Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia

Abstract

The earliest Christians of Phrygia were the nameless converts made by Paul the Apostle when he preached to a congregation of Jews and “Godfearing” gentiles (the latter being Greek or Greco-Phrygian incolae or cives of the colonia and Greek-speaking members of Roman colonial families in the synagogue at Colonia Caesareia Antiocheia in A.D. 49; and before Paul's death the Christian mission to Phrygia had been launched from bases both in the east (Iconium and Antioch) and in the west (Laodicea, Hierapolis and Colossae). Between the middle of the first and the end of the second century, five generations of Phrygian Christians (as Paul expressed it on the same occasion) “fell on sleep and were laid unto their fathers”—in surface family sepulchres along the roads outside the cities and in country graveyards throughout all the hellenised districts of Phrygia. During this period the strong conservatism of Phrygian sepulchral custom, reinforced by the prudence in the face of persecution or proscription held to be enjoined by Scripture (had not Jesus himself withdrawn into Gethsemane?), precluded the open display on tombstones—in all ages the consecrated tokens of sorrow and of hope—of any trace of the Christian profession.