In Acts
28:13, 14 it says regarding Paul’s journey to Rome “from
[Syracuse] we went along and arrived at Rhegium. A day later a south wind
sprang up and we made it into Puteoli on the second day. Here we found brothers and were urged to remain with them for
seven days, and so we went toward Rome.”
So, we know
that there were “brothers” at Puteoli in these early days and it is legitimate
to speculate whether they were also in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But at the same
time we should not allow wishful thinking to cause us to read more into the
evidence than is actually there. And as we have already seen in the previous post that pagans used crosses in their worship, the existence of a cross in itself
without a Christian context is not evidence of anything at all.
One reason
Christianity may have taken a hold in Puteoli in particular is that there was a
Jewish community there as early as 4 B.C.E. Both Philo and Josephus
attest to a Jewish presence during the first century. The same cannot be said
for Pompeii and Herculaneum.
What about evidence of crosses in Pompeii, referred to in
the book “The Crosses of Pompeii” by Bruce W. Longenecker.
The item with which Longenecker begins is a cross-shaped imprint on a ground
floor wall in a bakery on the western side of Pompeii. Three other objects
serve as primary pieces of evidence. These include a graffito of the Latin verb
vivit (he lives) in which the final –it are combined into a cross-shaped ligature, another
graffito in which Christians are discussed, and a cross found on a stamp ring
that appears to have belonged to a certain Meges. He also refers to nineteen
crosses faintly inscribed in paving stones around the city, and proposes that
the crosses served a good-luck function to protect them from evil where they resided and worked.
Other scholars examined his “evidence” and came to different
conclusions. For example, in Vigiliae Christianae (2018), John Cook, who is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at LaGrange
College, Georgia, wrote an article “Alleged Christian Crosses in Herculaneum and Pompeii” about this.
Cook gives some further details about the bakery in which
the cross-shaped imprint was found. He says on the west wall was a household
shrine which consisted of a painting of a snake. Next to it was a brick fixed
in the wall, which supported a lamp that “burned in honor of the custodial
divinities [Janus, Ferculus, Limentius, and Cardea]. On the east wall was the cross-shaped imprint. Mounted above the
oven was a plaque that depicts a large red phallus with an inscription “here
lives good luck”. Francois Mazois, who included the cross-shaped imprint in his
volume on the ruins of Pompeii in 1824, didn’t think it was a Christian cross
and wrote “It is difficult to imagine that the same person could at the same time
revere the cross of Christ and worship Janus, Ferculus, Limentius, and
Cardea, divinities who guarded the doors. Especially if one considers an obscene
image, from an incomprehensible cult, that is found near the same place.” If it
was not a cross what could it have been? Lampe (“Christians at Rome in the
First Two Centuries”) thought it could be a support for a shelf, like the
one in Herculaneum. Cook (and Moormann in Pompeii’s Ashes) suggests it
depicts a tool used in the bakery, maybe a large pestle. Whatever it depicts,
Cook says, “there is no archaeological context for the belief that a Christian
lived in the villa or bakery. None of the graffiti are ostensibly Christian.
The household shrine and phallus of the bakery fit well into the context of
Roman religion … The affirmation that [it] should be identified with the cross
of Christ is groundless.”
What about the graffito of the Latin verb vivit (“he
lives”)? Cook again shows this is simply unfounded speculation on the part of
Longenecker. First, the scrawl on the wall was (perhaps) VIV, or it could
have been VN, or possibly VRI, and the intention is vague. It could just be a
scrawl. And there is no decisive reason to interpret intersecting lines as the
cross of Christ. That is looking at it from a post-Constantinian viewpoint.
Martin Langner, who writes about ancient graffiti (“Antike Graffitizeichnungen”,
Wiesbaden, 2001), says regarding the intersecting lines “there are many
scratchings on Pompeian walls. I do not think they mean anything or at least
anything we can recognise today”.
The same goes for the nineteen “crosses” faintly inscribed on
paving stones around the city. Longenecker proposes these were to ward off
evil. There are many phalluses inscribed on the paving stones too. What was
their purpose? The fact is that we simply don’t know in either case, and there
is nothing to link these crosses with Christians. They may simply have been
markers on the pavement indicating a route (like a cairn does) or some other
helpful use.
Essentially, Longenecker’s argument is this :
- objects
resembling a cross have been found in Pompeii/Herculaneum
- Evidence
from a later period of early Christianity indicates that Christians
adopted these symbols to identify themselves
- Therefore
the objects found in Pompeii/Herculaneum must be Christian
Unless there is archaeological evidence that these
“crosses” were found in a Christian context, it is simply wishful thinking. There is no evidence crosses were used as a Christian symbol before the second century.
