In 1932, at an ancient military outpost on the Euphrates, excavators unearthed a series of wall paintings. A procession of veiled women, a soldier with sword drawn, a woman at a well. The space was designed for religious rituals, but whose? As a crossroads for travelers, the city of Dura-Europos had buildings honoring gods of Greece, Rome, Persia, and Judea. These archaeologists soon realized, though, that they were looking at the earliest preserved Christian building—a “house church” from about the year 250. The World’s Oldest Church shines a flashlight once again on the murals of the earlies ... More

In 1932, at an ancient military outpost on the Euphrates, excavators unearthed a series of wall paintings. A procession of veiled women, a soldier with sword drawn, a woman at a well. The space was designed for religious rituals, but whose? As a crossroads for travelers, the city of Dura-Europos had buildings honoring gods of Greece, Rome, Persia, and Judea. These archaeologists soon realized, though, that they were looking at the earliest preserved Christian building—a “house church” from about the year 250. The World’s Oldest Church shines a flashlight once again on the murals of the earliest Christian building. Michael Peppard’s research at the nexus of Bible, art, and ritual shows that many familiar interpretations of the church require historical and theological reevaluation. While updating scholarship on all aspects of the building, he advances bold re-identifications of the female figures on the church’s walls. What if the veiled women were going not to a tomb, but to a wedding? What if the woman at a well was not a repentant sinner, but a spotless virgin—the Virgin Mary herself? Contrary to commonly held assumptions about early Christian initiation, Peppard contends that the rituals here did not primarily embody notions of death and resurrection. Rather, the central motifs were victory, healing, incarnation, and especially marriage. He attends to how the presence of ritual in a given space affects our interpretation of its art. In other words, the meaning of what appears on these walls may become clear only when we imagine what happened between them.