Earliest Christian Inscription

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Every so often, when historians find incongruities in an ancient text, they err by throwing the baby out with the bathwater: They dismiss the entire document as unhistorical. This is what happened with one of the most important documents from early Christianity, an undeservedly obscure poem commissioned by Avercius, an early bishop of the church, and inscribed on his tombstone. This second-century C.E. poem, written in Greek, is the oldest existing, datable and identifiable Christian inscription. It contains one of the earliest extant extrabiblical references to the apostle Paul. It is the earliest Christian text outside the Bible to mention in one place several of the most potent and lasting Christian symbols: a shepherd, a fish and a virgin. Further, the beautiful yet enigmatic poem offers a unique glimpse of Christianity in this transitional period, as the church quietly, at times tentatively, began to establish itself in the public sphere.

Despite its importance, hardly anyone today knows this poem—or remembers Bishop Avercius.

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Avercius served as bishop of the city of Hierapolis, in the region of Phrygia, in western Turkey, during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180 C.E.). He was later canonized (October 19th is his feast day). His life story was recorded several centuries later. Today we have almost 50 ancient manuscripts of the Life of Avercius, nearly all of them in Greek.

So highly respected was Bishop Avercius that some of the versions of his Life dub him “equal to the Apostle,” that is, equal to Paul. His life story portrays him as one who imitated Paul, traveling about the Mediterranean world and performing miracles and preaching. Avercius’s greatest deed, according to the Life, was to exorcise a terrible demon afflicting the daughter of Marcus Aurelius (in about 163 C.E.). The Life describes Avercius as punishing the demon by forcing him to carry a stone altar from the hippodrome in Rome to Hierapolis.

Avercius, the legend goes, commissioned his own funerary epitaph to be carved on the altar. The Life records all 22 lines of the inscription, which begins: “As a citizen of a favored city, I have had this monument made while alive in order that I might here have a prominent place for my body. My name is Avercius, a disciple of a holy shepherd.” (The entire poem appears in the sidebar to this article)

From the 19th century on, most scholars doubted the historicity of the Life (and thus the epitaph) for several reasons: First, the Life was written at a late date, at least 200 to 400 years after Avercius lived. Second, the miracles performed by the bishop and the encounters he had with spirits seem too farfetched to be historical. Third, the Life’s descriptions of Hierapolis do not jibe with the geography of the city that has long been identified as ancient Hierapolis—modern Pamukkale, in western Phrygia (see map of ancient Turkey). Fourth, the Life seems to contradict the writings of the early church historian Eusebius (c. 260–339 C.E.), who indicates that someone named Claudius Apollinarius, rather than Avercius, served as bishop of Hierapolis in the mid- to late second century C.E. Consequently, scholars discounted the entire text. Many regarded the epitaph as a fanciful fiction, one of many tall tales dreamt up by the fertile imagination of an early Byzantine hagiographer. It was dismissed as unhistorical and “late” (a dirty word among scholars).

And so it would have remained if not for Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (1851–1939), the great Scottish classicist, who pioneered the archaeological study of the Roman province of Asia Minor. In 1881, as a Fellow at Exeter College at Oxford, Ramsay—with the aid of a guide—trekked through the out-of-the-way, mostly unexplored region of west-central Phrygia. At the time, Ramsay was not familiar with the controversy surrounding Avercius. But he soon would be. Indeed, his discoveries in Phrygia would prove the historicity of at least some elements of Avercius’s Life—including the funerary epitaph. And his discoveries would remind scholars that even when a text is late and contains unbelievable elements, it should not be immediately dismissed as entirely unhistorical.

While exploring Phrygia, Ramsay established that there were actually two ancient cities in this region known as Hierapolis: the well-known city at Pamukkale and a second located in a rural region to the northeast, at modern Koçhisar. This northeastern Hierapolis and four other cities were part of an ancient district known as the Pentapolis (the Five Cities).¹ Ramsay identified the district and then Hierapolis through his 013discovery of inscriptions in the area. In a small village outside the Hierapolis of the Pentapolis (Koçhisar), in front of a modern mosque, Ramsay discovered a marble column in secondary use (that is, it had been removed from its original setting) bearing an ancient Greek inscription. The inscription (now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum; see drawing of Avericus’s inscription) was a Christian funerary epitaph for a man named Alexander, son of Antoninus, who had lived in Hierapolis of the Pentapolis. According to the epitaph, Alexander had commissioned the inscription in 216 C.E. Written in verse, Alexander’s poem begins: “As a citizen of a favored city, I have had this monument made.”

Readers will immediately recognize the striking resemblance between Alexander’s epitaph and Avercius’s. Further inspection of the Alexander inscription found by Ramsay and the poem recorded in Avercius’s Life reveals that the two epitaphs share the same first and last three verses.

Ramsay, however, did not immediately recognize 014the parallels between the two texts, since he had never studied Avercius’s Life. (Remember, Ramsay was a classicist and an early church historian, not a Byzantinist.) But as Ramsay researched his find, he soon learned of the Life of Avercius and its epitaph. Back in Scotland, Ramsay surmised that Avercius’s epitaph was historical, and that it must have served as the model for Alexander’s later tombstone. Of course, critics could claim that Alexander’s tombstone served as the model for the poem recorded in Avercius’s Life. To prove that the Avercius inscription was the earlier text, Ramsay had to find the actual inscription dating to the second century C.E.—not just the poem recorded in the later Life. Ramsay decided to return to Hierapolis of the Pentapolis in search of Avercius’s tombstone.

In June 1883 Ramsay embarked on a four-month expedition to Turkey. He was accompanied by the epigrapher John Robert Sitlington Sterrett, then a student at the American School at Athens, who was later to become the chair of the Greek department at Cornell University. Using the description in the Life as a guide to the region, the two men began their quest.

The Life locates Avercius’s tomb near hot springs at the outskirts of Hierapolis (a description that accords well with the Hierapolis of the Pentapolis [Koçhisar], but not with the other Hierapolis [Pamukkale], whose hot springs lie in the center of the city).² In Ramsay’s day, the hot springs outside Koçhisar supplied the water for a public bath. In the entrance to the men’s bathhouse, Ramsay and Sterrett found two fragments of an ancient inscription carved in white marble; the marble had been reused in the construction of the bathhouse. From the decorative carving, they knew that the broken marble slab had originally been a tombstone. On the left face of the slab, a stonemason had carved a double molding surrounding a laurel wreath with tufts of leaves tied together with a ribbon—a common motif on grave markers. The remains indicated that the stone had been square, carved in the so-called altar (boµmos) form, which characterized local Phrygian funerary monuments. To Ramsay and Sterrett, the shape of the stone recalled Avercius’s tombstone, which the Life described as having been made from a stone altar. The text carved into the marble confirmed their suspicions: Ramsay immediately recognized the inscription as a significant section of Avercius’s original funerary epitaph. The fragmentary monument preserves parts of the middle nine verses, which include such key identifying words as “Paul,” “Rome,” “queen,” “people,” “seal,” “Syria,” “Euphrates,” “Faith,” “fish” and “friends.”

Despite the accuracy of the Life in indicating the inscription’s existence and location, the actual stones show us that the transcription in the Life contains several errors, partly because the late antique writers of the Life did not understand the requirements of Greek meter as used in earlier poetry.³

To translate the text of the Avercius inscription today, it is necessary to examine three sources: the marble inscription discovered by Ramsay, which preserves parts of the middle nine verses; the Alexander inscription, also found by Ramsay, which borrows the first and last three verses from Avercius; and the epitaph as recorded in the various manuscripts of the Life. This has only increased the challenge of transcribing and translating this beautiful, complex poem.⁴

Like many Phrygian tomb inscriptions from Greco-Roman antiquity, Avercius’s poem opens with a description of 015how the monument came to be built and a declaration of civic pride. Avercius describes himself as “a citizen of a favored city” who commissioned the monument so that his body will rest in “a prominent place” (verses 1–2). We are then introduced to Avercius’s teacher, “the holy shepherd,” who commands him to travel from the remote Pentapolis city of Hierapolis, in western Turkey, to the largest Mediterranean city, Rome (verses 3–6). Avercius then returns east by carriage, traveling through Syria, into the easternmost regions of the Roman Empire, to Mesopotamia (verses 7–11a). Avercius catalogues what he sees: In Rome, he gazes upon a “kingdom,” “a golden-robed and golden-sandalled queen”; he watches “the people”—probably a reference to the Christian community of Rome. He sees “the soil of Syria” and numerous cities across the Euphrates, all unnamed except for Nisibis (modern Nusaybin), in southeastern Turkey, which was one of the major centers of early Christianity in Mesopotamia. A solitary traveler, Avercius does not engage with those around him but prefers to keep a distance as he carefully observes his surroundings. In so behaving, Avercius follows the example of the poem’s “shepherd” with “huge eyes” that see “everywhere.”

The poem then shifts from recounting Avercius’s activities to describing his traveling companions (verses 11b–12a): the “brethren,” “Paul” and the “holy virgin.” Faith, too, serves as a sort of tour guide: “Faith led me everywhere,” Avercius declares. Two of the bishop’s escorts—faith and the holy virgin—supply our traveler with an enormous, pure fish, caught in a spring (verses 12b–16). At this point, the tone shifts. Avercius is not merely the observer of the previous verses. He dines with his friends as they partake of fish, bread and wine—probably a lightly veiled reference to the sacrament of the Eucharist. Avercius is no longer the prime mover behind the activities described. He receives food, for example, rather than gives it. Avercius is not the agent of this meal, but 016the recipient, the epitaph seems to imply. The eucharistic meal seems to have been understood as a prized gift from a higher power.^a

The poem culminates with a description of the “enormous and pure” fish (verse 14). The poet has used all his tools to emphasize this passage: This line alone of the poem has five trisyllabic dactyls (DA-da-da, as in the word BAR-na-cle). In addition, the fish section is full of alliteration: The p sound (Greek pi and phi) appears 13 times here.

Avercius’s poem closes with a standard type of Phrygian postscript, in which the bishop asks all who “understand” his epitaph to pray for him, and threatens anyone who buries someone else in his grave (verses 17–22).

So when was this inscription carved, and who was this Avercius? In the inscription Avercius says that he commissioned the monument “while alive” (a common practice in Phrygia in his day), at the age of 72. We know it was written before the Alexander inscription of 216 C.E., which quotes it. As we have already seen, the church historian Eusebius identified the bishop of Hierapolis in this period as one Claudius Apollinarius. But we now know there was more than one Hierapolis in ancient times. Claudius must have been bishop of the western city (Pamukkale). Eusebius also refers to one Avircius Marcellus, who was apparently heavily involved in the church in the Phrygian Pentapolis region in the early 190s C.E.⁵ I believe this is our Avercius.

This makes the Avercius epitaph the oldest Christian inscription that we can date with a high degree of certainty (between 190 and 216 C.E.). It is thus one of the oldest pieces of physical evidence of early Christianity, along with some wall paintings from Roman catacombs and the earliest New Testament papyri.⁶ Of course, much of the New Testament and other early Christian texts (such as the writings of the apostolic fathers) originated earlier than the Avercius inscription (c. 50 to 150 C.E.), but the extant manuscripts date hundreds of years later.^b Furthermore, unlike texts transmitted over a span of centuries, the Avercius inscription comes to us, at least in good part, unmediated by copyists.

The enigmatic text provides us with some of our earliest information about the Christian movement—its geographic extent, its emphasis on travel, its liturgy (especially the Eucharist), its close relation to the greater Greco-Roman world, its emergence as a religion that built monuments and created beautiful poetry. It is thus tempting to look at the inscription for historical evidence of the social world in which Avercius lived. Can Avercius’s meal of fish tell us anything about ritual dining or the rulers of Rome in his day? Ramsay favored this sort of literal reading of certain passages. For example, he insisted that Avercius had traveled to Rome to meet a historical king and queen.⁷ But Ramsay failed to recognize that this carefully 017constructed text is a work of art—a masterpiece of early Christian literature, replete with allegory and metaphor.

The epitaph of Avercius, like other ancient inscriptions (even those that are not written in poetic meter), should not be viewed as a transparent window on ancient times. Indeed, the epitaph probably tells us more about the symbolic language employed by the early Christians than about any specific historical events. For example, Avercius’s journey to Rome and Mesopotamia may have been real, but the reference to Paul (“I had Paul in my carriage”) is clearly symbolic; Paul was long dead by the time of Avercius. Avercius apparently wanted to suggest that he saw himself as extending the work of Paul further east, beyond the reach of the apostle’s mission. And perhaps Avercius was reading the New Testament letters of Paul. Everywhere Avercius goes, he finds like-minded compatriots with whom he shares ritual meals—evidence of the success of early Christian evangelists. Avercius emphasizes the widespread success of the early mission and the universality of Christianity by repeating a variant of the Greek word pas (English, pan, meaning “all,” “every” or “always”) no fewer than eight times. He reinforces pas by frequently repeating the sound of its first letter, pi, throughout the poem. Christianity had begun to permeate Avercius’s entire world, the Mediterranean region that earlier writers had referred to as the “inhabited world” (oikoumeneµ). The Greco-Roman religious terminology scattered throughout the poem led the earliest interpreters to try to demonstrate that Avercius was not Christian at all, but pagan or syncretistic (combining elements from various religions). The German scholar Gerhard Ficker argued that Avercius was a priest of the Phrygian god Attis who journeyed to Rome to see a sacred stone from a statue of Attis’s consort, Cybele. In 1896 the great German historian of religion Albrecht Dietrich proposed that Avercius visited Rome for the unusual marriage of the emperor Elagablus⁸ (218–222; born 018Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), who identified himself as the sun god, to the heavenly moon goddess Urania.⁹ Around the same time, the church historian Adolf von Harnack suggested that the epitaph reflects a form of Gnostic Christianity and traced the “golden-sandalled queen” to Gnostic mythology.¹⁰

It was not only the oblique language that led to these interpretations of the text. Some Protestant scholars (especially Ficker) were eager to dismiss the inscription as pagan in order to prevent Catholics from seizing on the reference to Rome as early proof of the primacy of Rome and the papacy.

Despite these attempts to identify the text as pagan, there is considerable internal evidence that this is a Christian text—not least of which are the references to the “holy shepherd,” that is, Jesus, and to Paul, who is almost certainly the New Testament apostle.¹¹ There are also external factors: The Life suggests that many Christians from the second century C.E. through late antiquity were familiar with the location of the Avercius inscription, recognized it as Christian and made transcriptions from the stone. We even have one example: Alexander’s tombstone. Clearly the members of Avercius’s community would have recognized his tombstone as a Christian monument.

The confusion over the identity of the inscription is nevertheless understandable. The text is extremely enigmatic, even oblique. Although conveying a Christian message, it seems deliberately to draw on Greco-Roman imagery. Further, almost every word in the epitaph bears several connotations: some pagan, some Christian and some that are not religious at all. For example, the phrase “holy shepherd” could suggest the Phrygian god Attis, who was often described as a shepherd, or it could refer to pagan shepherds who brought offerings of sheep for ritual sacrifices. Or it could simply refer to any shepherd, thereby conjuring up the bucolic atmosphere valued by so many Greek and Roman poets. It could refer to the respected virtue of philanthropy, as it did in Greco-Roman literature and art. Or it could refer to Jesus, the Good Shepherd. The same is true of the “enormous and pure” fish from a “spring,” which might recall the sacred fish that inhabited the hallowed springs of sanctuaries devoted to Greco-Roman divinities, or might simply 019refer to the prized dish served by the wealthy at ancient banquets. It might also refer to the Christian fish symbol, which represented Jesus, his followers and the Eucharist. In addition, in Greco-Roman times fish were sometimes used to represent fertility and productive power, which could have both nonreligious and religious connotations, implying growth and life in the face of death, suggesting the missionary success of Jesus (as in the New Testament fishing passages) or simply demonstrating the wealth of the host who could afford to serve such a sumptuous meal.

In antiquity a reader could have understood this text on multiple levels: nonreligious, Greco-Roman and Christian. Avercius himself seems to realize this. In the last verses of the epitaph, Avercius asks those who understand his poem to pray for him: “Let everyone, who understands these (words) and who is in unison (with them), pray on his behalf.” Avercius knows that some readers will not get it and will read the poem on a different level.

I believe that the Avercius inscription represents a shift among early Christians to a more public stance during the reigns of the Antonine and Severan emperors (175–225 C.E.). It is in this period that Christian art emerges (especially in the Roman catacombs) and New Testament papyri appear. Earlier Christians may well have produced monuments, but they were probably not identifiable as specifically Christian. The move to public acknowledgment likely indicated that Christians had attained a large enough membership, sufficient wealth and appropriate status to promote themselves to others and to one another in the form of monuments (funerary stones and inscriptions, graffiti, art, buildings etc.).

Like the earliest catacomb paintings, the Avercius inscription displays its Christianness more openly than ever before, yet its message remains hidden, at least for some, in the oblique language. Christians would immediately recognize the references to the Eucharist and to the apostle Paul, just as they would recognize the face of Jesus in a catacomb fresco of a young beardless man bearing a sheep on his shoulders. But those people outside the Christian community who were not “in unison” with the message, as Avercius himself put it, would simply not understand.

Today we find ourselves in a different position from both the Christians and non-Christians who lived in the time of Avercius. We no longer possess the personal connections to the historical and social contexts that made this poem so evocative and moving for those who first heard and read it. And yet our historical distance enables us to explain the language and images in ways that individuals in antiquity probably could not have articulated for themselves. Only by reconstructing the cultural context of the text and the motivations of its author, as well as translating its beauty and power, will we rescue this wonderful poem from obscurity.