Materials That Make Difference

Nicola Denzey Lewis. The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The question of how religion relates to the slippery concept “identity” is a long-standing one in the study of religion. This issue is especially tricky when it comes to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the first few decades of Christianity’s existence, because the boundaries between them, as we now recognize, were incredibly blurry. Indeed, in the last several decades, scholars such as Annette Yoshiko-Reed, Paula Fredriksen, Stephen Wilson, and Matthew Jackson-McCabe have all questioned the self-evident nature of “Jewish” and “Christian” identities in the Roman Empire. In the present venue, Todd Berzon has reflected more generally on the scholarly construct of identity.

Unfortunately, many in our field still often proceed as if ancient religious identity is self-evident or as if an ancient person’s religion was somehow all-encompassing of their identity, such that they cannot occupy any other identity category once they have been labeled “Jewish” or “Christian.” To illustrate these pervasive assumptions, I can offer an anecdote. I was recently discussing with a fellow scholar the question of whether Christians used a discourse about “loving their god” in a way that was foreign to Greeks and Romans. My interlocutor assured me that they had done extensive research into Christian sources and had found numerous examples of this discourse, marshaling such evidence as Luke 10:27 and 1 Peter 1:8. Similar discourse, they argued, does not seem to be found among Romans: it is, as they phrased it, “not a Roman thing.” My eventual response was simply, “I’d probably say there’s a very good chance that Luke is Roman. So, in that sense, it does seem to be a Roman thing to talk about their relationship to the divine in that way.” My point was that treating a Christian identity as a construct that cannot also encompass Romanness is actually distorting our ancient data, such that we begin to think of some religious phenomena as utterly unique and somehow incomparable to other social and religious forms.

The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome exemplifies how to integrate these and other critical insights generated by the study of religion into the study of late antique Christianity in Rome. Nicola Denzey Lewis interrogates precisely the kind of issues that I was concerned about in the anecdote above. She explores questions of ancient religious identities, assumptions that scholars make about how religious identities are expressed and lived, and connections between material culture and the discourse of religion, as well as how modern social and ethnic prejudices have affected our study of religion in antiquity. Though I will offer a basic overview of the book’s main goal, I want to focus my review closely on her discussion of the so-called Jewish catacombs. The case of the Jewish catacombs exemplifies how scholars of the ancient world have long worked with undertheorized ideas about religious identities, religious communities, and the relationship between material culture and lived religion, among other things. Denzey Lewis’ even-handed interrogation of this particular example underscores the need for more sophisticated, theoretically informed, treatments of ancient religion.

Before exploring this case study, it is necessary to foreground the book’s wider thesis: put simply, certain ideas about the religiousness of late antique Rome are not as obvious as earlier scholars have assumed. In particular, they do not arise from the ancient evidence itself, but are, rather, the consequence of theological and political ideological work in the Counter-Reformation period. Guided by an interdisciplinary suite of theoretical works (including those by Michel Foucault, Jonathan Z. Smith, Robert Hertz, and Judith Butler), Denzey Lewis examines how this skewed historical narrative about Rome arose. Importantly, she excludes the sacred itself (and its self-evidence) as a driving influential force in order to interrogate the specific decisions, arguments, and actions of cultural producers. Her expansive study includes not only early church thinkers attempting to frame the material space in Rome, but also later theologians, biblical scholars, and archaeologists working in the modern period. Each chapter tackles a specific instance of material culture to see how this ideological work unfolded. It is, to be sure, a remarkable reassessment of our long-entrenched imagination of late antique Rome.

 An illustrative example of the material evidence Denzey Lewis examines is so-called Jewish catacombs in Rome. Today, it is quite common to speak of the Jewish catacombs in Rome, as if they are simply a parallel phenomenon to the Christian ones. As this book shows, however, the scholarly treatment of these spaces embodies problematic assumptions about religious identity. Our assumptions about the religious affiliation of these spaces has distorted our understanding of this particular burial practice in late antique Rome. The case of the catacombs is thus an excellent example of how early modern ideological work in the Counter-Reformation period fundamentally distorted ancient material culture. Discovered in the sixteenth century, these catacombs have been treated as separate from, distinguishable from, indeed mutually exclusive with, Christian catacombs. Yet, Denzey Lewis argues that this assumption is a “myth” (the myth of the ‘Jewish catacomb’ [p.252]), and the self-evident religious identity of this material culture remains an “invented entity that persists in scholarly literature and popular understanding” (p.252). In particular, such a conclusion stems from identifying cultural markers of Judaism (such as a menorah or an inscription) and assuming that such markers essentially embody and represent Jewish identity. This nomenclature not only essentializes Jewish identity in antiquity and occludes a great deal of diversity in lived ancient religion, but it also relies on problematic assumptions between religious/cultural sensibilities and material culture, namely, the view that material must reflect visually the identity of those in and around where the material object existed or was used. Tomb inscriptions further illustrate these definitional problems since they served to showcase a person’s identity, but due to their limitations fail to capture the multiple dimensions of the owner’s identity.

The classification of the catacombs also reveals the more troubling influence of modern anti-semitism upon preliminary studies. According to Denzey Lewis, early scholars imported assumptions drawn from the ghettoization of Jewish communities in several European cities where deliberate cultural practices served to keep strict identity differences in place. For that reason, early catacombs scholars were predisposed to find Jewish communities that were markedly different from the surrounding social and material context. The narrow view of the Jewish community as an isolated enclave existing in the urban space of modern European cities was thus projected back onto the ancient city of Rome. In this way, Denzey Lewis argues, the “idea” of Jewish catacombs was invented in the sixteenth century, and then later in the nineteenth century, it was “tidied up and purged of any religious ambiguities” (p.252) that might allow any blurriness between these ancient religious identities. The corrosive effect of these studies resulted in the erasure of ancient Jews within sacred space in ancient Rome, besides that which could be definitively identified with their explicit ethno-religious markers. It is worth noting that Denzey Lewis does not address how the Jewish Emancipation in the sixteenth-century might have influenced this early scholarship. One wonders if the discursive efforts to “keep Jews in their place” in these constructions of late antique Rome was a reaction to their increasing presence in European cities in the early modern period.

This discussion about burial practices and material culture in connection to lived religion leads Denzey Lewis to a fascinating inquiry into how we imagine religious communities in late antique Rome (p. 267-288). How should we connect material culture to textual accounts of a religious community in a particular urban space? How much material culture with explicit religious or ethnic markers must be present to conclude a space’s actual use by that particular group of people? These are fundamental, yet undertheorized questions, in our field. This book brings them forward for rigorous consideration.

In fact, the chapter on Jewish catacombs, and indeed the book as a whole, seems to be suggesting that labeling any catacomb as distinctly “Jewish” or “Christian” is a questionable enterprise because we have no unambiguous evidence of religiously segregated burial practices in the first place. There is no a priori reason why non-Christians could not be buried in a so-called Christian catacomb, and likewise, there seems to be no a priori reason why Christians could not have shared burial space with Jews. Given the absence of contrary evidence, it is more probable that diverse communities may have shared religious spaces and burial space without incident —indeed, as the opening anecdote suggested, some people could occupy multiple identities at once. This is more realistic than the compartmentalized religious identities and communities that some have promoted. The case study on the Jewish catacombs, therefore, is a microcosm of the many problematic, often unspoken, methods and theories that plague the study of early Christianity, and the study of religion more broadly.

The book’s wider thesis offers important insights into the critical study of religion. In particular, this study compellingly shows, with extensive examples, that “what religion is” is a discourse that is historically contingent and culturally determined. Assumptions about what religion was—indeed, what it had to be for certain thinkers—and how religious identities operated (typically treated as mutually exclusive, all-determining identities) affected how the catacombs were treated and how Roman burial patterns have long been understood.

Given how persuasively this book undermines the conventional myths about Rome’s sacred features in late antiquity, it might be better to frame the book’s conclusions in terms of what was not going on in the city of Rome in late antiquity: the catacombs were not being treated as sacred space; burial patterns were not organized on the basis of proximity to saints and martyrs; relics were not the all-determining material objects that they became outside of Rome; Jewish and Christian religious leaders were not administering religiously exclusive cemeteries; pilgrims were not flocking to the city to visit catacombs, relics, or other gravesites. These conclusions, to be sure, challenge centuries of scholarship about ancient Rome and often resulted from scholars retrojecting later assumptions about how religious identities and practices operated.

The emergence of a so-called “sacred” city of Rome in the late antique empire has often been assumed as a self-evident development. This assumption arises from the privileging of textual evidence over material culture. Into this fray, Denzey Lewis adopts a refreshing perspective, refusing to follow traditional conclusions about the developments of sacred space and rituals that have long been the convention of our field. This is, to my mind, the brilliance of such a study, because it forces the burden of “sense-making” onto the ancient evidence itself. Not surprisingly, the ancient evidence, animated as it is by modern theological interests and cultural biases, does not reflect the historical narrative it has been marshalled to support. In my view, many would do well to adopt a similar perspective, for it makes us push our evidence to its logical conclusions, instead of just assuming that its interpretation is obvious. By centering material culture, moreover, Denzey Lewis helps us see how literary sources from this time period shape our perspectives. As we find time and time again, lived religious identities are often incredibly different than “what’s on the books.”

In sum, this is an ambitious project that hopes to dislodge a well-entrenched historical narrative about late antique Rome that has been guided and sustained by theologies and political ideologues for centuries. This work raises critical questions concerning the concept of origins. New Testament scholarship (my area of specialization) has often been preoccupied with origins. Beginning in the 1980’s, a new wave of scholars such as J.Z. Smith and Burton Mack and advances in critical theory by Foucault and others have called into question the primacy of origins. These approaches first deconstructed the idea that we can ever definitively identify a singular moment of origin for any particular social movement or religion. Even more important, to my mind, was the accompanying suggestion that origins do not account for future trajectory or meaning. That is, knowing about the origins of something does not explain what it might become, nor must we constrict its meaning to its origin. I note that in this book Denzey Lewis’ interests are often concerned with correcting flawed ideas about origins, whether the origins of the Jewish catacombs, the origins of Peter’s burial site, or the the origins of the so-called crypt of the popes. The origins, she consistently argues, are something other than what they were made into in the sixteenth century and beyond. I simply wonder if we privilege origins too much in these conversations. Put differently, can these material objects have cultural meaning outside of origins? To offer a specific example, can the Jewish catacombs—despite not really being singularly Jewish, as the book shows well—have any political significance or do any identity work today, despite the fact that its origins are not, strictly speaking, “true”? That is to say, might contemporary Jews find or feel some connection to the city of Rome on the basis of these catacombs, even though their origin, as Denzey Lewis has shown, might not be singularly Jewish?

Sarah E. Rollens is the R.A. Webb Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College. She received her PhD in the Study of Religion from the University of Toronto in 2013. Her scholarship focuses on Christian origins, specifically the ideologies, social practices, and group formations in the first century of the Jesus movement and Christ cults. In addition to co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Sayings Gospel Q, she is currently working on a project that redescribes the concept of “mission” in early Christianity. She is also in the final stages of editing a pedagogical volume with Eric Vanden Eykel and Meredith Warren, entitled Judeophobia and the New Testament, that seeks to confront and rethink antisemitic and supersessionist interpretations of New Testament texts.