Ancient Baptismal Spaces: Form and Function (original) (raw)
Reuniting the waters, separating the lands. Windows and liminality in late antique baptism
Hortus Artium Medievalium, 2018
Starting from the paradoxical presence of windows on late antique baptisteries used at night, the paper considers the effect windows of cultic buildings had in the period. Drawing on late antique descriptions, the paper argues for windows being instrumental in the construction of a concept of sacred space and, with it, of a hierarchy rooted in their perception. The analysis points to the windows as part of a coherent strategy developed by the Church to both segment and integrate late antique communities in a crucial moment of its existence, when the cult became a mass religion.
Inventing Baptism: The Religious Histories of the Origin of "Christian Baptism"
This essay exposes the ideological biases characterizing recent research into the origin of "Christian baptism" as scholars variously root its origin in their preferred religion (Greco-Roman, Jewish, or sui generis Christianity). This is made possible in part through the constructed categories of various types of “baptisms” and a preference for "Christian baptism," which controls comparison. To remedy the distortion of sources, I propose that a robust implementation of comparative method is necessary, including clarification on what, why, and how we compare. This will shed clearer light on the origin of the religious ritual of baptism in, of, and around the Bible.
History and Sources of Baptism
ECO Theology Resources: Baptism, 2020
A short paper looking into the contextual elements that made baptism an immediately understandable and plausible symbolic expression of Christian discipleship in the first century.
Lecture 3 Baptism in the Early Church
2014
St. Cyril uses a allegorical hermenuetic to find many passages that foreshadow and enrich our understanding of the meaning and reason for Baptism. In a day when the Church was not only legal, but fashionable, he insisted that his baptismal candidates (catechumens) were sincere and committed to their Christian Faith.
THE PHYSICAL SETTING OF HOUSE CHURCHES
This paper was presented at Esplorando la Bibbia on August 22, 2016, in Policoro, Italy. It describes the various types of dwellings in the first-century Roman empire and the different theories about which setting was most likely for early house churches.
Religions
Baptism is the sacramental celebration of Christian initiation. Paul’s letter to the Romans, which is central to the understanding of baptism, characterizes this sacramental event as a dying with Christ and the beginning of a new existence. This new mode of existence gains an aesthetic-performative form in the liturgical rites. The design of the liturgical spaces can then be understood as “petrified rites”. The imperial church basilicas and baptisteries of the Byzantine period in Ravenna bear particular witness to such petrified manifestations of liturgy. What took place in the liturgical rites found an aesthetic counterpart in the interior design and in the rich mosaic art of the ancient buildings. The Ravennese color-intensive wall and ceiling motifs substantiate in a sensuous way the eschatological aesthetic, which is opened to believers through baptism. Biblical texts, architecture, rite, and pictorial program thus form an aesthetic ensemble whose elements mutually illuminate ea...
The Photisterion in Late Antiquity: Reconsidering Terminology for Sites and Rites of Initiation
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2019
What is a photisterion? Translators usually render the Greek word photisterion (site of illumination)as ‘baptistery’ (site of immersion in water). This article reopens the study of photisteria, arguing that being ‘immersed’ or ‘illuminated’ evokes different senses of the concomitant meaning of the sites and rites of initiation. It situates late ancient photisteria from epigraphic and literary sources in their theological and liturgical contexts. The evidence from Galilee, Syria, Jordan and Cyprus corroborates the idea that many Christians of late antiquity preferred ‘illumination’ to express the composite rite of initiation in a photisterion, within which ‘baptism’ was one part.