To the magistrates of Lyons and to pagans generally, the predawn worship of Christians and their acts of faith were a mystery, which was made no more understandable by the martyred bishop of Lyons, who, when asked who was the Christian god, replied only that "If you are a fit person, you shall know." Attalus, too, said only that the name of his god was not like that of a man. Such secrecy elicited lurid notions of immorality, and there were accusations of "Thyestean banquets [cannibalism] and Oedipean incest, and things we ought never to speak or think about, or even believe that such things ever happened among human beings" (Eusebius, V.1.14).
Orator and rhetorician, Marcus Cornelius Fronto was the tutor of Marcus Aurelius and later, his correspondent. He condemned the Christians in a lost speech, fragments of which are preserved in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, a dialogue between the pagan Caecilius and the Christian Octavius that sought to refute such charges. One was that "They are initiated by the slaughter and the blood of an infant, and in shameless darkness they are all mixed up in an uncertain medley" (IX). Another, recounts Minucius, was "the charge of our entertainments being polluted with incest" (XXXI). Justin, who was martyred during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (the record of the trial, based on an official court report, still survives), also mentions "those fabulous and shameful deeds--the upsetting of the lamp, and promiscuous intercourse, and eating human flesh (First Apology, I.26), calumnies that inspired fear and hostility, and brutal punishment.
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Fronto also asserted that "the religion of the Christians is foolish, inasmuch as they worship a crucified man, and even the instrument itself of his punishment. They are said to worship the head of an ass, and even the nature of their father" (Octavius, IX). In the Histories, Tacitus recounts how the Jews, expelled from Egypt, wandered in the desert, exhausted and dying of thirst, when, following a herd of wild asses, they were led to water. So, in the temple at Jerusalem, "they consecrated an image of the animal which had delivered them" (V.3). Even though Pompey, upon entering the temple, found its sanctuary to be empty (V.9), it must have been from this story, supposes Tertullian, that the notion derived that Christians were "devoted to the worship of the same image" and that "our god is an ass's head" (Apology, XVI). An ignominious and shameful death and, in the words of Paul, "unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness" (I Corinthians I.23), the crucifixion was not depicted in Christian art until the sixth century. The earliest representation is this graffito, scratched on plaster c.200 AD and found in the Paedagogium on the Palatine Hill, possibly a school to train servants in the imperial household. One sees from the caricature that the cross is low to the ground and in the shape of a T (a tau cross, crux commissa, after the Greek letter, rather than the Latin cross, crux immissa, that traditionally is depicted) and, indeed, Tertullian remarks "Now the Greek letter tau and our own letter T is the very form of the cross, which He predicted would be the sign on our foreheads in the true Catholic Jerusalem" (Against Marcion, V.22; cf. Ezekiel IX.4). There is a bar to support the feet and the hands are tied to the cross beam, which would have prolonged the agony of crucifixion. The Greek inscription reads "Alexamenos worships [his] God." |
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The Alexamenos graffito now is in the Palatine Museum (Rome).
References: Eusebius: The History of the Church (1965) translated by G. A. Williamson; The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 (1885-1896) translated and edited by the Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson; A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series II (1890-1896) edited by by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace; Tacitus: The Histories (1975) translated by Kenneth Wellesley (Penguin Classics). The principle text is Graffiti del Palatino: Paedagogium (1966) edited by Heikki Solin and Marja Itkonen-Kaila (the Alexamenos graffito is no. 246).
