The World's Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria by Michael Peppard (review)

Peppard offers, in his own words, "a fresh, rigorous, and plausible—albeit sometimes imaginative—historical reconstruction of the Christian community at Dura-Europos" (p. 43), whose building still counts as our earliest preserved church (in use around the middle of the third century). The book's chapters revisit the famous paintings of the baptistery in turn. Peppard wants his audience "to imagine early Christian initiation at the nexus of Bible, art, and ritual" (p. 211)—the subtitle that is applied heavily throughout (see pp. 30, 32, 37, 45, 84, 91, 108, 111, 202, 212; cf. p. 140). He warns against viewing the paintings as "allegorical treasures unlocked by one hermeneutical key—the right biblical text" (p. 31), appreciating that the term biblical can be seen as problematic since "a stable canon of the New Testament did not yet exist" (p. 31) and that the principal framework to interpret the paintings is their "ritual context": "We are not trying only to read the biblical writing on the walls; even more do we seek the liturgical riting on the walls" (p. 32). Throughout, Peppard puts forward "polysemic interpretations" (e.g., pp. 32, 42, 151, 194, 197).

The first painting to be discussed in chapter 2 is that of David slaying Goliath, often seen as somewhat out of place in the baptistery. Peppard argues that its appearance can not only be clarified but "perhaps even be expected" (p. 62), combining the ritual of anointment with "a militaristic visuality centered on the figure of David" (p. 84). Following an analysis of the shepherd and his flock above the font and of Jesus' miracles in chapter 3, the book's "heart" (p. 111, cf. p. 42) is chapter 4, which criticizes the traditional interpretation of the painting of the processing women as those visiting Jesus' empty tomb. Peppard supports the view postulated by Joseph Pijoan in Art Bulletin, 19 (1937), 592–95, and more recently by Dominic Serra in Ephemerides Liturgicae, 120 (2006), 67–78; cf. now also the argument made by Sanne Klaver in Eastern Christian Art, 9 (2012–13), 63–78, that they are in fact the virgins in the wedding procession from Matthew 25:1–13. The baptistery is then not so much a grave as a bridal chamber, although Peppard hastens to add that "the marriage motif dominates, but does not completely subordinate, the notions of death and resurrection at initiation" (p. 42). That the room could also be understood as a womb is put forward in chapter 5, which is presented as the book's "ambitious climax," where "an original, extensive survey of artistic depictions of the Annunciation in late ancient and Byzantine art" (p. 43) is added as an expansion to what Peppard refers to as the "small gem of an article" (p. 28; cf. p. 159) by Serra (o.c.), in which the latter first proposed to interpret the painting of a woman at a well (traditionally viewed as the Samaritan woman) according to a commonly overlooked tradition preserved in the Protevangelium of James, namely, as the annunciation to the Virgin at a well. To Serra's brilliant hypothesis Peppard now adds visual comparanda. The book's conclusion analyzes the paradise imagery within the framework of the writings of Ephraem Syrus—who "never set foot in the house-church at Dura-Europos, but his hymns would have felt right at home" (p. 203)—and especially of the Odes of Solomon, said to reverberate strongly with the concepts present in the baptisterium (pp. 43, 218).

Notably absent from the bibliography is the substantial monograph by Ulrich Mell, Christliche Hauskirche und Neues Testament: Die Ikonologie des Baptisteriums von Dura Europos und das Diatessaron Tatians (Göttingen, 2010). Peppard's own argumentation, "inductive more than deductive, cumulative and associative more than...