The importance of archaeological evidence that has not been found or identified, or has been destroyed, or has never existed is particularly evident in the case of the development of smaller Christian community centers or parishes. In the century or so after the development of early Christian archaeology in Rome, this was one of the questions most discussed. Although we know from written sources that there was an important Christian community in the city, no Christian cult places or churches from the period before the early fourth century, when the persecutions of the Christians ended, have been found inside the city walls. The first Christian church built in Rome that we know of was the cathedral, the Lateran basilica, called today San Giovanni in Laterano (Krautheimer 1977; De Blaauw 1996, 2001). According to the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis (Duchesne 1886: 172-5), this was built by the emperor Constantine soon after ad 312. There is no reason to doubt that, and contemporary sources from the fourth and fifth centuries go on to mention a growing number of smaller churches for local communities in the various quarters ofRome; churches that were known, at least from the fifth century onward, as tituli (Pietri 1989b).
The Liber Pontificalis states that some of these were founded in the fourth and fifth centuries; of others no textual trace remains. The Liber clearly used older material from the archives of the Roman church; but it presents a standardized and a posteriori picture that few people put faith in today - that is, that there were twenty-five tituli, and that they had already been created around ad 100 by Pope Evaristus, ad 96-108 (Duchesne 1886: 126). (The number twenty-five is given in the biography of Pope Marcellus, ad 308-9 (Duchesne 1886: 164).) On the contrary, this assertion is contradicted by material evidence. We know that the tituli could not have dated from the first century ad : those still standing today cannot possibly be dated earlier than the fourth century - not least because of the building techniques employed in their construction.
In 1918, Johann Peter Kirsch proposed a theory about how the tituli were created, and that theory has dominated discussion about these earliest Roman community centers ever since (Kirsch 1918: 117-37). He recognized that what the Liber Ponti-ficalis said about Evaristus could not be true, and he believed that the establishment of the tituli was part of the reorganization of the Roman church after the end of the persecution of Valerian - that is, toward the middle of the third century, when the Roman church had so many members that it needed several buildings for liturgical celebrations. Kirsch also recognized that the foundation of a titulus did not always coincide with the construction of a regular church building. He knew of eight cases where private buildings of the second and third centuries had been found beneath Roman titulus churches, in particular San Martino ai Monti and Santi Giovanni e Paolo. His conclusion was that most Roman tituli originally were private houses. From the middle of the fourth century, regular church buildings were erected on top of these buildings, which he interpreted as tituli dating back to the third century. The names of these tituli, known from a Roman synod of ad 499 and in some cases already from fourth-century texts or inscriptions, repeat in many cases the names of the original owners of those houses. The tituli named after their founders (the dates of which are not mentioned in the literary sources) were mostly created before Constantine (Kirsch 1918: 133). The word titulus originally referred, therefore, to an inscription on the house that stated the name of the owner.
Archaeology does not contradict Kirsch’s theory, but nor does it prove it (Guidobaldi 1989, 2000). The two cases to which Kirsch attached particular importance, the churches of San Martino ai Monti and Santi Giovanni e Paolo, are just as likely not to have been Christian community centers.
In San Martino ai Monti (Accorsi 2002), a Roman third-century hall has been interpreted as the original titulus, probably that of the priest Equitius or of Pope Sylvester, both of whom are mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis (in the biography of Pope Sylvester, ad 314-35 (1. 170-1, 186)); but no Christian traces of so early a date have been identified in the building.
The case of the church Santi Giovanni e Paolo is equally problematic (Krautheimer 1965; Brenk 1995, 2003). Nineteenth-century excavations beneath the floor of the church revealed a second-century building, rebuilt as a luxurious dwelling in the third century. In its last phase, in the early fourth century, it was decorated with Christian paintings: a praying figure (an orans) and a scene that almost certainly depicts a martyrdom - perhaps that of the John and Paul after whom the church was named. Literary sources mention, in relation to this site, not one but two tituli. One is the titulus Pammachi, probably named after the man who built the church (so this titulus has nothing to do with any earlier history). The other is called the titulus Byzanti, named after an otherwise unknown Byzantius, who might have played a part in creating a community center on the spot where the church was later erected. So, in this case, we have a fourth-century titulus replaced around ad 400 by a regular church building.
Kirsch’s theory, however, that (fourth-century) churches were built on (third-century) house churches might be more justifiably applied to a later period, when (fifth-century) churches were built on top of (fourth-century) house churches. That would also fit with the more recent observation of Charles Pietri that the Latin word titulus (which normally does indeed mean inscription) cannot be found in contemporary sources with the meaning of a Christian community center before AD 377 (Pietri 1976: 90-6, 569-73; 1989b: 1043).
More recent research on the Roman house beneath Santi Giovanni e Paolo suggests, however, the need for an even more prudent approach. Brenk has argued convincingly (Brenk 1995; 2003: 82-113) that this house was no community center but rather a private dwelling, the owner ofwhich became Christian in the early fourth century and decorated some of the rooms of his house with paintings alluding to his new faith. A century after Kirsch, there are still no traces of earlier Christian community centers beneath Roman churches.
Now there are different ways of dealing with the poverty of evidence from the first Christian centuries, especially the third century, when the Roman church had acquired a considerable number of members. One is to suppose that the tituli or similar organizations really did exist, but that they have left no traces. Another possibility is that the evidence has been destroyed, perhaps during the violent persecutions of Diocletian, who in AD 303 ordered the demolition of all Christian churches. A third way of approaching the situation is to compensate for the silence in the Christian third-century material by appealing to the patterns of Jewish communities in Rome in the same period.
The Jewish pattern in the third century seems to have been similar to that attributed to the Christians. Both communities buried their dead in catacombs, the great subterranean burial places outside Rome; burials that began for both communities around ad 200 (see Rebillard, ch. 15). But, exactly as in the case of the Christians, there are no archaeological traces of the places in Rome where the living Jews gathered in the third century. We do have, however, from that same century, many inscriptions from the Jewish catacombs, which give us a lot of information about how their communities were organized. They supply the titles of different functionaries in the synagogues, all of them mentioned also by name. There were at least eleven of these synagogues (Noy 1995), some named after the geographic origin of their members (Tripolitans), some after different parts of Rome (Calcaresians, Campesians, Siburesians), some after individuals (Agrippesians). Are we entitled to suppose that Christian communities of the same period were organized and identified in a similar way?
It is difficult, unfortunately, to date the Jewish inscriptions: they rarely specify a date explicitly. Their catacombs are also difficult to date, since they are not mentioned in other sources unlike the Christian catacombs, with their martyr graves, which are described in sixth-century pilgrim guides, the itineraria. So, it is hard to tell whether a Jewish inscription should be dated to the third or the fourth century. That does not mean, of course, that the third-century Jews of Rome were not divided into different communities. And it is understandable that, when we place side by side the Jewish inscriptions and the list of Christian tituli from ad 499, we are tempted to suppose that Christian and Jews were organized in similar ways - that is, in small, local communities. But it is important here to observe chronological differences, and to treat Late Antiquity not as a single unit but rather as a period that evolved at varying speeds and in varying directions. The Christian evidence for such local communities remains obstinately later than the Jewish - from the fourth century and later. The numerous third-century Christian inscriptions never mention local communities, not even in the funerary inscriptions of third-century priests or bishops. On the contrary, inscriptions mention local Christian communities only from the middle of the fourth century, when contemporary sources prove that the foundation of tituli had already begun.
Now it is difficult to reconcile even this complex picture with the one we gain from texts. Eusebius mentions (in relation to Pope Cornelius) forty-six Roman priests (Hist. eccl. 6. 43. 11). Optatus ofMilevis mentions more than forty Christian basilicae in the city (De schismate Donatistarum 2. 4). If we accept Harnack’s estimate that there were some 40,000 to 50,000 Christians in Rome in the late third and early fourth centuries (Harnack 1915: 255), this textual evidence might suggest that the church in the city was divided into some forty communities, each with around 1,000 members, and each presided over by its own priest. The archaeological and epigraphic evidence, on the other hand, points, as we have seen, to a more centralized organization, unlike the communities imagined by the Liber Pontificalis (and by many modern scholars) or created by Roman Jews. Yet, although texts and archaeology give different pictures, they must be in some way related to a single series of historical events. So, until a satisfactory way is found to reconcile the two sets of impressions, it would be wise to keep them both in mind. Neither can be taken exclusively for granted, since neither has been established as indubitably correct.
In any case, discussion in recent decades has moved to the fourth century: scholars now tend to think of the creation of the tituli as a fourth-century phenomenon. That the Christians of Rome were organized into tituli before the fourth century must be considered a legend, created largely by the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis. It is dangerous to take the preoccupations of one century as evidence for what happened in another. Indeed, one can go further: recent research (Guidobaldi 2000) suggests that the whole idea of the foundation of tituli emerges only in the sixth century. When Roman churches are first mentioned by contemporary Latin sources, there is no mention of tituli: the words used are basilica, ecclesia, or dominicum. Different words are likely to point to different functions and situations. In other words, Kirsch’s chief error was to search in an earlier period for the answer to an entirely sixth-century question.
From the fourth century onward on, there was - not only in Rome but also in other large Mediterranean cities like Constantinople, Alexandria, and Carthage - more than one Christian basilica inside their walls (see the overviews of the four cities by Pietri, Dagron, Martin, and Ennabli in Duval 1989a). Archaeologists can date such buildings, telling us, for example, that the earliest preserved churches belong to the fourth century; but only texts can determine whether, on the one hand, there were actually corresponding communities, organized more or less like modern parish churches, as described for Alexandria around AD 375 byEpiphanius (Adv. haeres. 69. 1. 2-3; 2. 2), or whether they should be seen, on the other hand, as urban sanctuaries, the domain chiefly of the local bishop and subject to his authority (see further the treatment of bishops by Rita Lizzi Testa, ch. 35). A building’s function - whether as the center of a community or as a bishop’s personal domain - is rarely obvious from the site itself, and could change from period to period. Great prudence is necessary when using archaeology as a source for church organization.
World History
