En referencia a los objetivos del trabajo de investigación

Although the evidence regarding the early Christians who commemorated Paul’s death is scarce, it is nonetheless sufficient to form an imaginative picture of the material conditions under which they lived. Hence, in the first section of this chapter I shall attempt to reconstruct the early development of the veneration of Paul qua martyr, by analogy with what we know about the early devotees of Peter’s alleged grave at the Vatican Necropolis. Next, I will analyze how the Christian Roman leadership gradually became involved in the apostles’ martyr cult until it

3 _{See MacMullen’s 2009 book The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400. Unlike our knowledge}

about the faith of bishops and intellectuals (which can be gathered from written sources), our sources for the faith of non-elite Christians are more limited (archeological remains or chance remarks found in the texts of literary

Christians).

4 _{Regarding the length of the Martyrdom of Paul, notice that the Passion of Jesus as narrated in the Gospel of Mark}

(from Mark 14:1 to the end) is twice as long Likewise, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, an account whose first literary form (see Hartog 2015:178-180) was produced probably not much later than the Martyrdom of Paul, is about 2.5 times longer. Finally, the Pseudo-Linus and Pseudo-Marcellus – two later accounts of Paul’s death to be studied in Chapter 5 – are between 2.5 and 4.5 times longer.

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took administrative control of it. I will refer back to this review in § 5.4 when we examine later martyrdom accounts and their relationship to places associated with Paul in Rome.

As discussed in § 2.4, the Roman presbyter Gaius (Eus. HE 2.25.7), ca. 200 CE, in his Dialogue against the Montanist Proclus stated that he could show his Asian rival the shrines (τρόπαια) of the two great apostles who had laid the foundations of the Roman church, Peter’s in the Vatican and Paul’s on the Ostian way (ἐπὶ τὴν ὁδὸν τὴν Ὠστίαν). Presumably Christians from the East coming to Rome had already started visiting Paul’s shrine decades before Gaius offered his services as a tourist guide.5 Indeed, one of the few things that we know with relative certainty about the early Jesus movement is that there were many Christians who travelled a lot. The Didache (chaps. 11-13), written ca. 100, has detailed instructions on the proper way to receive Christians coming from out of town; additionally, ca. 195-215, we have concrete proof of pilgrimage to Rome on the part of eastern Christians such as Origen of Alexandria and Abercius; the latter, a bishop of Phrygia and admirer of Paul, went to Rome (ca. 200) and died before returning home.6

By analogy with contemporary pagan travelers (cf. Epict. Disc. 3.7.1 and Apul. Met. 2.1), we may surmise that Christian sightseeing in Rome in the period 100-250 likely involved paying a visit to holy sites, among which the shrine of Paul on the Ostian Road must have been a great

5 _{The site of Paul’s shrine is discussed later in this section. As probable visitors to his alleged tomb in Rome, apart}

from Valentinians, Marcionites and proto-orthodox leaders like Polycarp, we can think of anonymous non-Roman Christians who held the apostle in high esteem, for instance, people such as the Scillitan Martyrs (ca. 180 CE), who in their own Acta are said to have carried Paul’s letters to their own execution and quoted from 1 Tim. 6:16 (see Musurillo 1972:86-89 and discussion in Eastman 2015:xviii-xix). As to Roman Christian leaders, one suspects that bringing to the fore the ties of Paul to their city could sometimes be of help in doctrinal disputes about the apostle. For instance, elsewhere in the Dialogue, Gaius discussed Paul’s letters (Jerome De Vir. Illustr. c.59).

6 _{See discussion in Birch 1998:23, Snyder 2003: 247-249 and Thonemann 2012:257-282. Origen himself stated in}

one of his writings that he went to the Eternal City “desiring to see the most ancient church of Rome” (apud Eus. HE

6.14.10). Information on Abercius comes from his own epitaph in Hieropolis, probably the earliest Christian inscription. In the legible parts of the epitaph, written in flowery dactylic hexameters, Abercius says that the “Holy Shepherd” (Jesus) sent him to Rome and talks of the apostle Paul as “his companion”.

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attraction. In the 320s Constantine built churches on top of the shrines of both Peter and Paul. This was likely a political move, but also a response to a growing number of pilgrims (cf. Eus. Theophania 4.7). Later, ca. 380-405, the Constantinian Basilica of Saint Paul was renovated and expanded under the Theodosians, and a few decades later Leo the Great (440-461) altered the area around Paul’s tomb, raising the floor and thus creating additional space for privileged burials near the tomb.7 The prestige of the basilica continued to grow, and by the reign of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), it had become a place of awe and reverence for travelers from outside Rome.

Despite its renown in late antiquity, Paul’s martyr-site had very humble beginnings. Paul’s grave was located in a pagan necropolis along the Ostian Road, about two miles south of the city walls (see location in Appendix 4.a).8 The grave was in a low-lying area irregularly enclosed by steep hills and by the Tiber River; initially a quarry, by the 1st _{century it had become}

an area for burial grounds surrounded by farmland.9 The necropolis was public property and included columbaria (niches in walls for cremation urns), sarcophagi and more modest tombs. In general, the graves of the people buried there, freedmen and slaves, are indicative of low social status. Paul’s funerary monument was probably built ca. 145-160 at a time when the

7 _{In excavations performed in 1959 at Saint Paul’s Basilica, the burials of the father and wife of Pope Felix III (483-}

492) were discovered. See Eastman 2011:48. See § 5.5 for a discussion of pilgrimage to the basilica in the Middle Ages and other 20th _{century archeological discoveries.}

8 _{Appendix 4.a (taken from Eastman 2011:16) shows the geographical location of the four most important cultic}

centers in Rome discussed in this dissertation. These are: (a) Peter’s grave at the Vatican Necropolis, (b) Paul’s grave on the Ostian Road, (c) the Memoria Apostolorum on the Appian Road in honor of both apostles and (d) Aquae Salvias, the alleged location of Paul’s martyrdom (to be discussed in § 5.4).

9 _{The ancient Romans made a practice of having their cemeteries built extra urbem. This was done primarily for}

religious and sanitary reasons. Despite its distance from the city, we have data allowing us to conjecture that, occasionally, some Christians must have carried out their daily activities in the proximity of Paul’s shrine. Lampe (2003:45-46), based on his reading of the Shepherd of Hermas, infers Christian presence along the Via Portuensis (that ran extra urbem, parallel to the Ostian Road, on the other bank of the River Tiber). Moreover, the Ostian Road connected Rome to Ostia, where in the late 2nd _{century there were already some Christians (cf. Octavius of Minucius}

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necropolis was still under development; around the shrine there probably was a paved area surrounding and isolating the monument that served as a gathering place for devotees of the apostle. This burial site lasted till the early decades of the fourth century, when it was enclosed by the Constantinian basilica.10

Given the general modesty of the graves surrounding Paul’s shrine and its distance from the city, it is sensible to assume that, except on occasional visits of Christian leaders from outside Rome, regular visitors to the martyr site (i.e. his early devotees) were humble folks. 11 _Although

we have no direct evidence to support our conjecture, we can work by analogy. Indeed, we can learn more about the social status of Paul’s early devotees by making inferences from what has been discovered at the site of Peter’s presumed grave, located under the Vatican in another pagan necropolis that was excavated in the 1940s. During these excavations, archeologists found the shrine in honor of Peter to which Gaius had referred ca. 200 CE. What follows is a brief

10 _{Modern scholars have inferred the date of construction, size and form of Paul’s shrine from the very scanty}

archeological evidence and by comparison with Peter’s aedicula at the Vatican (see below). Unlike Peter’s Vatican site, opportunities for more careful archeological observations under Paul’s Basilica were lost after the church burned in 1823 and excavations were poorly performed. SeeBrandenburg 2011:351-382 and Bucarelli 2011:219- 245; Nicola Camerlenghi has written a lively reconstruction of the beginnings of Paul’s burial site in Chapter 1 of a still unpublished book about the history of Saint Paul’s Basilica (his manuscript, which he kindly shared with me, is provisionally entitled 'Biography of a Basilica”). Camerlenghi estimates that the ground level of Paul’s original burial was about five meters below the transept of the modern basilica. Perhaps the earliest depiction of the location of Paul’s martyrdom is found in the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus († 359 CE), which presents the scene of the apostle’s execution. The reeds behind Paul probably represent the marshy area extra urbem where Paul's martyrdom was traditionally believed to have happened.

11 _{The material poverty of these early devotees should not come as a surprise. Cf. the story of Jesus’ grandnephews}

(Eus. HE 3.20.1-7) being brought to Domitian’s court and dismissed by the Emperor, who looked down on them due to their low economic status. Although the story is likely fictional, it probably involves real relatives of Jesus who by the end of the 1st century supported themselves by working a small piece of land with their hands (see Bauckham 1990 for a study on the family of Jesus). As to the relative modesty of Paul’s shrine, it is worth noticing that the tombstones of the mid-3rd _{century Christian martyrs Cornelius and Novatian were also inconspicuous and}

surrounded by other ordinary tombs (see Green 2010:185 and Février 1996:110 ). Regarding the early phase of Paul’s martyr site, an interesting analogy can be established with Mormonism (the religious movement that R. Stark (1996) used as a modern parallel to trace the demographic growth of early Christianity). Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, was killed in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1844. To avoid desecration, his corpse was secretly buried and was only transferred to the Smith Family cemetery in the late 1920s. It is only after the 1950s, and in a gradual process, that Nauvoo became a place of historical tourism for members of the Mormon Church. Note also that Smith’s tombstone in Nauvoo (which by 2010 counted only 1,149 inhabitants) is discreet, despite the fact that Mormonism has more than 15,000,000 members worldwide and has a majestic temple in Salt Lake City.

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reconstruction of historical developments at this site from the early 2nd century till ca. 324 CE when the Constantinian basilica began to be built.12 _{Following Lampe (2003:104-116), my focus}

will be on what the archeological evidence tells us about the first devotees of Peter’s martyr cult and the degree of involvement of the Christian leadership at Rome in the administration of this site.

Sometime in the early decades of the 2nd century, Christians started to venerate a modest grave under the open sky located in the Vatican close to the circus of Nero. We know this with certainty because the excavators found graves clustered around the revered grave.13 Four of them are dated earlier than the mid-2nd century and clearly belonged to poor people. In the poorest grave, the body was laid in a bare hole in the ground and brick tiles were laid out on top of it. Later in the 2nd century, the newer graves appearing around the venerated grave are indicative of — in Lampe’s words — “a small social advancement.”14 _{Parallel to these}

developments, the land around Peter’s alleged burial site, starting ca. 120, began to be

systematically divided and sold in relatively quick stages. A necropolis came into being. Ca. 150 the Christian site was already surrounded by pagan mausoleums. About 160 CE, the pagans who owned the adjacent burial sites built a clivus (a ramp with stairs) as an entrance to their mausoleums. During the same construction phase they decided to erect a wall to shut off this

12 _{The construction of the Constantinian basilica of Saint Peter was done so as to ensure that the aedicula would be}

encased directly under the apse of the church. This required considerable work and the large-scale removal of soil and debris from the Vatican hill. The enormous effort and expense can only mean that the builders were convinced that the aedicula was an old funerary monument in honor of Peter. Needless to say, the bibliography on the

excavation of the Vatican Necropolis is very large. Of notice are the early studies of Toynbee and Perkins 1956 and Guarducci 1960. See more recently Lampe 2003:104-116, Lampe 2015: 273-320 and Barnes 2010:397-413.

13 _{This is likely the earliest example of the Christian fondness for sepultura ad sanctos. Cf. Green 2010:188 for}

extant epigraphical evidence of this custom. For instance, a Christian named Serpentius bought a loculus from the

fossor Quintus near the crypt of St. Cornelius (martyred in 253 CE). The inscription reads ad sanctum Cornelium.

14 _{It is interesting to observe that one of the graves has a libation pipe, a pagan element that the Christian devotees of}

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entrance way to the outside world. This wall cut directly across Peter's grave; thus, presumably as a concession to the Christians, the pagan owners of the mausoleums made a recess on the wall to protect the grave and allowed Peter’s devotees to build an aedicula (shrine) into the wall itself. The aedicula was a rather simple “second-rank” monument: a horizontal travertine tablet,

supported at the front by two white marble columnsand an upper niche in the wall.15 Facing the shrine there was a small (7 × 4 meters) courtyard where people could gather. As previously discussed, the very scanty archeological evidence of Paul’s shrine suggests an open area for visitors of similar proportions.

What does the archeological evidence tell us about the earliest devotees of Peter’s martyr cult (and by extension Paul’s) in the period 100-200 CE? Notice that Peter’s aedicula, our earliest surviving piece of Christian material evidence, dates from the mid-2nd century, a fairly well-documented period of Christianity at Rome to which the evidence in the Vatican site can be related.16 Two questions naturally arise. Why did Peter’s devotees not buy the land near the venerated grave to maintain the whole site for themselves? Did they not anticipate the growth of the pagan burial sites? Fortunately we have a ballpark idea of the cost of land and funerary monuments in the necropolis in the first half of the 2nd century. Located less than 80 meters away from Peter’s burial site, an inscription on the tomb of Gaius Popilius Heracla informs us that the deceased left 6,000 sesterces to his heirs to build him a sepulcher. As scholars

frequently mention, Marcion, ca. 140, made a donation of 200,000 sesterces to the church in Rome (see Tert. De Praesc. 30). Yet the church returned to him this considerable gift in its

15 _{Architecturally, the aedicula has often been comparted to the tomb of Sabinus Taurius (dated around 150 CE) at}

the necropolis of Isola Sacra in Ostia. See Toynbee and Perkins 1956:162-163.

16 _{As previously discussed, within the decades 140-165 we know of these developments in Rome: the missionary}

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entirety when he was expelled due to doctrinal differences ca. 144. Apart from shedding light on Marcion’s impressive wealth, this anecdote tells us that the Christian leadership at Rome was able to gather, if needed, significant sums of money (cf. evidence for cash collections for the needy described in Justin 1 Apol. 67). So, clearly, the leadership of the Roman Church ca. 160 was in a position to build a statelier funerary monument for Peter that the surviving aedicula. Yet for reasons that we discuss below, they either did not help monetarily the early devotees of Peter, or if they did, their aid was minimal in proportion to their financial means.17

This situation does not seem to have changed significantly even after Gaius (ca. 200) cited the shrines of Peter and Paul as points of pride of the Roman church. In the 3rd century, Peter’s aedicula was partially clad in marble and the flooring of the courtyard decorated with mosaics. In addition, to alleviate the pressure caused by the shrine on the wall, two rough buttressing side walls of unequal thickness were added perpendicular to it. Apart from those changes and improvements, the martyr site as a whole remained modest in comparison to its neighboring pagan mausoleums in the Vatican necropolis. According to Brandenburg, the structural evidence under the Basilica of St. Paul is similar to that found at the Vatican, so the mid-2nd century shrine of Paul probably also remained more or less in the same state until it was enclosed by its 4th century Constantinian basilica.18

Why did 2nd and 3rd century Christians not decorate these funerary monuments more lavishly? One could speculate that they did not wish to bring attention to themselves by

17 _{See also discussion in Lampe 2003:115, who cites The Shepherd of Hermas (Sim. 9.20; 8.91) as evidence that}

well-to-do Christians in Rome were reluctant to help monetarily the poor in the community.

18 _{See Brandenburg 2011:351-382. If one reads the words found in Eus. HE 2.25.5 literally (“their names are}

preserved in [their] cemeteries”), then it follows that the names of the apostles had been added to their shrines sometime before the beginning of the 4th _{century. See discussion in Bucarelli 2011:220.}

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conspicuously venerating the grave of the apostles who, according to tradition, had been

condemned as criminals. Yet as Lampe (2003:115) correctly pointed out, it is extremely unlikely that pagans would have cared about this fact more than a century after the events. In my view, several factors may have contributed to the relative lack of involvement of the Roman Christian leaders in the early stages of the martyr cult of the apostles. First, simple demographic

considerations (cf. Appendix 1.a) suggest that for a long period of time the venerated graves would not have attracted a large number of devotees. After the Neronian persecution, the Christian community in Rome likely remained relatively small up to the first half of the 2nd century; it is only in the period 150-200, when the shrines were built, that the Christian

community at Rome grew to reach substantial numbers, probably from 1,300 to 7,000 members. Another important factor that probably delayed the full blossoming of the martyr cult of the apostles in Rome was that even in the late 2nd _{century there were still elite Christians who had}

not given up their expectation of an imminent return of Christ. For those who believed that the end of times was at hand, attending to the graves of Peter and Paul would have seemed of lesser