The Earliest Christian Graffito?
In my previous posting I briefly described Roger Bagnall’s new book, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East, and I mentioned his lead chapter on a body of graffiti from ancient Smyrna. Among the items he discusses in this chapter, I was particularly (predictably!) intrigued with one that Bagnall confidently claims must be Christian (pp. 22-23). Here are the basic data:
- The graffiti in question are on plastered surfaces in the basement of a city structure, and there are multiple layers of plaster laid on across time.
- One graffito includes a date, which Bagnall correlates to 125/126 CE.
- The layer of plaster beneath the layer on which this dated graffito is written is partially exposed, and on this exposed plaster is “a most remarkable graffito, incised into the plaster rather than written with ink or charcoal.” This graffito reads:
- The first word, ισοψηφα, means “of equal value/number”, indicating that the graffito is an example of “isopsephy”, the ancient practice of comparing words of equal numerical value (by adding up the value of their letters). The letters of each of the two words, κυριος (“Lord”) and πιστις (“faith”), = 800, which is expressed by the omega after each one (the omega = 800).
- The distinguishing centrality of these two Greek words in early Christian vocabulary (as well as the interest in 8 and multiples of 8) combine to prompt Bagnall’s judgment that the graffito “can only indicate a Christian character” (22).
- As this graffito is on a layer of plaster just beneath the layer with the dated graffito, it must be dated earlier than 125 CE, perhaps some years earlier. This would make this certainly the earliest identifiable Christian graffito, and perhaps also likely the earliest artifact of Christian writing.
Perhaps because Bagnall doesn’t have a TV production company behind him, we haven’t seen this item in the daily news. But, while we wait to see what scholars make of the Talpiot tombs, and whether in fact we have a fragment of a 1st-century copy of the Gospel of Mark, here we have a published artifact that has strong claims for anyone interested in the origins of Christianity.
Bagnall also notes a few other graffiti from Smyrna that he judges “possible references to Christianity” (23). These include a fragmentary graffito that can be restored as “the one who has given the spirit”. Another partially-preserved graffito “even more tantalizingly” has the letters ΚΑΡΠΟΣ, which Bagnall wonders might have been the name of Polycarp (Greek: Πολυκαρπος), a leader in the church in Smyrna in the period of the graffito.
Isopsephy was taken up by ancient Jews, and the Jewish practice is called “gematria” (from the Greek word “geometria“), and it is interesting that among our earliest literary examples are instances in NT writings that likely stem from Jewish-Christian authors: the best-known one Revelation 13:18 and also (more subtly) Matthew 1:17 (alluding to the numerical value of “David” in Hebrew characters). Roughly contemporary are instances in 3 Baruch and Sibylline Oracles 5, lines 12-51. The second-century Christian text, Epistle of Barnabas, uses the technique in expounding the meaning of the 318 servants of Abraham (Gen 14:14) as the cross of Jesus (318 written as the Greek letters TIH, the T = cross/crucifixion, and the IH the first two letters of Jesus’ name). For a helpful introduction, see the entry on “Gematria” by Gideon Bohak in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, eds. J. J. Collins & D. C. Harlow (Grand Rapds: Eerdmans, 2010), 661.