Bodytemple metaphor: Early Christian reconciliation with Roman architecture

Abstract

The history of early Christian architecture has been presented as a gradual, typological transformation from undifferentiated residential buildings in the first two centuries, to modified residential buildings in the third, culminating in the monumental Constantinian structures of the fourth century. To rationalize this transformation, a great deal of scholarship has focused on identifying formal, cultural, and programmatic characteristics that might link the domus to the basilica. However, along held view is that the basilica, along with all monumental church architecture, is a Roman deviation in the evolution of Christianity. To support this argument, proponents read NT passages like the body/temple metaphor of 1 Cor. 3.16-17 and John 2.19-22 as indicative of a Christian rejection of Roman and Jewish material culture. These contrary aspects of early Christianity, the construction of monumental churches and the tacit rebuke of Roman architecture in Christian texts, have been characterized by Paul Corby Finney as iconic and aniconic. In an effort to better understand early Christian architecture, recent studies employ models from cultural theory and sociology to reveal the broader context of church building, demonstrating similar patterns of architectural development among other cultural groups living within the Empire. Richard Krautheimer and L. Michael White are foremost in this field and they have provided a solid foundation for re-evaluating the evidence. While these seminal archaeological and architectural studies have provided us with a chronology of formal and programmatic developments for the beginnings of Christian architecture, they have done little to help us understand how early Christians came to reconcile the conflicting ontological demands of being the temple in Christ (NT) with building the temple for Christ (Constantine). In this dissertation, I argue that a reconciliation between NT body/temple metaphor and Imperial Architecture, between the aniconic and iconic characteristics of Christianity, is achieved, in part, through a shift in the tenor of the metaphor that occurs through the second, third, and fourth centuries. The trajectory of this shift is traced from sources in the Gospels and Epistles through the Epistle of Barnabas, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen to the panegyric written by Eusebius for the commemoration of Paulinus' church at Tyre in 317. I conclude that the metaphorical vehicle of the body/temple, first used rhetorically to unify and segregate the Christian community, has a hermeneutic function that reveals an architectural model in Christ Logos.