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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Israel Museum / Public domain

The 25,000 fragments that make up the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered by many to be the archaeological discovery of the 20th century. They were found mostly in the decade following 1947, yet 21st century techniques still have more to teach us about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and thus about Second Temple Judaism at the time of Jesus.

A highly technical study released on June 11, 2020 in the Journal Cell examines the Dead Sea Scrolls by identifying the ancient DNA of the animals–mostly sheep, but also cow, goat, and other bovids–whose skin formed the underlying parchment. The DNA analysis allowed a definitive determination that some fragments were not part of the same scroll as others, and also to establish that some scrolls at Qumran had come from outside the area.

Credit: Lux Moundi/CC BY-2.0

The Essene sect at Qumran is considered more mystical than typical Second Temple Judaism. One concern of scholars has been that the discovered library of the Dead Sea Scrolls might not be fully representative of Jewish practice at the time. By demonstrating via this DNA analysis that many of the scrolls came from elsewhere across Judea, the study suggests to scholars that the library of scrolls, including some of the oldest surviving manuscripts that would become part of the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical manuscripts, was probably broadly representative of Jewish religious thought during the Second Temple period.

In the study, researchers were able to establish that four copies of the book of Jeremiah were represented among the fragments, each a different version. This suggests Jewish society of the Second Temple period was open to differently worded versions circulating simultaneously, with emphasis more on the larger meaning and themes conveyed, and less insistence on the precise wording of the religious scripture.

Another liturgical composition, known as the Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice, was even more prevalent than the biblical scrolls themselves, with fragments of some ten copies from the Qumran caves, and another at Masada. Previous supposition had been that the Masada copies had been brought from Qumran. Thanks to the DNA analysis, researchers were able to determine that the copy at Masada had not come from Qumran, but rather from elsewhere. They conclude that the mystical Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice was more broadly available and thus more likely to have survived in hidden pockets for long enough to influence the Jewish mystical literature that emerged centuries later into the Middle Ages.

75 years after their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls aren’t done teaching us about Second Temple Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. Even further new techniques will hopefully keep yielding insights for decades to come.

Read the Israel Antiquities Authority release about the study here.

^{This post originally appeared in Bible History Daily in June, 2020}

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Hershel’s Crusade, No. 1: He Who Freed the Dead Sea Scrolls So, of course, the question: What would have happened if Hershel [and Biblical Archaeology Review] had not carried out his campaign to free the scrolls and had instead granted the new editor-in-chief the opportunity to turn matters about? I have actually debated this question on several occasions with Emanuel himself and have concluded—given Tov’s obvious talent for managing such a minor miracle—that the publications in the fall of 1991 that have been credited with freeing the Dead Sea Scrolls actually played a very different, and arguably more important, role.

Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Most scholars believe the Dead Sea Scrolls (more than 900 of them) were either written or collected by a sect of Jews called Essenes, who are described by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo. However, the scrolls themselves make no explicit reference to the Essenes. Scholars infer the connection because of the congruence of Essene philosophy and doctrine as reflected in the scrolls and as described in Josephus and Philo.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament What do the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us about the New Testament? One possible answer is: Nothing. The scrolls were associated with a relatively small group, or, rather, with several small groups. Other Jewish people, like the first Christians, may not even have known about their sectarian writings. In fact, there is no evidence that any author of a New Testament book knew of or used any of the sectarian works found in caves near Qumran that we know as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Searching for the “Original” Bible When ancient Biblical texts differ from one another, which one should we believe? More specifically, in answering this question: How helpful are those ancient scrolls of the Hebrew Bible found among the Dead Sea Scrolls?

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