Alexamenos graffito

An ancient Roman graffito with a satirical depiction of Jesus Christ on a cross.

Alexamenos graffito

The Alexamenos graffito (Template:Langx,Template:Rp or ) is a piece of Roman graffiti scratched into the plaster of a wall in a room near the Palatine Hill in Rome, Italy, which has since been removed and is now located in the Palatine Museum. Often said to be the earliest depiction of Jesus, the graffito is difficult to date, but has been estimated to have been made around the year 200 AD. The image seems to show a young man worshiping a crucified, donkey-headed figure. The Ancient Greek inscription approximately translates to Template:Gloss, indicating that the graffito was apparently meant to mock a Christian named Alexamenos.

Content

File:AlexGraffito.svg

From Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (1898)

The image depicts a human-like figure affixed to a cross and possessing the head of a donkey or mule. In the top right of the image is what has been interpreted as either the Greek letter upsilon or a tau cross. To the left of the image is a young manTemplate:Sndapparently intended to represent AlexamenosTemplate:Sndas a Roman soldier or guard, raising one hand in a gesture possibly suggesting worship.

The name Alexamenos (and its Latinate variant Alexamenus) is also attested in the instances of Alexamenus of Teos, student of Socrates, and the general, Alexamenus of Aetolia (2nd century BC), possibly composed of the common Greek compound elements of Template:Wikt-lang (aléxō, Template:Gloss) and Template:Wikt-lang (ménos, Template:Gloss, etc.). Alternatively, it may be derived directly from (alexámenos), which is the participle of that same Greek verb.

Beneath the cross is a crude caption written as . The word can be understood as a variant of spelling (or a possible phonetic misspelling) of the Standard Greek word , which means Template:Gloss.Template:Efn The inscription would then be read as , or Template:Gloss. Several other sources suggest Template:Gloss or other similar variants as the intended translation.

In the next chamber, another inscription in a different hand written in both Greek and Latin reads as ("Alexamenos Template:Wikt-lang"), which either means Template:Gloss or Template:Gloss. This may be a retort by an unknown party to the mockery of Alexamenos represented in the graffito.

Date

No clear consensus has been reached on when the image was made. Dates ranging from the late 1st century AD to the late 3rd century AD have been suggested, with the beginning of the 3rd century AD thought to be the most likely.

Discovery and location

The graffito was discovered in 1857 when a building known as the domus Gelotiana was unearthed on the Palatine Hill. The emperor Caligula had acquired the house for the imperial palace, which after Caligula died was used as a Paedagogium (boarding school) for imperial page boys. Later, the street along which the house sat was walled off to give support to extensions to the buildings above, and it thus remained sealed for centuries.

Interpretation

The inscription is usually considered to be a mocking depiction of a Christian in the act of worship. The donkey's head and crucifixion would both have been considered insulting depictions by contemporary Roman society. Crucifixion continued to be used as a method of execution for the worst criminals until its abolition by the first Christian emperor Constantine I in the early 4th century AD.

It seems to have been commonly believed at the time that Christians practiced onolatry (donkey-worship). That was based on the misconception that Jews worshiped a god in the form of a donkey, a claim made by Apion (30–20 BC – c. Template:Trim) and denied by Josephus in his work Against Apion.

Origen reports in his treatise Contra Celsum that the pagan philosopher Celsus made the same claim against Christians and Jews.

Tertullian, writing during the late 2nd or early 3rd century, reports that Christians, along with Jews, were accused of worshiping such a deity. He also mentions an apostate Jew who carried around Carthage a caricature of a Christian with a donkey's ears and hooves, labeled (Template:Gloss).

In the image, Alexamenos is portrayed venerating an image of the crucifix, a detail that Peter Maser believed to represent the Christian practice of venerating icons. The practice, however, was not known to be part of Christian worship until the 4th or 5th century.

File:Anubis as Guardian of the Dead.png

"Anubis as Guardian of the Dead" from Lundy, John Patterson (1876). Monumental Christianity New York, J.W. Bouton. p. 60.

File:The Gnostic Anubis.png

"The Gnostic Anubis" from Lundy, John Patterson (1876). Monumental Christianity New York, J.W. Bouton. p. 61.

Some scholars of the 19th century argued that the inscription is actually a depiction of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis. For example, in Rev. John P. Lundy's book on early Christian history published in 1876, it identifies the inscription as the "Gnostic Anubis." He writes that the inscription depicts the "head of Anubis, or Thoth, the Egyptian Mercury and custodian of the dead". 19th-century scholar Charles William King says it is disputed whether it is a caricature of a Christian convert or an adoration of the jackal-headed god Anubis.

Further reading

• Titus Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, II (VII), 2.80
• Norman Walker, The Riddle of the Ass's Head, and the question of a trigram, ZAW 9 (1963), 219–231.

See also

• Anti-Christian sentiment

External links

• The Alexamenos Graffito: page by Rodney J. Decker
• Alexamenos and pagan perceptions of Christians
• Alexamenos: a Christian mocked for believing in a crucified GodTemplate:Category handler