The Year of St. Paul ends with revelations
First, Benedict XVI confirms that tests done on bone fragments from a tomb venerated as that of the Apostle–but often considered more legend than fact–belonged to a man who lived between the first and second century.
“This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul,” the pope said during an evening prayer service June 28 at Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, according to the CNS report.
The basilica has long been held to be the burial site of St. Paul, but because of the destruction and rebuilding of the basilica, the exact location of the tomb was unknown for centuries. Vatican officials announced in December 2006 that several feet below the basilica’s main altar and behind a smaller altar, they had found a roughly cut marble sarcophagus beneath an inscription that reads: “Paul Apostle Martyr.”
Because part of the sarcophagus is buried beneath building material, Vatican officials determined they could not dig it out to open and examine the contents. Initially they tried to X-ray it to see what was inside, but the marble was too thick.
Pope Benedict said a “very tiny perforation” was drilled into the marble so that a small probe could be inserted in order to withdraw fragments of what was inside.In addition to traces of purple linen, a blue fabric with linen threads and grains of red incense, he said they found bone fragments.
The bone fragments “underwent a carbon-14 analysis carried out by experts who did not know their place of origin,” the pope said, adding that the results “indicate they belong to a person who lived between the first and second century.”
Second, and just as remarkable, is the news that Vatican archaeologists have found what is likely the oldest known portrait of St Paul–a fourth-century mosaic (shown above, from the London Times story) that shows the Apostle to the Gentiles much as he has been portrayed down through the centuries.
L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, which devoted two pages to the discovery, said that the oval portrait, dated to the 4th century, had been found in the catacombs of St Thecla, not far from the Basilica of St Paul’s Outside the Walls, where the apostle is buried. The find was “an extraordinary event”, said Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture.
Barbara Mazzei, a restorer, said that centuries of grime had been removed with a laser. Fabrizio Bisconti, Professor of Christian Iconography at Rome University and a member of the team that made the discovery, said that it appeared to have decorated the tomb of a nobleman or high church official.
Tags: St. Paul
Sandro Magister also has the story today, with comments on why St. Paul was represented as a philosopher. http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1339103?eng=y
One senses from their accounts in L’Osservatore Romano the wonder experienced by the archeologists and restorers in seeing come to light the moving visage of the Apostle of the Gentiles after centuries of being buried below the earth.
But also their excitement at the potential opened up by this first use of laser technology in the catacombs. One of them writes:
“I risultati raggiunti, come i volti degli apostoli dimostrano, sono di qualità insperata, e l’impiego di questa rivoluzionaria tecnica di restauro nelle catacombe di Roma promette nuove sorprese.” [The results achieved, as the faces of the apostles show, are of higher quality than could have been hoped for, and the application of this revolutionary technology of restoration in the catacombs of Rome promises new surprises.]
The other apostles to whom she refers are Peter and, probably, James and John.
“First, Benedict XVI confirms that tests done on bone fragments from a tomb venerated as that of the Apostle–but often considered more legend than fact–belonged to a man who lived between the first and second century.”
I would say that it is the tests rather than Bendict that confirm the period, i.e., 1st to 2nd century CE, of the one whose remains were examined. Bendict goes somewhat further: “This seems to confirm the unanimous and uncontested tradition that they are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul.” The operative word here is “seems”. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor might not agree. “No public liturgical cult of the martyrs [Peter and Paul] in Rome is attested before the middle of the third century. Hence no reliable local tradition can be assumed.” So Murphy-O’Connor in Paul: a Critical Life.
Joseph,
I’d suggest that Murphy O’Connor’s evidence is too slim to firmly conclude that there was in fact no public liturgical cult of these two martyrs. Lack of conclusive evidence for a cult is not the same thing as conclusive evidence for a lack of a cult, if you know what I mean.
On the other hand, the Pope’s evidence seems much too slim to compel belief. “Seems to”–I agree that this is the key phrase.
What struck me first about the portrait is that St. Paul doesn’t look Jewish. (I accept that it’s of him.) He looks more like a long-headed, long-nosed Turk, not the round=headed, round-eyed Jew that forms my stock image of Jews. Might his father’s people have been Turk, or whatever the people in Tarsus was called in those days? It might partly explain his interest in preaching to the Gentiles.
He says he rejects “the philosophers”, but he certainly thinks like a philosopher — regularly telling us what a word means, making distinctions, and he obviously relished paradoxes (“The Cretan says all Cretans are liars.”)
As to a continuous tradition that he is buried there, it seems that this is another of those “as-the-CChurch-has-always-taught” items, a triumph of hope over evidence. But I must admit that it would be just too weird to think that the early Christians forgot where he was buried. Human nature doesn’t work like that.
Anybody know how a laser cleans things? Sounds like magic :-)
Rome and the empire – would suggest that locations of events, churches, etc. have changed because of various historical happenings.
Example from Australia’s Catholica: “Perhaps as a result of his personal dramas; about this time Constantine also dispatched his mother Helena on a penitential journey to the Holy Land where she is reputed to have recovered the remains of the True Cross of Jesus. She claimed to have identified most of the major sites associated with the life of Jesus following ecstatic visions. Bear in mind that this was the city built by Hadrian, not the city Jesus had known.
The credulous or perhaps just dutiful son, ordered magnificent churches to be built to house each of the holy places, including one at Bethlehem on the site of Jesus’ supposed birthplace. The focal point was the rockcut grotto where pagan women had come for centuries on a fixed day every year to mourn for the death of Adonis. Regardless of the authenticity or not of Helena’s discoveries, the story of her pilgrimage led to a flood of pilgrims from all over the Christian world, eager to view where Jesus had delivered his message. Their influx began to enrich the Church there.”
Now, compare to this announcement…..sound familiar?
Kathy
I agree that arguments from silence are not knock down arguments, but I think Murphy-O’Connor might respond that if there was a memory of the place of the martyrdom and burial of Peter and Paul in Rome there would be a cult before the third century, and if there was a cult of two so prominent figures in Rome, there would be some notice of it.
Of course Benedict’s claim that there not negative attestation is equally an argument from silence. The Vatican interest in claiming they have the remains of Peter and Paul to some degree resembles the enthusiasm with which persons of a very different persuasion want to believe that the burial place of Jesus and his family has been found in Jerusalem!
Ann
The “portrait” of Paul seems to have borrowed, generically, from portraits of Greek philosophers. The pointed beard is somewhat reminiscent of the well known portrait of Plato, and actually some portraits of Peter make him look something like Aristotle. How do portray someone you have no likeness of? If you are talented you might use your imagination. Look at the tradition of portraits of Homer. But apparently Christians use the iconography of Apollo and Orpheus to represent Christ. Given that precedent, why not use a handy likeness of Plato to suggest what Paul might have looked like. We are not dealing with great artists here, or Romantic visionaries.
Joseph,
Perhaps the argument would have to go one step further: …and if there was notice of it, these writings would have survived to this day.
That’s a step too far, I think. Arguments from silence rely too much on the completeness of the historical record.
“If this is what happened, then the Church in the early centuries had no reservations about attributing to the apostles, and to Paul in particular, the title of philosopher, nor of handing down, studying, and proclaiming in its entirety his thought, which is certainly not easy to understand and accept.
The same can be said of the Fathers of the Church. In a phase of Christianity in expansion, in a phase in which the transmission of the Christian faith to the Gentiles was in full development, the Church never considered watering down or domesticating its own message in order to make it more acceptable to the men of the time.
The depiction of Paul the philosopher is an eloquent warning to those who today deny relevance to a pope theologian like Benedict XVI, a modern Father of the Church.”
The convenient timing of the announcement of both these “finds” and the needlessly hard sell they are being given in Rome are disheartening. And so unnecessary. The most vivid picture anyone could get of Paul is available in his letters, and always has been.
Susan Gannon: I don’t think that there’s much of “hard sell” going on in Rome. The articles in the “Osservatore Romano” on the portrait of St. Paul are by the scientists and they don’t sound like used-car salesmen. As Bob Imbelli points out above, the archeologists seem more stunned by the success of the new technology and by what it uncovered than triumphalistic. Sandro Magister, of course, is another thing…
Thanks to Fr. K for the link to Sandro Magister’s comments on the representation of Paul as philosopher I cited above. Anyone who has strolled through a collection of Greek and Roman portrait busts would immediately recognize the way the portraits of long forgotten ancients are confidently categorized as “portrait of a poet,” or “portrait of a philosopher” solely on the evidence of facial type and hairstyle. What is most interesting about the Magister piece is not the art history lesson, but the conclusion he draws about what the image of Paul as philiosopher must mean to the faithful today.
Sorry. Paul himself would have objected to this. It is not Apollo, Paul or Simon but Jesus Christ who is our leader. Relics have always been a mask substitute for the real Christian life.