Alexamenos graffito

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The Alexamenos graffito

The Alexamenos graffito (also known as the graffito blasfemo, or blasphemous graffito)[1]:393 is a piece of Roman graffiti scratched in plaster on the wall of a room near the Palatine Hill in Rome, which has now been removed and is in the Palatine Hill Museum.[2] It may be the earliest surviving depiction of Jesus, and if so is the earliest known pictorial representation of the Crucifixion of Jesus, together with an engraved gem.[3] It is hard to date but has been estimated to have been made c. 200.[4] The image seems to show a young man worshipping a crucified, donkey-headed figure. The Greek inscription reads something like, "Alexamenos worships [his] God." The graffito was apparently meant to mock Alexamenos, a Christian.[5]

Content

Tracing of the drawing

The image depicts a human-like figure affixed to a cross and possessing the head of a donkey. In the top right of the image is what has been interpreted as either the Greek letter upsilon or a tau cross.[1] To the left of the image is a young man, apparently intended to represent Alexamenos,[6] a Roman soldier/guard, raising one hand in a gesture possibly suggesting worship.[7][8] Beneath the cross is a caption written in crude Greek: Αλεξαμενος ϲεβετε θεον. ϲεβετε can be understood as a variant spelling (possibly a phonetic misspelling)[2] of Standard Greek σέβεται, which means "worships". The full inscription would then be translated as "Alexamenos worships [his] God".[2][9][10] Several other sources suggest "Alexamenos worshiping a god", or similar variants, as the intended translation.[11][12][13][14]

Date

No clear consensus has been reached on when the image was made. Dates ranging from the late 1st to the late 3rd century have been suggested,[15] with the beginning of the 3rd century thought to be the most likely.[9][16][17]

Discovery and location

The graffito was discovered in 1857 when a building called the domus Gelotiana was unearthed on the Palatine Hill. The emperor Caligula had acquired the house for the imperial palace, which, after Caligula died, became used as a Paedagogium (boarding school) for the imperial page boys. Later, the street on which the house sat was walled off to give support to extensions to the buildings above, and it thus remained sealed for centuries.[18]

Interpretation

The inscription is usually taken to be a mocking depiction of a Christian in the act of worship.[19] At the time, pagans derided Christians for worshipping a man who had been crucified.[19] The donkey's head and crucifixion would both have been considered insulting depictions by contemporary Roman society. Crucifixion continued to be used as an execution method for the worst criminals until its abolition by the emperor Constantine in the 4th century, and the impact of seeing a figure on a cross is comparable to the impact today of portraying a man with a hangman's noose around his neck or seated in an electric chair.[20]

It seems to have been commonly believed at the time that Christians practiced onolatry (donkey-worship). That was based on the misconception that Jews worshipped a god in the form of a donkey, a prejudice of unclear origin. Tertullian, writing in the late 2nd or early 3rd century, reports that Christians, along with Jews, were accused of worshipping such a deity. He also mentions an apostate Jew who carried around Carthage a caricature of a Christian with ass's ears and hooves, labeled Deus Christianorum Onocoetes ("the God of the Christians begotten of an ass").[21]

It has also been suggested that both the graffito and the roughly contemporary gems with Crucifixion images are related to heretical groups outside the Church.[22]

A small minority of scholars consider the image to be not of Jesus but of some other deity.[23]

Veneration of the Cross

In the image, Alexamenos is venerating the crucifix, a detail that some scholars once took to represent actual Christian worship practice.[24] The cross, however, was not actually used in worship until the 4th and 5th centuries.[25]

"Alexamenos fidelis"

In the next chamber, another inscription in a different hand reads Alexamenos fidelis, Latin for "Alexamenos is faithful" or "Alexamenos the faithful".[26] This may be a riposte by an unknown party to the mockery of Alexamenos represented in the graffito.[17]

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Rodney J. Decker, The Alexamenos Graffito
  3. ↑ Schiller, 89-90, fig. 321
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 1898, chapter 5 'The Palace of the Caesars'
  7. ↑ Thomas Wright, Frederick William Fairholt, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, Chatto and Windus, 1875, p. 39
  8. ↑ Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, Walks in Rome, Volume 1, Adamant Media Corporation, 2005, p. 201
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 David L. Balch, Carolyn Osiek, Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003, p. 103
  10. ↑ B. Hudson MacLean, An introduction to Greek epigraphy of the Hellenistic and Roman periods from Alexander the Great down to the reign of Constantine, University of Michigan Press, 2002, p. 208
  11. ↑ Wikisource-logo.svg Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Hans Schwarz, Christology, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998, p. 207
  16. ↑ Schiller, 90
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004, p. 244
  18. ↑ Edward L Cutts, History of Early Christian Art, Kessinger Publishing, 2004, p. 200
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Wikisource-logo.svg Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?, 1997, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, p. 46
  21. ↑ Tertullian, Ad nationes, 1:11, 1:14
  22. ↑ Schiller, 89-90
  23. ↑ B. Hudson MacLean, An introduction to Greek epigraphy of the Hellenistic and Roman periods from Alexander the Great down to the reign of Constantine, University of Michigan Press, 2002, p. 208
  24. ↑ Wikisource-logo.svg Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ David L. Balch, Carolyn Osiek, Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003, p. 103, footnote 83
  26. ↑ Wikisource-logo.svg Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

References

  • Schiller, Gertrud. Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. II,1972 (English trans from German), Lund Humphries, London, ISBN 0-85331-324-5

Further reading

  • Titus Flavius Josephus, Contre Apion, II (VII), 2.80, translated by Leon Blum, LBL, 1930, 72-74.
  • Norman Walker, The Riddle of the Ass's Head, and the question of a trigram, ZAW 9 (1963), 219-231.

External links

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