Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome

Galit Noga-Banai. Sacred Stimulus: Jerusalem in the Visual Christianization of Rome. Oxford University Press, 2018.

The turn to material culture over the past generation has led historians of antiquity to craft more nuanced reconstructions, drawing on sources beyond extant, (often) elite literature. As a result, these historians have been able to leverage countless studies on the development of early Christian art and architecture to illuminate new ways to understand how polemic contributed to identity formation. Noga-Banai’s new monograph, part of the Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity Series, follows up her previous project on early Christian reliquaries, The Trophies of the Martyrs, with a more ambitious study of how the visual memory of an earthly Jerusalem was appropriated by a newly ascendant Christian Rome, eager to demonstrate its own hegemonic importance to the foundation of Christianity. As she notes: “I consider the role of earthly Jerusalem as a conception that Rome used, or had to take into account, in constructing its own new Christian ideological and cultural topography of the past” (p. 3). Noga-Banai structures her study around repeated journeys between Jerusalem and Rome from the first through fifth centuries, tracing a period from subtle to increasingly assured visual appropriation of memories and tropes, culminating in a self-assured and assertive Rome confident in its identity as the perceived historical center of the Christian movement.

Sacred Stimulus traces these journeys through four chapters, beginning with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, the Emperor Titus’s ferrying of the sacred objects to Rome, and the pronounced effects the “presence of the absence” of the Temple had on artistic representations in Rome up to the fourth century. Noga-Banai parallels this arrival of sacred spoils with the arrival of a relic of the True Cross in the church of Saint Croce in Gerusalemme, and argues that these two events summarize “the basic theological and physical shift of Jerusalem’s sacred quality and reality to Rome” (p. 24). Two further sections compare the visual motif of Dominus legem dat (“The Lord gives the Law”) found in the Mosaic in Santa Costanza, with a related composition in the Jewish Catacomb of Villa Torlonia. This juxtaposition allows her to demonstrate that the Christian Dominus legem dat motif, as interpreted in Rome, relies on the public presence of the Temple relics in Rome as a reflection of the Temple’s absence in Jerusalem. The last section then argues that the related imagery found in the Jewish Catacomb and elsewhere not only responds to the Emperor Julian’s ill-fated fourth-century attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple but remains in a tense artistic dialogue with its related Christian motif.

The journeys continue with further migration of visual traditions from Jerusalem and Palestine to Rome, inspired by narratives concerning the third-century discovery of the True Cross and related staurophanies (manifestation of the symbol of the cross) in Jerusalem. Beginning with an analysis of the artistic narratives on Roman sarcophagi, Noga-Banai argues that the artistic trope of Peter and Paul adoring the Christogram appropriates for Rome the idea of Jerusalem as the locus for the cross. She contends the composition both prioritizes the imagery of Constantine’s vision of the cross at Milvian bridge over Jerusalem staurophanies and also reinforces the Roman locale through the integration into the trope of Peter and Paul as martyrs of the city. She maintains a focus on the so-called Bethesda sarcophagi which display biblical scenes traditionally associated with specific places in Jerusalem and Palestine. Noting the conflated and muddied details of the depicted biblical narratives, she argues that such Roman iconography downplays the Galilean location of Peter known from biblical accounts of Jesus’s ministry to promote the Roman location of Peter the Martyr and founder of the Roman church.

Noga-Banai expands from individual works of art to cover the theological fabric of the city itself as it developed around the reign of Pope Damasus. Two holy sites, The Basilica Apostolorum and Saint Paul Outside the Walls, provide examples of the development of an ecclesial design unifying the city of Rome as a site of religious memory. Pope Damasus expanded such efforts by mapping the city with numerous inscriptions commemorating the holy sites dedicated to Roman martyrs, and Noga-Banai compares this with analogous contemporary actions by Cyril of Jerusalem. She argues that “portable” art developed from the iconography decorating these holy sites, both securing and reflecting Rome’s new role as a center of Christian pilgrimage. She supports this argument with a detailed comparison of an early fifth-century Roman casket and reliquary with a sixth-century reliquary from Palestine.

The narrative concludes with a description of fifth century Rome, now confident in its supremacy as a Christian holy site, incorporating artistic representations of an earthly—and Christian—Jerusalem without any trace of inferiority to the earthly Jerusalem. The final chapter tours the art and architecture of several Roman churches built or expanded in the early fifth century, beginning with the apse mosaics of Santa Pudenziana on the Via Urbana. Within these sites one encounters a representation of the holy sites of Jerusalem tamed by the iconography of a Christian Rome. Further evidence is drawn from the fifth-century mosaics found in Santa Maria Maggiore which depict both Jerusalem and Bethlehem subsumed in a hierarchy that culminates with Rome as the city of an eschatological future. The tour concludes with Saint Stephano Rotondo, whose concentric design Noga-Banai argues is modeled on the predecessor of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, thereby assertively evoking the sacred pilgrimage site while simultaneously incorporating it into a larger “Roman map of sacred memory” (p. 168).

Well organized and amply illustrated, Sacred Stimulus carefully demonstrates the importance of a deep analysis of visual tropes as part of historical inquiry concerning the development and construction of early Christian identity in Rome. The book’s value lies not only in illuminating the polemical value of art in such contexts, but also as an invitation for further exploration and inquiry into the hegemonic appropriation of such imagery. In the context of an early Christian visual annexation of Jerusalem by Rome, I would welcome additional studies on how such appropriation directly intersects with a concomitant rise of supersessionist rhetoric. It is to our benefit that Noga-Banai has charted a methodological course for such work with her careful and detailed scholarship.

Ian Kinman recently defended his PhD in Theology at Fordham University and is an adjunct professor at Fordham University, Villanova University, and Saint Joseph’s University. His current research engages with issues of gender and sexuality, art and architecture, and economics, in Second Temple, Greco-Roman, and early Christian contexts.