Alum rewrites the narrative of the ‘Christian Building’ at Dura-Europos

By Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R.

For seven years, Camille Leon Angelo ’18 M.A.R. excavated the truth about the so-called Christian Building at the archeological site of Dura-Europos, a ruined fourth-century Syrian settlement that has been described as “the Pompeii of the Desert.”

Angelo wasn’t digging at the site, which has become inaccessible and irreparably compromised by Syria’s civil war, but through thousands of pages of archeological records about the abandoned Roman outpost. The Christian Building, sometimes called the “world’s oldest church,” has been the subject of extensive scholarship and the basis of long-held theories of early Christian history. This past summer, however, Angelo cast doubt on these foundational views of the building in an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Roman Archeology.

The paper, “Debating the domus ecclesiae at Dura-Europos: the Christian Building in context,” was co-authored with Joshua Silver, an architect and postgraduate researcher at the University of Manchester. It declares that established conclusions about the ancient house and its use “do not do full justice to the archeology of the building.”

Yale News called Angelo’s findings “a bold challenge of entrenched understandings of what early Christianity looked like.” The article’s provocative scholarship places the ’25 Ph.D. candidate among a growing cadre of younger scholars reconsidering conventional concepts about the facts and interpretations of Dura and the Christian Building.

Yet the piece might never had been written but for Angelo’s experience as a master’s student at Yale Divinity School. It was at YDS, with the instruction and encouragement of Divinity faculty and others, that what she calls “the bones” of her published findings were first conceived and developed.

Domus ecclesiae

Angelo was in only her second semester at YDS when she was one of two master’s students permitted into a Spring 2017 doctoral seminar on Early Christian archeology taught by Stephen Davis, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies, and Felicity Harley-McGowan, Lecturer in the History of Art at the Divinity School. Despite being younger than most of her seminar-mates, Angelo brought considerable background to the course, including a BA in Archeology from the University of Toronto and fieldwork on international excavations.

To this previous experience, Angelo added at YDS an M.A.R. concentration in “Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.”

“It gave me new ways of asking questions about the experiences of people in antiquity,” she said of the concentration. “Even if I’m not talking explicitly about gender and sexuality, what I have drawn from those disciplines is the ability to think about experience and bodies in different terms. And that’s been important to my work as an archeologist.”

Her gender studies also informed a longtime interest in the “phenomenology of space.” Simply stated, this philosophical construct asks how the architectural spaces where we live, work, shop, and worship affect our lived experiences. “Just thinking about space,” Angelo said, “you have to think about bodies too. Our relationships between our own subjectivities and the spaces we inhabit are at the crux of what I do.”

In the 2017 seminar, “The central theme was specifically around the domestic. At the time, a number of important studies had just come out that critically interrogated the relationship between religion and the domestic—how those two things were at play and how they had been treated by researchers. So, just through the syllabus, I walked into the seminar primed to ask questions about domestic space. I was particularly interested in the ways that the categories with which we interpret archeological material can become self-reinforcing.”

One of the case studies examined in the seminar was Dura-Europos.

The base of a Roman imperial garrison, Dura-Europos was abandoned around 256 C.E. after a series of Persian invasions. It was not until the 1920s and ’30s that excavation was undertaken by scholars from France and America, led by a team from Yale. The university holds an extensive archive of excavation records, journals, and photographs from those digs and a collection of nearly 100,000 artifacts, many of which, including remnants of the Christian Building, are on display at the Yale University Art Gallery.

The Christian Building is renowned for its early Christian murals, including one that some scholars believe may be the earliest depiction of the Virgin Mary. The third-century domestic structure was discovered entombed inside a high rampart wall on the edge of town, one of several buildings buried by Dura’s inhabitants sometime between 254 and 256 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the city from being overrun by invaders.

‘Missing link’

Almost from the moment archeologists unearthed the Christian Building, the structure was determined to be the ruins of a private domicile adapted for Christian worship. In the 1960s, it was identified specifically as a domus ecclesiae, a “house church” where members of the Jesus sect were believed to have gathered in a time when Christians were persecuted as enemies of the state. Christianity was outlawed across the empire for more than two centuries until Emperor Constantine declared it legal in 313.

RELATED CONTENT: Alum Michael Peppard on Dura-Europos and what might be the earliest verifiable picture of Mary

The theory that the “house church” served as a sanctuary for a cadre of Christendom’s beleaguered forebears has for decades supported the foundational Christian chronicle of a true faith prevailing against difficult odds. Biblical and Early Christianity scholars have promulgated an evolutionary account of the religion’s development, with Dura’s so-called domus ecclesiae serving as a kind of “missing link” between the furtive meeting places described in the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles and the sanctioned basilicas that sprang up during the reign of Constantine.

This evolutionary account was at the heart of Angelo’s critique in 2017.

At the time, Kristina Sessa and other scholars had begun to question the literary validity of the designation domus ecclesiae as it has been applied to early Christian architecture. “It’s not a term we have evidence for being used prior to Constantine,” Angelo said. And, as she observed when she began poring over the Dura-Europos archives, neither did the archeological record really support the theory that the Christian Building had ever co-functioned as a domestic dwelling, or that it had much in common with Dura’s residential structures more broadly. Indeed, the evidence suggests the opposite: at some point in the building’s final two decades, it ceased to be a home at all and was extensively remodeled for religious purposes.

“I strongly suspected the archeology wasn’t there to support the idea of the domus ecclesiae,” Angelo said of the Dura archives. The more she researched other buildings at the site, “the more I started to see ways that the Christian Building was not unique, but part of a much larger pattern of houses renovated for cultic use.”

Angelo’s professors encouraged her to pursue her findings in the seminar’s final paper. “I was having these really interesting conversations with Felicity and Steve at the time,” she remembered. “They said to me, ‘We love the questions you’re asking and how you’re using the evidence.’”

“After I finished writing that term paper,” she continued, “I realized that there were things that I suspected based on light that I couldn’t show definitively without modeling. That’s why I brought on my co-author Josh Silver. We had been undergrads together and he’s now an architectural researcher.”

With Silver’s help, Angelo continued her investigations into the Christian Building throughout her time at YDS and after she began doctoral work at Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Through, as their article states, “an analysis of architectural adaptations, including before and after 3D reconstructions and daylight simulations,” the authors built a compelling argument against the Christian Building as a domus ecclesiae. They mapped the movement of daylight through the building and formulated a theory of how ambient light would have influenced activity inside the rooms. They examined such material considerations as the reflectance of paving stones, the installation of windows, and the off-center placement of a podium in a main room. They also considered what was missing from the building, including a cistern for storing water and an area dedicated to food preparation.

Their conclusion was that Dura’s Christian Building was as much a dedicated place of worship as the Jewish synagogue and Roman Mithraeum (a temple honoring the pagan god Mithras) that stood on the same street. As such, in its day it could hardly have functioned as a private residence or been taken for one. The publication of their article further complicates the narrative around the illegality and assimilation of Christianity in the days before Constantine.

Badass women

Professor Harley-McGowan, asked about the possible impact Angelo and Silver’s findings could have, predicted the article, “will change some of the conversations around the ways we think about the physical environment in which Christian communities in this early period were meeting, and the cultural context in which they were living and developing.”

She also spoke of being impressed by Angelo from their first meeting in that 2017 class. 

“She was obviously extremely talented and had been well trained in her undergraduate degree,” the professor said of her former student. “At Yale, she continued to develop and refine her skills across a range of disciplines, moving nimbly from Art History and Classics to Religious Studies in order to explore with rigor the kinds of research questions in which she was interested.” Harley-McGowan praised Angelo’s “seven years of hard work and commitment,” observing, “she had a vision of the sort of scholar that she wanted to be, and has been willing to engage with a variety of scholars and methodological frameworks.”

Another early mentor was Sally Promey, Professor of Religion and Visual Culture at the Institute of Sacred Music and director of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion.

“By some stroke of divine intervention,” Angelo said, “Sally was assigned to be my advisor at Yale Divinity. I’d read her work and loved it. I worked quite closely with her. Sally’s influence on me is clear in my work.”

Harley-McGowan and Promey, “carried me through my master’s into my Ph.D.,” Angelo said. The professors are part of a community of scholars, many of them women, who continue to inspire and guide her.

“I have been fortunate in my career to have worked with a lot of really badass women,” she remarked. Angelo cited specifically the influence of scholars focused on Dura-Europos, including Jennifer Baird, Anne Chen, Karen Stern, and Harley-McGowan, among others. “We have this kind of replicating cycle of mentorship and support that makes it a really fantastic site to work on because you get to be in conversation with such fantastic people. Hopefully in a couple of years I can turn around and mentor other women to work on Dura as well.”

Angelo is currently applying for university teaching positions as she completes her dissertation on “Monastic Materialities: Space, Subjectivity, and Sexuality in Late Antiquity.”

“It looks at how monastic spaces such as refectories, storage spaces, and tombs produced monastic sexualities in late antique Egypt,” she explained. “My dissertation makes the case about the ways that sexuality and space are always intertwined. I think the methodologies I develop there can be taken into other contexts as well. It looks different in different historical contexts, but it’s not a conversation that’s only applicable to the ancient world.”

Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. writes about the intersection of faith and the arts.

October 15, 2024