In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Religion et Sépulture: L’Église, les vivants et les morts dans l’Antiquité tardive
  • John S. Kloppenborg
Religion et Sépulture: L’Église, les vivants et les morts dans l’Antiquité tardive. By Éric Rebillard. [Civilisations et sociétés, Vol. 15.] (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. 2003. Pp. 243. €22.00.)

Since G.-B. de Rossi's La Roma sotterranea cristiana (Rome: Cromolitografia pontificia, 1864), the opinio communis has been that at least by the beginning of the third century, Christians owned and managed cemeteries and that it soon became normative for Christians to be buried in such church-controlled cemeteries. Rebillard's point of departure is the question, if the earliest church already controlled cemeteries reserved for the Christian dead, why do medieval legislators make no reference to this? His thesis comes in several parts: that the evidence of Christian control of cemeteries in the third century is much less convincing than has been supposed; that in the third century burial in a church-controlled cemetery was far from the norm; that it was not the Church that defined tomb violation as a crime, but rather the state; that the Church's principal interest was in the burial of martyrs; and that there was no standardized funeral liturgy (since it was the family rather than the Church that was involved in the burial of most of the Christian dead).

The two main texts supporting the traditional view are Hippolytus, Ref. 9.12, according to which Pope Zephyrinus appointed the deacon and future pope Callixtus to be in charge of to koimeterion, identified by most with the famous catacomb of San Callisto. From approximately the same time Tertullian's Ad Scapulam 3 refers to pagans who objected to the existence of burial grounds (areae) for Christians. Rebillard points out that the Greek koimeterion originally referred to individual tombs, not communal cemeteries, and that in Latin coemeterium was probably equivalent to martyrion rather than designating a general place for Christian dead. Valerian's decree of 257, forbidding Christians to visit "their places called koimeteria" (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 7.11.10) makes little sense if koimeteria referred to ordinary graves, since the emperor could [End Page 511] hardly forbid Christians to bury their dead. As far as Ad Scapulam 3 is concerned, Rebillard argues that Carthaginian pagans were not objecting to the existence of areae reserved for Christians, "mais plus vraisemblablement les enclos dont ils savaient que les propriétaires étaient chrétiens" (p. 20).

Apostolic Tradition 40 would seem to contradict Rebillard's thesis, since it prescribes that the poor should not be overcharged for burial in the koimeteria (plural!) since "it is the property of every poor person" and that the bishop should support those who care for cemeteries lest they become a burden on those who use them. Rebillard points out, however, that the original Greek of the Apostolic Tradition is not preserved, nor is the Latin for this section. What has been preserved is a Sahidic version dating from about the sixth century. Moreover, he distinguishes two parts of the prescriptions of chapter 40: one which requires burial places to be provided for the poor, which does not necessarily imply that the Church possessed or managed such places; and the other which indicated only that if the Church did own such cemeteries, the bishop should ensure that nothing was demanded of the poor to be buried there (p. 134). Rebillard's interpretations of these texts seem possible but hardly compelling and do not successfully exclude the more usual interpretations, that the Roman Church possessed cemeteries controlled by the bishop.

Throughout Rebillard insists that the choice of a place of burial was not imposed by the Church; Christians "had no religious reason to privilege a form of communal burial at the expense of burial by families" (p. 49). Collegia also offered burial for members, which offered another possibility for burial for Christians who were members of such professional or neighborhood groups. But he argues that membership in a collegium would not have necessarily made burial by the collegium more likely; on the contrary the family remained the "communauté naturelle...

pdf

Share