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Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Ancient Jewish Art and Early Christian Art*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2012

Jaś Elsner
Jaś Elsner*
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi, Oxford
*
[email protected]
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Extract

There are (at least) two ways to approach the history of religious art in Antiquity. One is to study what was going on in the ancient world, to tell the story as they (the subjects of our inquiry) saw it and as they did it. Another is to ask how we know how they saw it and did it. The first might be called ‘history’, the second ‘critical historiography’. Both are crucial to the historical enterprise, and I in no way intend to demean the first by saying that this paper is largely of the second kind. My project is to examine what are the grounds for our assumptions in creating the generalizations of ‘Late Ancient Jewish Art’ and ‘Early Christian Art’ as real categories of visual production in Late Antiquity with specific and discrete audiences and constituencies of patrons and producers. Both fields are venerable, with long historiographies and complex guiding-agendas of the sort that are perhaps inevitable given the kinds of ancestral investments made by scholars and indeed members of the general public (which is to say, also adherents of the two faiths) in both fields. In addition to prising apart the history of some of these investments, I want to question the methodological basis for many of the assumptions about what can rightly be classified under either the heading of ‘Jewish’ art or of ‘early Christian’ art.

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Articles
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The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 93 , November 2003 , pp. 114 - 128
Copyright
Copyright ©Jaś Elsner 2003. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

*

This paper is the result of the Oxford-Princeton collaboration on questions of Jewish and Christian inter-dependence in Late Antiquity. I am particularly grateful to Simon Price for commissioning it and to Martin Goodman for his chairmanship of the seminar where it was delivered, as well as to all who commented. Margaret Olin and Steven Fine subjected earlier drafts to some penetrating critiques, Joel Snyder gave me a telling interrogation when I offered a version at Chicago, and the anonymous referees for JRS put me through the usual (and very useful!) mill.

References

1 On Judaism see e.g. Hachlili, R., ‘Synagogues in the land of Israel: the art and architecture of the late antique synagogue’, in S. Fine (ed.), Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World (1996), 96–129Google Scholar, esp. 113. On Christianity, see P. C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (1994), 99–104.

2 See further in relation to Christian art, Elsner, J., ‘Art and architecture 337–425’, CAH 13 (1998), 736–61, esp. 744–8Google Scholar.

3 See Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 116–31.

4 See esp. Rutgers, L. V., ‘Überlegungen zu den jüdischen katakomben Roms’, JAC 33 (1990), 140–57Google Scholar; idem, ‘Archaeological evidence for the interaction of Jews and non-Jews in Late Antiquity’, AJA 96 (1992), 101–18; idem, The Jews in Late Antique Rome (1995). The great exception, of course, is the Ostia synagogue, on which see now B. Olsson, D. Mittermacht and O. Brandt (eds), The Synagogue of Ancient Ostia and the Jews of Rome (2001), with bibliography.

5 See Fine, S., This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue in the Greco-Roman Period (1997), 95.Google Scholar

6 For an overview see Rutgers, L. V., ‘Diaspora synagogues’, in Fine, op. cit. (n. 1), 67–95Google Scholar.

7 Hachlili, R., Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Tomb: Goodenough, E. R., Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman World (1953), vol. 2, 113Google Scholar; Torah shrine: Gressmann, H., ‘Jewish life in ancient Rome’, in Jewish Studies in Memory of Israel Abrahams (1927), 170–91, esp. 180–2Google Scholar and Sukenik, E., The Ancient Synagogue of Beth Alpha (1932), 20–1.Google Scholar

9 For discussion, see Clair, A. St, ‘God's House of Peace in Paradise: the Feast of Tabernacles on a Jewish gold glass’, Jewish Art 11 (1985), 6–15Google Scholar, with full earlier bibliography at n. 1; Kessler, H., ‘Through the temple veil: the holy image in Judaism and Christianity’, Kairos 32/33 (1990/1991), 53–77, esp. 56–60Google Scholar; Fine, op. cit. (n. 5), 154–6.

10 See Noy, D., Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe. 2. The City of Rome (1995), 421–2Google Scholar.

11 ibid., 471–85; Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 81–5, with bibliography.

12 See Noy, op. cit. (n. 10), 471, with earlier bibliography.

13 Hachlili, op. cit. (n. 7), 298; eadem, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel (1988), 234–73.

14 cf. Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 78.

15 See Deckers, J. G., Seeliger, H. R. and Mietke, G., Die Katakombe ‘Santi Marcellino e Pietro’ (1987), 348–50.Google Scholar

16 On Orpheus, see Murray, Sister Charles, Rebirth and Afterlife: A Study in the Transmutation of some Pagan Imagery in Early Christian Funerary Art (1981), 37–63Google Scholar and Jensen, R. M., Understanding Early Christian Art (2000), 41–2.Google Scholar

17 See Deckers et al., op. cit. (n. 15), 319–20.

18 See Elsner, J., Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (1995), 271–80Google Scholar, with further bibliography.

19 For example in the Jewish catacombs of Beth Shearim, on which see Schwartz, S., Imperialism and Jewish Identity 200 BCE to 640 CE (2001), 154–7Google Scholar, with bibliography.

20 See the acute comments of Schwartz, op. cit. (n. 19), 133–5. The first of these strategies (which he characterizes rightly as ‘non-interpretation’) Schwartz associates with M. Avi-Yonah, the second with E. R. Goodenough.

21 On the problems of mixed burials see e.g. J. Magness and G. Avni, ‘Jews and Christians in a Late Roman cemetery at Beth Guvrin’, in H. Lapin (ed.), Religious and Ethnic Communities in Late Roman Palestine (1998), 87–114; Johnson, M., ‘Pagan-Christian burial practices of the fourth century: shared tombs?’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997), 37–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 On these symbols, see Hachlili, op. cit. (n. 7), 312–46, 360–73; on the menorah, see Levine, L. I., ‘The history and significance of the menorah in Antiquity’, in Levine, L. I. and Weiss, Z. (eds), From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity, JRA Suppl. 40 (2000), 131–53Google Scholar, and now at length R. Hachlili, The Menorah, the Ancient Seven-Armed Candelabrum: Origin, Form and Significance (2001). For Samaritan and Christian uses of this symbol, see ibid., 263–74.

23 See e.g. Matthiae, G., Mosaici medioevali delle chiese di Roma (1967), 77–81Google Scholar.

24 The issue arises especially in the classification of new finds, particularly in the (all too frequent) absence of archaeological context. For example, the eleven marble statues purchased by the Cleveland Museum in 1965 (if they are not fakes) have been classified as works of mid- to late third-century Christian art from the East (in the absence of eastern parallels it might be said): see Wixom, W., ‘Early Christian sculptures at Cleveland’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54 (1967), 67–88Google Scholar, P. Du Bourguet, Early Christian Art (1972), 116–18; W. Wixom in K. Weitzmann (ed.), Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Centuries (1979), 406–11. But the combination of four unique Jonah statuettes (a Jewish theme?), some (like the bearded and clothed prophet beneath the gourd vine) iconographically unprecedented, with the Good Shepherd (not necessarily a Christian theme: see Klauser, T., ‘Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der christlichen Kunst’, JAC 1 (1958), 20–51Google Scholar) and with three pairs of male and female portrait busts apparently representing the same two individuals, clearly gives rise to questions about function, context, and indeed religious significance if these sculptures really are authentic and a single group found together, as alleged (Wixom (1967), 67 and (1979), 411). Are the Cleveland marbles part of a single group? Were they made for burial? Or originally for some liturgical purpose? Or for domestic decoration (for example, a nymphaeum) with a Jewish-Christian ‘mythological’ theme in place of a more familiar pagan subject? For a handy corpus of pre-Constantinian Christian art, see G. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine (1985).

25 See Engemann, J., ‘Bemerkungen zu römischen Gläsern mit Goldfoliendekor’, JAC 11/12 (1968/1969), 7–25Google Scholar; Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 81–5.

26 See Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 85–8.

27 For the ‘Jewish’ sarcophagi see Konikoff, A., Sarcophagi from the Jewish Catacombs of Ancient Rome (1986)Google Scholar and Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 77–81. For the same workshops making pagan and Christian sarcophagi as well as other relief sculpture, see L'Orange, H. P. and von Gerkan, A., Der spätantike Bildschmuck des Konstantinsbogen (1939), 219, 222–5.Google Scholar

28 See Konikoff, op. cit. (n. 27), 38–41 (no. III. 14) and P. Kranz, Jahreszeiten Sarcophage (1984), 204 (no. 69).

29 Shared artists for Jewish and Christian catacombs: Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 261–3 and Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 73–7; shared artists for pagan and Christian cubicula: Tronzo, W., The Via Latina Catacomb: Imitation and Discontinuity in Fourth Century Roman Painting (1986), 32–49Google Scholar.

30 See Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 92–9, with 43–9 on the isolationist case.

31 See Wharton, A. J., Refiguring the Post-Classical City (1995), 60–1Google Scholar; Jensen, R. M., ‘The Dura Europos synagogue, early Christian art and religious life in Dura Europos’, in Fine, S. (ed.), Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue (1999), 174–89, esp. 185–7Google Scholar; Elsner, J., ‘Cultural resistance and the visual image: the case of Dura Europos’, CP 96 (2001), 271–306, esp. 301Google Scholar.

32 Kraeling, C., The Excavations at Dura-Europos: Final Report VIII.I: The Synagogue (1956), 54Google Scholar.

33 See ibid., 41–54 and Goodenough, E. R., Jewish Symbols of the Greco-Roman Period (1964), vol. 9, 48–59Google Scholar.

34 See P. Baur, V. C., Rostovtzeff, M. I. and Bellinger, A. R. (eds), The Excavations at Dura Europos: Preliminary Report of Fourth Season of Work (1933), 31, 42–53Google Scholar; Rostovtzeff, M. I., Bellinger, A. R., Hopkins, C. and Welles, C. B. (eds), The Excavations at Dura Europos: Preliminary Report of Sixth Season of Work (1936), 283–91Google Scholar; Kraeling, op. cit. (n. 32), 52; Goodenough, op. cit. (n. 33), vol. 9, 48–51.

35 A useful synopsis of the emergence of the field, but with no articulation of the underlying racial politics, is Levine, L. I., ‘The emergence of art, architecture and archaeology as recognized disciplines in Jewish studies’, in Goodman, M. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), 824–51Google Scholar.

36 For an excellent survey of the Roman material see Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 5–42, with 8–14 on Bosio. On Bosio's Roma Soterranea of 1632, see Ditchfield, S., ‘Text before trowel: Antonio Bosio's Roma Soterranea revisited’, in Swanson, R. N. (ed.), The Church Retrospective (1997), 343–60.Google Scholar

37 As in the arguments of G. Marchi (1844) and V. Schultze (1882), as discussed by Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 30–2 and 38–9, themselves building on some suggestions in Bosio's original text which were cut from its posthumous publication by the editor Giovanni Severano; see Ditchfield, op. cit. (n. 36), 355 and n. 25 for Bosio's unpublished discussions of Jewish influence (implicitly contra Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 11–14, which is reliant only on Bosio's published work).

38 For example by G. B. de Rossi (1864) and N. Müller (1912), with Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 37–9.

39 For a critique of the category of ‘uniqueness’ in religious comparisons (and especially in relation to Christian origins) see Smith, J. Z., Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (1990), 36–46Google Scholar.

40 For a brief contemporary synopsis of these finds, see Sukenik, E., Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece (1934), 27–37Google Scholar.

41 I see no reason why White, L. M., The Social Origins of Christian Architecture (1997), vol. 2, 272Google Scholar, says it was discovered in 1921 and excavated from 1922–33. The excavators themselves date the find to November 1932: see Baur et al., op. cit. (n. 34), 1 and Hopkins, C., The Discovery of Dura-Europos (1979), 127–39Google Scholar.

42 J. Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom (1901). For some background see Olin, M., ‘Alois Riegl: the Late Roman Empire in the Late Hapsburg Empire’, Austrian Studies 5 (1994), 107–20Google Scholar; Marchand, S., ‘The rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism: the case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory: Theme Issue 33 (1994), 106–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elsner, J., ‘The birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, Art History 25 (2002), 358–79, esp. 359–61 and 371–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 On these issues, see the excellent account of Olin, M., ‘“Early Christian synagogues” and “Jewish art historians”: the discovery of the synagogue of Dura-Europos’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000), 7–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted as ch. 5 of M. Olin, The Nation without A rt: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (2001), 127–54.

44 See the fine critique of persistent Orientalism in this area in Wharton, op. cit. (n. 31), 1–14 and 15–23 (specifically on Dura). Also Olin, op. cit. (n. 43), 14–22.

45 On the historiography of Jewish art in Rome, see Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 1–49.

46 For example Hachlili, op. cit. (n. 7), 424–32, esp. 431–2; J. Gutmann, ‘The synagogue of Dura-Europos’, in Kee, H. C. and Cohick, L. H. (eds), The Evolution of the Synagogue: Problems and Progress (1999), 73–88Google Scholar, esp. 86–8 (summarizing much of his earlier work).

47 See, for example, Grabar, A., Christian Iconography: a Study of its Origins (1968), xlvi–vii, 5–6Google Scholar; Murray, op. cit. (n. 16), esp. 5–8; Elsner, op. cit. (n. 18), 1–2, 251–60 (on some of the problems of distinguishing ‘pagan’ from ‘Christian’ art).

48 Kessler, H., ‘The Sepphoris mosaic and Christian art’, in Levine and Weiss, op. cit. (n. 22), 65–72, quote on p. 65.Google Scholar

49 Kraeling, C., The Excavations at Dura-Europos: Final Report VIII.II: The Christian Building (1967), 216Google Scholar; cf. Kraeling, op. cit. (n. 32), 398–402.

50 Goodenough, E. R., Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (1965), vol. 12, 1Google Scholar.

51 Klauser, T., ‘Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der christilichen Kunst IV’, JAC 4 (1961), 128–45, esp. 139–45Google Scholar; idem, ‘Erwägungen zur Entstehung der altchristlichen Kunst’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 76 (1965), 1–11.

52 Grabar, A., ‘Recherches sur les sources juives de l'art paléochrétien’, chs I–III in L'art de la fin de l'antiquite et du moyen age (1968), vol. 2, 741–94Google Scholar.

53 Wetizmann, K., ‘Zur Frage des Einflusses jüdischer Bilderquellen auf die Illustration des Alter Testaments’, in Mullus: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, JAC Erg. 1 (1964), 401–15Google Scholar; K. Weitzmann and H. Kessler, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (1990). In many ways Weitzmann was following the lead of Roth, C., ‘Jewish antecedents of Christian art’, JWCI 16 (1953), 24–44Google Scholar.

54 For a differently organized summary of the influence question, see Jensen, op. cit. (n. 31), 176–8.

55 Kessler, op. cit. (n. 48), 65; cf. Kessler in Weitzmann and Kessler, op. cit. (n. 53), 178–93.

56 For an interesting reading of the Sepphoris mosaic that emphasizes instability of meanings and their flexibility, see Schwartz, op. cit. (n. 19), 245–63.

57 See for instance Kessler, op. cit. (n. 48), 65–6, 72.

58 See for example E. Kessler, ‘The ‘Aquedah in early synagogue art’, in Levine and Weiss, op. cit. (n. 22), 73–81 and H. Kessler in Weitzmann and Kessler, op. cit. (n. 53), 154–7, 177–9.

59 R. Brilliant, ‘Painting at Dura-Europos and Roman art’, in J. Gutmann (ed.), The Dura-Europos Synagogue: A Re-Evaluation (1932–72) (1973), 23–30, esp. 29.

60 M. 1. Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and its Art (1938), 57–99; Kraeling, op. cit. (n. 32), 366–7; A. Perkins, The Art of Dura-Europos (1973), 114–26.

61 See Hachlili, op. cit. (n. 7), 190–3; Gutmann, op. cit. (n. 46), 75–7.

62 See M. Avi-Yonah, Oriental Art in Palestine (1961); idem, ‘Oriental elements in the art of Palestine in the Roman and Byzantine periods’, Art in Ancient Palestine (1981), 1–117; Hachlili, op. cit. (n. 13), 366–8. Inevitably this model of analysis (still it seems to me the dominant one) leads to a version of the ‘decline’ theory of late antique art. Take for instance G. Sed-Rajna's recent and lavish Jewish Art (1997), 126, where we read of the Dura paintings ‘of a gradual detachment from the values of Greco-Roman art, leading to a resurgence in the ancestral traditions of the Orient’.

63 See e.g. Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 247–63; Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 4, 1995), 50–99.

64 See e.g. Fine, op. cit. (n. 5), 118–21, 141, 152, 154; Levine in Levine and Weiss, op. cit. (n. 22).

65 For an overview, see Sed-Rajna, G., ‘Images of the Tabernacle/Temple in late antique and medieval art: the state of research’, Jewish Art 23/24 (1997/1998)Google Scholar [ = B. Kühnel (ed.), The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art (1998)], 42–53.

66 See Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 230, 263.

67 A new move in the context of Dura is the attempt to read the synagogue frescoes in the light of liturgy — assuming that Dura's Judaism participated in what has been called ‘Common Judaism’ within a Rabbinic context (as discussed by E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE-66 CE (1992)). See e.g. Laderman, S., ‘A new look at the second register of the west wall in Dura Europos’, Cahiers archeologiques 45 (1997), 5–18Google Scholar and S. Fine, ‘Liturgy and the art of the Dura Europos synagogue’, in S. Fine and R. Langer (eds), Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue (forthcoming) (I am grateful to Steven Fine for letting me see this excellent paper in advance of publication).

68 For a historiography of Jewish aniconism, see Bland, K., The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (2000)Google Scholar.

69 See Koch, H., Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nach den literarischen Quellen (1917)Google Scholar, with the discussion of Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 7–10.

70 See on the Christian side e.g. Murray, M. C., ‘Art and the early Church’, JTS 28 (1977), 305–45Google Scholar; Murray, op. cit. (n. 16); Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 15–68. On the Jewish side, e.g. J. M. Baumgarten, ‘Art in the synagogue: some Talmudic views’, in Fine, op. cit. (n. 31), 71–86.

71 Hachlili, op. cit. (n. 7), 459.

72 cf. Goodenough, op. cit. (n. 50), 184–5. On the problems of ‘Judaism’, ‘rabbinic Judaism’, ‘Judaisms’, and ‘Common Judaism’, see L. V. Rutgers, ‘Some reflections on the archaeological finds from the domestic quarter on the acropolis of Sepphoris’, in Lapin, op. cit. (n. 21), 179–95, esp. 192–4.

73 cf. the interesting methodological discussion of how to extrapolate identity from archaeology in Rutgers, op. cit. (n. 72).

74 My exhibits might include Grabar, op. cit. (n. 47), with the concession at p. xli; Koch, G., Early Christian Art and Architecture (1995)Google Scholar, with no concession whatever; Lowden, J., Early Christian and Byzantine Art (1997)Google Scholar, with no concession; Jensen, op. cit. (n. 16), concession at pp. 15–16.

75 For Christian symbols, see Snyder, op. cit. (n. 24), 13–29; for narratives, ibid., 31–65.

76 On the limits of toleration, see Beard, M., North, J. and Price, S., The Religions of Rome (1998), vol. 1, 228–44Google Scholar.

77 For the ‘market place’ metaphor for religious competition in the Empire, see J. North, ‘The development of religious pluralism’, in J. Lieu, J. North and T. Rajak (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (1992), 174–93, esp. 178–9; also ibid., ‘Introduction’, 1–8, on the issue of models. The notion of pluralism has become a fundamental assumption about Roman religion, especially in the Empire: e.g. Beard, North and Price, op. cit. (n. 76), 245–363 and A. Bendlin, ‘Looking beyond the civic compromise; religious pluralism in late Republican Rome’, in E. Bispham and C. Smith (eds), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome (2000), 115–35, Precisely for this reason we should perhaps ask what is at stake in the pluralist model and what assumptions it entails. Among other questions, we might ask whether pluralism must imply some kind of capitalist model of religious competition (following e.g. North (1992), in this note) and whether its essentially Durkheimian framing of religion as replicating wider social structures is certainly, exclusively or only partially correct (for a good summary of ancient Roman religion as ‘reflecting and reinforcing social relationships’ see M. Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (1994), 15–17). Note that Goodman, esp. 1, 17–18, argues that the co-existence of numerous religions does not necessarily imply competition.

78 e.g. for Rome, see Beard, North and Price, op. cit. (n. 76), 245–312; for Palestine, the papers in Lapin, op. cit (n. 21).

79 On art as a means of promulgating competing religions in the period, see Grabar, op. cit. (n. 47), 27–30; Mathews, T. F., The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (1993), 3–10Google Scholar; Elsner, J., Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100–450, (1998), 211–21Google Scholar.

80 For a different expression of this spectrum, see Beard, North and Price, op. cit. (n. 76), 245, which emphasizes the span between collective civic cults on the large scale and small private or local religious associations, and between religions whose adherence is ethnically linked (like those of the Palmyrenes or the Jews) and religions whose worship was essentially elective (like Mithraism, Christianity, and the cult of Isis). For a sensitive account of the inter-relations among the adherents of this jumble of new and old religions, see North, J., Roman Religion (2000), 68–75Google Scholar, with bibliography.

81 For attempts to see the rise of Christian art in this light, see Mathews, op. cit (n. 79), and Elsner, op. cit. (n. 79). So far as I know, Jewish art has hardly been treated in this way. While, on an architectural front, one might cite White, L. M., Building God's House in the Roman World (1990)Google Scholar and White, op. cit. (n. 41) (the sequel), it remains the case that he places Christian evidence against a broad mix of comparanda that puts Judaism and Mithrasim together effectively as background (op. cit. (n. 41), 259ff.). This is an example of what Smith, op. cit. (n. 39), 108 rightly calls ‘poor method’ (though speaking of a literary rather than archaeological context).

82 cf. Gordon, R., Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World (1996)Google Scholar, study IV, 49, which is formulated as a discussion of ‘the structured system of differences’ between Mithraism and the other Graeco-Roman religions, but is evidentially based (fortuitously for my point here!) on the differences between their imagery.

83 See Kraeling, op. cit. (n. 32), 62–5; Goodenough, op. cit. (n. 33), vol. 9, 79–82.

84 See Elsner, op. cit. (n. 31), 283–301.

85 See Mathews, op. cit. (n. 79), 48–50.

86 See Elsner, op. cit. (n. 79), 220–1. On the house of Aion from Nea Paphos, see Daszewski, W. A., Dionysos der Erlöser (1985), 35–8Google Scholar and Bowersock, G., Hellenism in Late Antiquity (1990), 49–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Isis see Tinh, V. Tran Tam, Isis Lactans (1973), esp. 40–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Langener, L., Isis Lactans-Maria Lactans (1996)Google Scholar.

87 On Christian typology, see Schrenk, S., Typos und Antitypos in der frühchristlichen Kunst (1995)Google Scholar and Elsner, op. cit. (n. 18), 279–87.

88 On syncretism see Elsner, op. cit. (n. 18), 251–60, 271–9; Elsner, op. cit. (n. 79), 218–20. Much of the evidence usually attested as Christianization (for instance in Huskinson, J., ‘Some pagan mythological figures and their significance in early Christian art’, PBSR 42 (1974), 62–97Google Scholar; Murray, op. cit. (n. 16); Engemann, J., ‘Christianization of late antique art’, in The Seventeenth International Byzantine Congress: Major Papers (1986), 83–115Google Scholar) can equally be seen as examples of syncretism.

89 On inter-Christian competition in third-century Rome, see Brent, A., Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century (1995), 398–540CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Callistus catacomb, see Finney, op. cit. (n. 1), 146–230 with bibliography; on the Hippolytus statue, see Brent, 3–114 with bibliography. On inter-Christian competition and art, see Elsner, J., ‘Inventing Christian Rome: the role of early Christian art’, in Edwards, C. and Woolf, G. (eds), Rome: The Cosmopolis (2003), 71–99, esp. 73–4.Google Scholar

90 For a laudable art-historical attempt to put pagan, Christian, and Jewish together in the mosaics of Israel, see M. Schapiro's one venture into the field of ancient Jewish art: ‘Ancient mosaics in Israel: late antique art – pagan, Jewish, Christian’ (1960) in his Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art (1980), 20–33, though one might demure from the Strzygowskian final sentence about ‘decorative symbolization … within a Christianized and Hellenized Oriental world’ (33).

91 On universalism, see G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (1993), 37–60; Rives, J., ‘The decree of Decius and the religion of Empire’, JRS 89 (1999), 135–54Google Scholar; A. Brent, The Imperial Cult and the Development of Church Order (1999), 251–309.

92 See Smith, op. cit. (n. 39), 37–46, 116–17.

93 For the Mithraic record, see Cumont, F., Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithras (2 vols, 1896–1999)Google Scholar; Vermaseren, M. J., Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae (2 vols, 1956–1960CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

94 On Cumontian Mithraism, see Gordon, R., ‘Franz Cumont and the doctrines of Mithraism’, in Hinnells, J. (ed.), Mithraic Studies (1975), vol. 1, 215–48Google Scholar.

95 On the synagogue, see e.g. Levine, L. I. (ed.), The Synagogue in Late Antiquity (1987)Google Scholar; White, op. cit. (n. 81), 60–101; Fine, op. cit. (n. 5) and op. cit. (n. 31); Kee and Cohick, op. cit. (n. 46); Levine, L. I., The Ancient Synagogue: the First Thousand Years (2000).Google Scholar

96 For optimistic surveys of pre-Constantinian churches, see Snyder, op. cit. (n. 24), 67–82; White, op. cit. (n. 41), 121–258.

97 On the origins problem, see Smith, op. cit. (n. 39), 1–35, for example.