One of the many advantages of working at Baylor University is having such a range of very talented and productive colleagues, who do really interesting work. One such is Bruce Longenecker, of Baylor’s Religion Department, who has published extensively in the history and archaeology of Early Christianity. Including both sole-authored and edited collections, he has over thirty books in print. These include his In Stone and Story: Early Christianity in the Roman World (Baker Academic, 2020), and his edited collections on Greco-Roman Associations, Deities, and Early Christianity (Baylor University Press, 2022) and Early Christianity in Pompeian Light (Fortress Press, 2016). With David Wilhite, he coedited the terrific The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity (2023) about which I posted at some length at this site.
With that as context, I was delighted to see Bruce’s brand-new book The Materiality of Early Christ Devotion (Baylor University Press 2025), which answers some fascinating historical questions, drawing on evidence from a range of critical sites. At my invitation, he kindly agreed to do a guest post on this excellent book.
The Materiality of Early Christ Devotion
Bruce W. Longenecker
In the early fourth century, Emperor Constantine (together with his co-emperor Licinius) declared that the empire was to exhibit tolerance toward Christianity. By the late fourth century, huge basilica churches started to spring up throughout the Mediterranean basin. Those massive churches were frequently adorned with elaborate Christian art, paid for by wealthy benefactors.
Nothing on this scale is evident in the first three centuries of the Common Era. The Christian religion was too young and some powerful social pressures were at times aligned against the growth of the fledgling religion. But did these things prevent pre-Constantinian Christians from engaging in artistic representations of their theological convictions?
One preeminent archaeologist, Erich Dinkler (1909–1981) thought so. He claimed that Christians would never have placed the symbol of the cross on public display prior to the time of Constantine; it was simply too dangerous for them to have done that since they were always vulnerable to persecution.
Dinkler’s claim makes perfect sense, and many scholars have adopted his claim. But the archaeological evidence frequently calls into question Dinkler’s claim. Let’s leave to one side the issue of the extent to which pre-Constantinian Christians were in danger of martyrdom (persecution against them usually being only sporadic and localized). Archaeological findings repeatedly testify that Christians did, in fact, place images of the cross in material form. And those findings frequently suggest that Christians were probably doing this more widely than the fragmentary record allows us to see. The surviving artifacts, however, reveal that pre-Constantinian Christians sometimes incised the cross of Jesus on rings and gemstones, etched it into tombstones and occasionally embedded it within floor mosaics.
Even more than that, archaeological artifacts demonstrate that pre-Constantinian Christians regularly found shrewd and innovative ways to depict the cross. In the artifacts that have come to us from the first three centuries, only rarely does the cross stand alone as a self-contained symbol. Usually images of the cross are creatively combined, often with other symbols, to fashion material creations that testify to the artistic eye and theological interests of their creators.
The artistic creativity of early Christians is evident in other ways as well. In my recent book The Materiality of Early Christ Devotion, I foreground the artistic innovation of pre-Constantinian Christ followers, as revealed by the material remains at four archaeological sites. I demonstrate that Christian artistic creativity is evident in numerous pre-Constantinian archaeological finds, not simply in relation to depictions of the cross of Jesus but in relation to other symbolic and artistic innovations.
For instance, in Ostia (a harbor city neighboring Rome) we find a cautious form of Christ devotion, most likely from the fourth quarter of the third century. Christians in that city expressed their theological convictions in cryptic symbols placed within a public space — mosaics embedded in the floor of a public bath. As their symbols suggest, these Christians exhibited a consciousness of their precarious position in the aftermath of a recent persecution that resulted in the death of one of their most prominent members.
In Dura-Europos, the evidence shows an ambitious and impassioned form of Christ devotion in mid-third-century Syria. Their extensive artwork in the baptistry of their worship space suggests that they saw themselves as eagerly awaiting the marriage of the eschatological bride (i.e., the church) to its heavenly bridegroom (i.e., Jesus Christ). In particular, the emphasis on sexual renunciation as an exemplary form of Christian lifestyle may well have had a foothold within this Christian group. A combination of artistic and architectural data from the Christian building at Dura-Europos, together with evidence from the town itself, provides a rich glimpse into how Christ devotion was ritualized in the worship spaces of these Christians who lived in a dangerous and militarized context.
Image is in public domain
At Smyrna in Asia Minor (currently Izmir, Türkiye), several graffiti reveal an inquisitively sapient form of Christ devotion sometime in the late second to mid-third century. The ingenuity of these Christians included puzzling out mathematical interrelationships between various components of their theological convictions. This interest is not surprising in a city where a prominent local non-Christian philosopher had already advocated a kind of “numerical mysticism” for exploring the architecture of divinely-ordered material reality.
In Pompeii, before the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79, we find a somewhat embryonic form of Christ devotion, probably from the 70s of the first century — a time before most New Testament texts were written. The theological ingenuity of a few Christ followers in that context includes none of the complexities we see in the materiality of later periods. Instead, on display is a simple hope for protection from evil forces in the insecurities of life. This hope interfaced with devotion to Isis, a mystery deity who was popular in Pompeii and was known to bring success to her devotees and help them migrate into an afterlife beyond their deaths.
These case studies open new angles of vision onto the ingenuity of pre-Constantinian Christians, as they expressed their theological convictions artistically in relation to the realities of their distinct contexts. We repeatedly see evidence of pre-Constantinian Christians taking inventive initiatives in artistic media of different kinds to express their lived experience of Christ devotion in their respective contexts.
The post-Constantinian age of tolerance did not invent Christian artistic creativity. It merely amplified what was already emerging in small assemblies of sub-elite Christians in the pre-Constantinian era. Archaeological artifacts indicate that some early Christians were not simply repurposing artistic motifs from the artistic resources of the Greco-Roman world but were actively engaging their own creative novelty. Their resourceful creativity helped them externalize their theological commitments in ways that reflected their locally shaped identities.
If we wish to understand how early Christians lived their devotion, we need to look not only to the theological treatises of prominent Christian authors but also to the material expressions of ordinary believers, whose innovative artistry helps reveal their lived experience in specific local settings.
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