Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity

Can archaeological remains be made to “speak” when brought into conjunction
with texts? Can written remains, on stone or papyrus, shed light on the
parables of Jesus, or on the Jewish view of afterlife? What are the limits to
the use of artifactual data, and when is the value overstated? Text and
Artifact addresses the complex and intriguing issue of how primary religious
texts from the ancient Mediterranean world are illuminated by, and in turn
illuminate, the ever-increasing amount of artifactual evidence available from
the surrounding world.

The book honours Peter Richardson, and the first two chapters offer
appreciations of this scholarship and teaching. The remaining chapters focus
on early Christianity, late-antique Judaism and topics germane to the Roman
world at large. Many of the essays relate to features of Jewish life — the
epigraphic evidence for gentile converts to Judaism or for Jewish defectors,
ancient accounts of the Essenes or of the siege of Masada, and the material
context of the first great rabbinic work, the Mishnah. Other essays connect
early Christian texts with the social and cultural realia of their day — modes
of travel, notions of gender, patronage and benefaction, the relation of
tenants and owners — or reflect on the aesthetics of Christian architecture
and the relation between building and ritual in Constantinian churches. One
study relates the writing of the famous novelist Apuleius to a household
mithraeum in Ostia, while another explores the changing appropriation of
religious realia as the Roman world became Christian.

These wide-ranging and original studies demonstrate clearly that texts and
artifacts can be mutually supportive. Equally, they point to ways in which
artifacts, no less than texts, are inherently ambiguous and teach us to be
cautious in our conclusions.