Double Identity

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A splendid mosaic now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum is said to portray Christ as Orpheus playing his lyre. A similar figure in a synagogue mosaic discovered in Gaza in the 1960s—resembling the traditional form of Orpheus but labeled “David”—may be thought to support this interpretation of Orpheus as Christ. But on closer examination the comparison falters. Allow me to unpack this.

The Istanbul mosaic—or, more appropriately the Jerusalem mosaic, for it was discovered in 1901 northwest of Damascus Gate during the years of Ottoman dominion over Palestine—is one of the most impressive products of late antique mosaic production to survive from the Holy Land. Although Orpheus taming the animals with his lyre is the central panel, it is only a small part of a grand mosaic floor that includes a series of registers, each with panels of figural imagery inset into the complex and delightful decorative framing typical of Roman mosaics.¹

At the bottom of the mosaic are scenes of two near-naked hunters confronting a leopard and a lion, respectively. Each hunter holds a lance. In the tier above are three main panels, the central of which shows a column or perhaps a candlestick. This is flanked by two female figures in what may be Byzantine 037aristocratic dress. Each woman’s name is inscribed in Greek: “Theodosia” and “Georgia.” These may represent particular individuals associated with the mosaic or structure—donors or patrons—or they may be representations of other well-known figures.² Intriguingly, the two panels on either side of this scene originally appeared to frame unexplained large stones (see drawing). Father Louis-Hugues Vincent of Jerusalem’s école Biblique et Archéologique Française, who first published the mosaic, called these stones “an enigma.”

The principal image of the composition, measuring 6.5 by 4 feet (2 x 1.24 m), has an elaborate acanthus scroll border with animals and busts at the top, a second, narrower floral border and then an impressive frontal image of a seated Orpheus dressed in a chiton (an ancient Greek garment worn by both men and women) and a chlamys (an ancient Greek cloak) with a Phrygian cap, playing the lyre. By his feet are a centaur and the satyr Pan (who holds his pipes), and around are a series of animals (not all are easy to identify).³

The entire mosaic measures 18.5 by 10.5 feet (5.7 x 3.2 m) and is composed largely of tesserae made from local stone in vivid colors, plus some in glass paste. This mosaic, in typical late-antique style, is 040commonly dated to the sixth century C.E.⁴ Its iconography is similar to numerous Roman mosaics from the high empire to late antiquity, which generally depict images in a full-frontal perspective.⁵

In the original publication, Vincent interpreted the mosaic as a Christian decoration on the floor of a tomb chamber.⁶ Since then the tomb has come to be seen as a funerary chapel, with Christian liturgical as well as burial significance. The result has been that the mosaic is regularly taken as an example of the syncretistic assimilation of the iconography and type of Orpheus as Christ.⁷ In making this move, interpreters fit the mosaic into a syncretistic frame of the Christian associations of various pagan iconographic figures, including Sol/ Helios, Heracles and Bellerophon.⁸

The interpretation of Orpheus as Christ in this mosaic depends on an assumption that has hardly been established with any certainty. The assumption is that the imagery of Orpheus really had a strong potential for Christian assimilation and identity—beyond most other pagan themes—rather than belonging to a general category of mythological imagery whose use in Christian nonliturgical contexts (e.g., in domestic decoration, in baths, in silverware for the dinner table, on textiles, even in burials) was common and unproblematic long into the heights of the Byzantine era. This form of pagan mythological survival has been labeled “Hellenism.”⁹ One may indeed suspect that the too-swift desire to identify Orpheus iconography with Christian meanings (and the figure of Orpheus with Christ) in an overzealous strand of scholarship was primarily responsible for the identification of the building from which the Jerusalem mosaic was excavated as a Christian religious one in the first place. Even if the building had a funerary function (which is quite doubtful), there is no evidence but the excavator’s assertion that the funerary function was a Christian one, nor that the floor had some liturgical significance.

In this period Orpheus and other mythological scenes, inscribed donors, personifications and hunting images are all extremely common in Roman and late Roman art—both severally and in combination—not only in mosaics but in numerous other media from relief sculpture in stone and ivory to textiles and silverware. Orpheus with a centaur and Pan is paralleled in ivories of this same period.¹⁰

What is striking about the thematics of the Jerusalem mosaic is the context of wild and tame in which the aggression of the hunting scenes in the lower tier is reversed by the irenic harmony of the Orpheus panel. Whereas the huntsmen are largely 041naked, Orpheus is clothed. The wild world of nature is not only a realm of real animals, but also of supernatural and mythological beings like the centaur and Pan, as well as the hero-god Orpheus himself. The contest of man and beast in the hunting scenes at the bottom is transformed into the deliberate non-contest of the Orpheus panel, where Pan holds his pipes but does not blow so long as Orpheus is playing on his lyre.

Those scholars who support the identification of Orpheus as Christ in this mosaic cite as a key parallel another mosaic, discovered in 1965, in an ancient synagogue (dated to 509 C.E.) in the Gaza Strip (see sidebar).¹¹ There, an image of Orpheus playing the lyre is assimilated to an image of King David. Of this there can be no doubt: A Hebrew inscription in the mosaic tells us that it is David.

Some scholars have argued that the Gaza synagogue represents a Jewish Orpheus tradition whose (now lost) earlier instances may have been influential on Christian art as well.¹²

The only possible surviving antecedent to the notion of a Jewish Orpheus transmogrified as David is a highly contentious mural from the famous Dura-Europos synagogue (in modern Syria), which was destroyed in 256 C.E. Unlike some of the vivid Dura paintings that were uncannily preserved, the 042mural with a musician playing to animals above the Torah shrine was overpainted (perhaps more than once) and exists only in archaeological reconstruction. The figure is seated on a throne, his legs spread wide with the tips of his toes touching the base line of the painting. He wears a Phrygian cap, plays the lyre and is surrounded by a number of animals. The interpretation of this painting is open to much discussion, hypothesis and fantasy depending on the scholars’ observations, reconstructions and imaginative deductions. A substantial strand of interpretation wants the musician to be Orpheus,¹³ while an equally distinguished tradition holds that it is David, represented in iconography borrowed from the Greco-Roman arts of the period.¹⁴ My own sympathies lie here. As Carl Kraeling, who excavated the site in the 1930s, observed in his publication of the synagogue: “In view of the 044uncertainties about many of the details of the area, the only inferences that can safely be drawn … about the influence of the Orpheus tradition … is that the artist fell back upon the best-known and most appropriate of the many clichés for musicians as a happy device for David in the role assigned to him by 2 Samuel 22.”¹⁵

The use of an Orpheus-like figure to represent King David in the Gaza synagogue mosaic and (probably) in the Dura-Europos synagogue painting is typical of a long tradition of the adaptation of pagan imagery to the needs of artists creating Christian and Jewish themes. In this same way the nude sleeping Endymion became the model for Jonah sleeping beneath the gourd-vine.¹⁶ The dress and appearance of Mithras (in Persian clothes and Phrygian cap) was borrowed for the iconography of the Magi coming to Bethlehem. This kind of appropriation, which belongs to the level of forms and iconographic types, need involve no assimilation of content or meaning (unless particular viewers wished, and still wish, to impute such things).

The claim that the Orpheus figure in the Jerusalem mosaic represents Christ presents a far different situation. There is no reason to believe that this Orpheus is anything but Orpheus. In contrast to the Gaza synagogue mosaic, the Jerusalem 045mosaic carries no label or identifying inscription. More than this, however, the claim that this figure is Christ (or the lesser claim that Orpheus imagery evokes Christian connotations) makes strong doctrinal assumptions about the assimilation not only of a non-Christian mythological image-type to Christian iconography, but also of the fusion of pagan and Christian meanings. That is a big claim—effectively raising the interpretive stakes very high—and thus ought to depend on far stronger archaeological and contextual certainty than we have about what the building from Jerusalem with the mosaic actually was. Remember that the identification of the (lost) building as a burial chamber and as Christian is wholly interpretive and rests on no empirical evidence whatsoever in the original publication.

For more than a century since the discovery of the Orpheus in the Jerusalem mosaic, he has been playing his music to a series of chimeras created by unproven and unprovable scholarly fantasies, and he has masqueraded for longer than he deserves under the name of Jesus. It is simpler and more economical to assume that the figure was made to be Orpheus when he was originally laid out on a floor of elegant late-antique Hellenism, whose imagery would not have been repugnant to the probably Christian but potentially Jewish patrons and users of the room over whose floor he presided.

A splendid mosaic now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum is said to portray Christ as Orpheus playing his lyre. A similar figure in a synagogue mosaic discovered in Gaza in the 1960s—resembling the traditional form of Orpheus but labeled “David”—may be thought to support this interpretation of Orpheus as Christ. But on closer examination the comparison falters. Allow me to unpack this. The Istanbul mosaic—or, more appropriately the Jerusalem mosaic, for it was discovered in 1901 northwest of Damascus Gate during the years of Ottoman dominion over Palestine—is one of the most impressive products of late antique mosaic […]