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Turkey’s Unexcavated Synagogues

Could the world’s earliest known synagogue be buried amid rubble?

By Mark R. Fairchild

BAR specializes in articles about sites that have been excavated, featuring the often dramatic finds archaeologists uncover. But what about finds from sites that have not been excavated (and should be)? We know a lot about the Jews of Cilicia from the New Testament and other ancient sources. Before becoming a follower of Jesus, Paul was a devout Jew from Tarsus, the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia in southeast Anatolia (modern Turkey). Despite the presence of Jews in Cilicia, however, relatively little is known about their synagogues. Indeed not a single ancient synagogue has been excavated in […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Angelos Chaniotis, “Godfearers in the City of Love,” BAR 36:03.

Endnotes

1.

Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 281–282.

2.

Josephus, Antiquities 18.140–141.

3.

Epiphanius, Against Heresies 30.11.

4.

Margaret H. Williams, “The Jewish Community of Corycus—Two More Inscriptions,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 92 (1992), pp. 248–252.

5.

Josef Keil and Adolf Wilhelm, Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua (MAMA) III. Denkmäler aus dem rauhen Kilikien (London: Manchester University Press, 1931), no. 440.

6.

Keil et al., MAMA III, no. 222.

7.

Keil et al., MAMA III, no. 344.

8.

Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Paul Between Damascus and Antioch: The Unknown Years (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), p. 161.

9.

Natural History 5, 22.

10.

J. Theodore Bent, “Explorations in Cilicia Tracheia,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 12.8 (1890), pp. 445–463. Bent’s survey is described in more detail in J. Theodore Bent, “A Journey in Cilicia Tracheia,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 12 (1891), pp. 206–224.

11.

Hershel Shanks, Judaism in Stone—The Archaeology of Ancient Synagogues (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 139.

12.

E.L. Hicks, “Inscriptions from Eastern Cilicia,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 11 (1890), pp. 236–254 and E.L. Hicks, “Inscriptions from Western Cilicia,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 12 (1891), pp. 225–273.

13.

The archaeological remains of synagogues are uncommon, leaving us with questions regarding the origin and time when these institutions first appeared within Judaism. As Runesson, Binder and Olsson state: “Nearly every region of the Mediterranean world has been proposed as the birthplace of this institution, as has every time period, from the age of the Patriarchs to the Late Roman period” in The Ancient Synagogue from Its Origins to 200 C.E.: A Source Book (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 11. The earliest synagogue remains yet known are found in Israel and may date to the first century B.C.E.