’s enemies and their gods is also frequently depicted. Not surprisingly, prominent among the scenes are the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea and the destruction of the idols and altar of the Philistine god Dagon (see 1 Samuel 5:1–5). Several religions in Dura, including Judaism, presented triumphalist images.

Turning to number symbology, the number seven appears repeatedly in the Dura synagogue. The continuing importance of the Jerusalem Temple is reflected in one synagogue painting that shows the Temple situated within seven walls, each one clearly indicated with a different color. We frequently find not only the seven-branched menorah (the best-known ancient symbol in synagogues), but also a peculiar depiction of seven sons in the scene of Samuel anointing David as King of Israel. According to the biblical account of this episode (1 Samuel 16), Samuel rejects David’s seven older brothers before selecting him to be king. But the Dura picture shows a total of seven brothers—not eight—of equal height, including young David.⁹ A horizontal line of identically sized figures especially invites counting for symbolic purposes.

Other examples of number symbology in the Dura synagogue include several depictions of the 12 tribes, shown as 12 men of the same size.¹⁰

Incidentally, number symbology was not confined to the synagogue and the church at Dura. The repeated emphasis of seven also appears in the mithraeum at Dura; the altar there, for example, has seven steps, which represent stages of initiation correlated to the planets.¹¹ Plaques in the mithraeum walls depict the 12 signs of the zodiac. Number symbology was common in Dura art.

In the Christian building, the conversion from a house involved removing a wall between two rooms on the south side to make a larger assembly room with a raised platform at one end and covering over the cesspool in the courtyard. The baptistery was in the northwest room; it is the only room decorated with wall paintings.

As noted earlier, the paintings include no representation of the Temple, the Ark of the Covenant or the seven-branched menorah, which are featured in the synagogue wall paintings. Except for the picture of David, the Christian art selections are quite different from those of the synagogue. And the Christian art makes quite different claims than the art in the synagogue.

Instead of emphasizing twelve and seven, the Christian building directs our attention to the number eight. For Christians of that time, the number eight represented Sunday, the eighth day. This was part of the contention between Jews and Christians, and part of a larger intra-Christian calendrical dispute regarding the date of Easter observance. Some early Christians observed both Saturday Sabbath and Sunday, and sermons have survived complaining about this practice.

The disputes included the so-called Quartodeciman controversy.¹² The term “quartodeciman” refers to early Christians who observed Easter in relation to the beginning of Passover, which starts at the end of the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan and which can fall on any day 030of the week. Early Christians observed Easter in relation to the start of Passover, according to the Jewish calendar, since that is when the Christian Holy Week occurred. Later, many Christians wanted to observe Easter on a date independent of the Jewish calendar, focusing instead on the importance of always observing it on Sunday, when the resurrection occurred. This long and complex controversy was ultimately decided by determining Easter Sunday independently of the Jewish calendar. Related to this dispute, the weekly day of rest changed from Saturday to Sunday.

Since early times, Christians associated baptism with the resurrection of Jesus. According to 1 Peter 3:20–21 in the New Testament, “[I]n the days of Noah…eight persons were saved through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you…through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”¹³

Because of the symbolic association of resurrection and baptism, some early Christian communities considered Easter Sunday as an especially appropriate time for baptism. For example, Tertullian (about 200 C.E.) wrote, “The Passover [that is, Easter, before it was separated from the Passover] provides the day of most solemnity for baptism, for then was accomplished our Lord’s passion, and into it we are baptized.”¹⁴

Calendar calculations can be very complex (some Christian churches still disagree on the calendar and scholars still differ on several questions in the gospels’ chronology of the life of Jesus), but the issue has at least one clear consequence: Calendar differences are one of the most crucial dividers between communities. For example, a few centuries earlier, the Essenes (at Qumran and elsewhere) separated from and condemned their fellow Jews who ran the Jerusalem Temple in part for following what they considered a wrong and unholy calendar.

The Christian claim of the special nature of the eighth day, Sunday, was asserted very sharply and bitterly, for example, in the letter of pseudo-Barnabas 15:8–9 (written around 100 C.E.): “[T]he present Sabbaths are not acceptable to me…I will make the beginning of the eighth day, that is, the beginning of another world…We celebrate…the eighth day on which Jesus arose from the dead.”

The claim that Sunday was superior to the seventh-day Sabbath continued well after the first century. In the second century C.E., Justin Martyr claimed that the eighth day “possesses a certain mysterious import, which the seventh day did not possess”;¹⁵ the eighth day, to Justin, was “a type of the true circumcision [newborn Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth day] by which we are circumcised from error and wickedness through our Lord Jesus Christ who rose from the dead on the first day of the week.¹⁶

Origen, an influential Christian who was active at the time the Dura baptistery was decorated (he died about 254 C.E.), wrote that “the number eight, which contains the virtue of the Resurrection, is the figure of the future world.”¹⁷ To Ambrose, a fourth-century bishop of Milan who sought the destruction of synagogues, is attributed an inscription at the Saint Thekla baptistery in Milan, Italy: “Eight-niched this church arises destined for holy rites, eight corners has its font, dignifying its gift. The sacred eight is fitting for this fair baptismal hall: here our people are truly reborn.”

From ancient times until today many baptismal buildings and rooms, as well as many baptismal 031fonts, have been constructed in an octagonal shape.¹⁸

Polemic references to the eighth day rather than the seventh day as the Sabbath (the day of rest) are also frequent in eastern Christian literature. For example, the Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas relates a legend in which the apostle Thomas converts a king in India. Before he was baptized, “the king gave orders that the bath should be closed for seven days…and…on the eighth day they…entered the bath.”¹⁹ The third-century Syriac Didascalia—the title means “teachings” and refers to the teachings of the apostles it claims to contain—tells us that “the Sabbath itself is counted even unto the Sabbath and it becomes eight days” (Didascalia 26).

Though today Sunday is rarely called the eighth day, Sunday as the eighth day was clearly a prominent issue at the time of the Dura baptistery.²⁰

Do the paintings in the Dura house-church reflect this polemic?

Between the two doors leading into the baptistery room we see a depiction of David slaying Goliath—a scene not often found in a baptismal context. Naturally, the Christians identified with David, presented as an ancestor of Jesus (see Matthew 1:1 and Luke 3:31), rather than with Goliath. The small Christian community presumably hoped to overcome, as did the righteous little David, despite discouraging appearances, the non-believers represented by the brutish Goliath.

To the left of the font is a depiction of the Samaritan woman at the well. As narrated in John 4, Jesus speaks to her of the “living water”—hence the connection with baptism. Jesus also says to her that worship in the future would need to be “in spirit and truth”—and that this will supersede worship at the Samaritan and the Jerusalem temples: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father” (John 4:21).

Above the font, Jesus Christ is depicted as the Good Shepherd (see reconstruction drawing of baptismal font painting). By itself, this image (borrowed from Greek art) would not be polemical. However, with the added drawing, beneath Jesus, of Adam and Eve reaching for the forbidden fruit, the whole indeed takes on a polemical aspect. As a whole the scene contrasts the old Adam, the fallen man, with the risen Christ as a reversal of the Fall from Paradise.

On the north wall’s upper register, we see Jesus healing the paralytic. Jesus and the healed man gesture to a third man, not mentioned in the Bible, who is still on a bed.²¹ According to John 5, this healing takes place in Jerusalem on the Sabbath; “the Jews” complain that it is unlawful for the healed man to carry his bed on the Sabbath. The third man (and by extension, the viewer), therefore, is invited to be healed and to defy the Sabbath proscription. In short, in these paintings the seventh-day Sabbath is rejected in favor of the eighth-day Lord’s Day.

This brings us to the most monumental scene of the house-church (see drawing of baptismal font painting). It begins immediately adjacent to the baptismal font, takes up the entire lower register of the north wall, and continues around the corner, extending along the entire lower register of the east wall. This carefully laid-out scene includes a sarcophagus (presumably an allusion to Christ’s burial), which reinforces the connection between baptism and rebirth. A number of figures walk toward this sarcophagus and toward the baptismal font. As one commentator has observed, “It seems that the painter represents the moment before the Resurrection, perhaps inspired by images of the paternalia (visits of relatives to the tombs).”²² Three figures are inside the tomb chamber (as indicated by the open door, for some reason not represented by a rolling stone); five more figures in identical garb approach outside the door—making a total of eight figures. This number of course corresponds to Sunday, seen as the eighth day, and the preferred time for baptism. These 032figures approaching the sarcophagus, then, represent the eight days, from Palm Sunday to Easter. Three of them are within the tomb because Jesus was in the tomb for three days.²³

In the ancient world it was not uncommon to find time periods, such as days and seasons, personified as figures. For example, a draped statue from the second century C.E. found at Aphrodisias (in modern Turkey) is labeled in Greek HMHPA, that is, heµmeµra, meaning “day.”²⁴ Seasons are represented by figures in synagogue mosaics, such as at Beth Alpha in Israel, as well as in early Christian art, for example in the Via Latina catacomb in Rome.

In an extraordinary illustrated manuscript known as the Cotton Genesis, dating to about 500 C.E., the Greek text recounting the days of creation is illustrated with personified figures. Unfortunately, the manuscript was damaged in a fire in 1731, but watercolor copies of some of its illuminations had been made before the fire damaged it.²⁵ In addition to these watercolor copies, the same Cotton Genesis manuscript apparently was used as a pattern book for the 13th-century mosaic decoration on a dome of the San Marco church in Venice.²⁶ So, many of the manuscript’s illustrations can be seen in fairly close—and impressive—copies in the church mosaic.

Thus it seems a reasonable inference that the eight figures in the Dura church scene represent the eight days of the Christian Holy Week, from the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to the resurrection, from Palm Sunday to Easter.

It is uncertain whether the eight days are personified as Christian initiates arriving for baptism, or as “the Marys” (the women who were first to arrive at the tomb on Easter morning), or as angels. Perhaps they represent more than one of the above. In favor of an identification as angels, one could recall an idea recorded by Clement of Alexandria, a second-century Church father, that “days [heµmerai] were called angels.”²⁷ A modern viewer might expect angels to have wings; but in ancient art angels did not always have wings. In the Dura synagogue painting of Jacob’s dream, the angel walking up the heavenly ladder has no wings.²⁸

Another question: Was the Dura synagogue congregation aware of the Dura baptistery’s claim that eighth-day worship had superseded seventh-day Sabbath worship? I think so. One of the synagogue paintings depicts eight identical figures. The scene represents Elijah’s contest on Mt. Carmel with the priests of Baal (see 1 Kings 18). The biblical text tells us that 450 prophets of Baal contested with Elijah (1 Kings 18:19). The synagogue artist knew how to paint a crowd (as in the Exodus scene), but he nevertheless painted only eight prophets of Baal.

That the synagogue artist chose to depict the despised priests of Baal with eight identical figures reinforces the proposal that Jews as well as Christians in Dura were aware of the polemic claims attached to seventh- and eighth-day worship.

The Dura Christian community worshiped on Sunday and made a polemical issue of this 033distinction in their art. The synagogue congregation in Dura knew of this claim and reacted against it. While the polemic between Jews and Christians, needless to say, continued, the terms changed somewhat. For various reasons, including the church’s campaign against the Gnostics, who especially emphasized this symbology of eight, later Christians less and less frequently described Sunday as the eighth day. Also, calling Sunday the eighth day is confusing while still using a calendar with seven-day weeks.²⁹

Many gnostic texts repeat and elaborate on the symbology of the eighth day. For instance, Theodotus, a second-century C.E. Gnostic, wrote that “the rest of the spiritual man takes place on the day of the Lord in the ogdoad [that is, the eighth day].”³⁰ And Tatian was said to have become a Gnostic, though both Gnostics and non-Gnostics used his Diatessaron. The question of possible gnostic influences on Dura Christians will likely be debated by experts on gnosticism.

The wall-paintings at Dura thus provide us an opportunity to see a representation of a Jewish and Christian polemic as it was expressed in one neighborhood in the mid-third century.³¹

When the remote Roman fortress of Dura-Europos, overlooking the Euphrates, came under attack in the mid-third century C.E., the residents hastily fortified the city’s vulnerable western wall. They piled up a massive dry-fill buttress that covered the numerous buildings directly inside the wall, including a house-church and a synagogue. But their desperate efforts were not enough: The Persian Sassanian army besieged and conquered the city in 256 or 257 C.E., and Dura-Europos was abandoned to the desert sands. While the dry fill failed to save the city from the Persians, it did help later archaeologists by preserving the buildings […]