Still frame from RTI file of the previously unseen gladiator graffito alongside a modern tracing. Courtesy Louis Autin, Marie-Adeline Le Guennec, and Éloïse Letellier-Taillefer.

Few images capture the Roman world more vividly than the clash of gladiators in the arena. These spectacles drew enormous crowds across the empire and became one of the defining features of Roman popular culture. A small graffito recently discovered in a theater corridor at Pompeii offers a rare glimpse into how ordinary people experienced the spectacle of the games. It also connects to the broader cultural environment that shaped the New Testament, as Paul’s letters and later Christian writings show.

The etching comes from a recent study of graffiti found in a passageway linking two entertainment venues in Pompeii’s theater district. Before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius buried the city in 79 CE, this corridor was a bustling avenue for spectators moving between performances. Over time, visitors left messages on its walls—declarations of love, jokes, insults, sketches, and prayers to the goddess Venus. In total, researchers documented nearly 300 graffiti, including 79 previously unknown examples. The textual inscriptions appear in Latin, Greek, and even Safaitic script—an Ancient North Arabian script normally found in the deserts of Syria and Jordan—revealing just how interconnected the Roman world was.

The faint gladiator etching provides a rare window into how an ordinary person absorbed and reproduced the experience of watching gladiatorial combat. Although one figure is fragmentary, the scene is surprisingly dynamic—a gladiator twists as if responding to an opponent’s strike. Researchers suggest the artist was recalling a live spectacle, attempting to capture the movement of combat from memory rather than copying an existing image.

Recovering these faint marks required advanced digital techniques. The team used Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a method that captures photographs under multiple lighting angles. When combined digitally, these images reveal surface texture and shallow reliefs that are otherwise difficult to detect. This technology allowed unprecedented precision in documenting the corridor’s walls.

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Gladiatorial culture was not confined to Rome or Italy. It extended deep into the eastern provinces of the empire—including the regions associated with the Bible.

Under Herod the Great, Roman-style entertainment venues appeared across Judea. Archaeological and textual evidence points to theaters, stadiums, and arenas at sites such as Caesarea Maritima, Jerusalem, Sebaste, Jericho, and Herodium. The historian Flavius Josephus reports that Herod even organized large public games honoring the emperor Augustus. He also notes that many Jews viewed these events as foreign customs linked to pagan worship and imperial ideology, and that the violence of the arena clashed with Jewish ethics. Gladiatorial combat was nevertheless part of the Roman environment in which Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity emerged.

This context helps explain why writers like Paul frequently used arena imagery. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes the apostles as a “spectacle to the world,” language drawn directly from Roman public entertainment. He even speaks metaphorically of “fighting with beasts” at Ephesus—imagery that would have resonated immediately with audiences familiar with arena spectacles.

In the generations after the New Testament, such imagery sometimes became grim reality for Christians. Early Christian traditions describe believers being executed in public arenas by wild animals. The bishop Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, expected to face death by beasts in the arena at Rome. A century later, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity records how the Christians Perpetua and Felicity were exposed to animals before being killed in the arena at Carthage in 203 CE.

Although such persecutions were sporadic rather than constant, these accounts show that the arena was a stage not only for entertainment but also for dramatic confrontations with Roman authority. Against this backdrop, the graffito at Pompeii—etched by a spectator remembering the thrill of combat—takes on an additional dimension, reminding us how deeply the culture of spectacle permeated the Roman world in which Christianity took shape.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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Photo: Assaf Peretz, Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The church was built under Emperor Justinian (527-565 C.E.) A chapel was added when Tiberius II Constantine (574-582 C.E.) was emperor. This is known because the IAA excavation uncovered a Greek inscription indicating that Tiberius II funded the elaborate chapel south of the main body of the church. In the courtyard, the team also discovered the inscription commemorating the “glorious martyr”, whoever that may have been.

Photo: Assaf Peretz, Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The church, very large for its time, was laid out as a basilica, featuring a main central hall with an aisle on each side. IAA Archaeologists believe pilgrims went down via one staircase into the crypt and out via another so the church could accommodate a large volume of worshipers. Mosaics of birds, plants, and geometrical shapes decorated the church. Colorful frescoes also brightened the walls.

Photo: Assaf Peretz, Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Over the last three years, thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the site by the team of professionals and many hundreds of teenage volunteers. One unique item was a baptismal font shaped like a cross made of calcite stone. They also found the most complete collection of glass window panes yet recovered from a Byzantine church in Israel. The windows, as well as the many lamps found that had been used inside the church, are especially illuminating to modern understanding of the use of light in the Byzantine church. As Jodi Magness explains in “Illuminating Byzantine Jerusalem” (Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 1998), light and the lamps that provide it can be an important clue to how the religion was practiced in that time and place.

In addition to the Byzantine lamps, Islamic clay lamps were found, indicating that the “glorious martyr” was still visited–and Christianity still practiced–after Muslims conquered the Holy Land. This supports the controversial theories of those archaeologists who believe that 7th-century forced conversion to Islam, and destruction of Christian architecture, has been exaggerated. Rather, a more gradual transition may have taken place. The Church of the Glorious Martyr may have continued to serve a shrinking population of worshipers until it was abandoned intact in the 9th century.

Some of the artifacts have now been made available to be viewed in the Bible Lands Museum’s exhibit, The Glorious Martyr, which opened October 23rd, in Jerusalem, and will run until April, 2020. There are plans to open The Church of the Glorious Martyr itself to the public in the future.

https://www.friendsofiaa.org/news/2019/10/22/church-of-the-glorious-martyr

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