A Post-Colonial World?

I just finished reading an article entitled "Empire and Apocalypse in Thessaloniki: Interpreting the Early Christian Rotunda" by Laura Nasrallah (Journal of Early Christian Studies 13, 2005, 465-508). What's interesting here is the author's attempt to impose post-colonial theory and a mental constructed called "thirdspace" on her subject in an attempt, once again, to deconstruct early Christianity, while ignoring those aspects of the history of early Christianity that do not suit her "theories."

Basically, Nasrallah wants to consider the Rotunda (otherwise known as the Church of St. George) in terms of its local significance rather than as part of the oikoumene. In other words, what did its reconfiguration as a Christian church mean for those in Thessaloniki and what do its mosaics tell us about Christianity in Thessaloniki? What does it mean that the Rotonda, commissioned originally by the Emperor Galerius, the fourth-century persecutor of Christians, was adapted in the late fourth-early fifth centuries by Christian themselves?

Nasrallah makes a good deal of the notion of "thirdspace," a concept popularized by Edward Soja (Postmetropolis, Oxford, 2000) that allows for the realization of a city as a "fully lived space" (p. 469). She combines this with Homi Bhabha's notion that a "fully lived space" is also shaped through literature (The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994). So far, so good. After all, ancient Alexandria is certainly a city that has appealed to the imagination through the centuries (E.M. Forster comes to mind). And pagan and Christian Rome has provided the background for more than two millennia. And, of course, as Nasrallah points out, one needs to allude both to textual and material evidence. Of course, this is not exactly a new approach, although it is true that art historians tend to use Scriptural and other written documents only when it is necessary and Biblical scholars either tend to ignore material remains or use them only as illustrations.

Nasrallah also appeals to post-colonial theory in the interests of revealing the cultural and religious identity of Thessaloniki, an identity she believes is recognizable apart from that of the Christian oikoumene, in which the products of Christian faith (art in particular) have been studied as though directed by a unified approach. Thessaloniki doesn't have the mystique of either Rome or Alexandria, but it does have a local history and local religious variations. What Nasrallah is trying to do is visit post-colonial theory on Thessaloniki to "liberate" it from the imposition of a paradigm of normative Christianity, as constructed by the "victors."

The trouble is that theory works out nicely on paper; practice and evidence are often much less amenable.

First of all, the architectural elements depicted are the same as those seen in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Judith McKenzie, Peter Roger, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt: c. 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, Yale University Press, 2008, 351-352). Therefore, there is obviously cross-pollination at work here, characteristic of the active trade and travel of late antiquity as well as the perpetual influence of Egypt, even during the Hellenistic period.

More importantly, the mosaic programme at St. George has been heavily damaged. The dome mosaic has been destroyed. The entire second register is gone. The third register has suffered extensive damage. And the bottom register, the best-preserved of the lot, is damaged as well. Making an argument based on what remains is chancy at best.

Nasrallah readily acknowledges that the evidence in Thessaloniki is rather sparse. And it is here that she really runs into trouble. It's one thing to specify the importance of local culture; it's another to take a monument constructed in the fourth century and reconfigured in the fifth, with mosaics that are clearly related to others in Greece and Egypt, both in style and meaning, and then adduce 1 Thessalonians as an interpretive paradigm, when there are clear differences in historical context. Citing 1 Thess. 5.3, with its apocalyptic themes in support of her thesis that the mosaics carry on such a theme is fanciful at best (p. 499). Of course, Paul was placing Jesus Christ in place of the Roman imperial cult as the true savior (cf. J.R. Harrison, "Paul and the Imperial Gospel at Thessaloniki," Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 25, 2002, 71-96), but by the time of the reconfiguration of the Rotunda the issue had been settled. Christ was the cult. Apocalypticism was a dead issue in the main (and citing 2 Thessalonians in support of continuing apocalypticism is not useful in this context). Roman imperial claims and imagery had already been subverted.

That 1 Thessalonians was an "object of local civic pride" (p. 502) is understandable. Nasrallah cites the martyrdoms of Agape, Eirene, and Chione in 303/304, the era of the Emperors Maximian and Diocletian and notes that the account of their death uses language reminiscent of both 1 and 2 Thessalonians (p. 502). Nasrallah further says that this martyrial account also links the martyrdoms of these women with the ekklesia of Thessaloniki as an: "examplar in Macedonia and abroad" (p. 503).

However, if this is the case, why does the mosaic in the Rotunda make no reference to the martyred Agape, Eirene, and Chione? Nasrallah notes that only male figures are shown in the Rotunda (p. 488), but does not answer this question. It would appear that her thesis suffers from the visual evidence itself.

Also odd is her statement that: "The city itself is also depicted as a location of textual anxiety" (p. 504). She cites the interaction between the city prefect and the women, assuming that he was interrogating them about texts they were concealing (and this had happened in Carthage, so Nasrallah has a basis for her supposition). But then assuming that the depiction of Christian books on the lowest register of the Rotunda mosaics represents a response to this situation is hardly provable, since the reconfiguration of the building occurred late in the fourth or early in the fifth century, a fairly long period after the persecutions had ended and into the period when Theodosius the Great had proclaimed Christianity as the religion of the empire. Certainly, those in Thessaloniki would have remembered the persecutions, but so would others around the empire. It was hardly unique to Thessaloniki. And depictions of the Scriptures lying on pillowed thrones are not rare in early Christian mosaics. So, again, there is no evidence that the Thessalonians are saying something specific about their persecution.

Neither is the appearance of an "eschatological Christ," if that is what it is. It is one thing to see the relief in the writings of Eusebius, who had personally witness persecution and then was profoundly lavish in his praise of Constantine. It is another to suppose that more than a century after the end of persecution that apocalypticism was still at fever pitch.

Nasrallah has not proved her point that the mosaics at Thessaloniki were there to "subvert" Roman imperial power. In fact, she is a century too late. If Christians at Thessaloniki had constructed a small church there with frescoes containing these elements which dated around 303/304, she would have a case. But she is being anachronistic here.

Oddly, for all of Nasrallah's insistence on the "subversive message" presented by the mosaics in the Rotunda, she does not acknowledge that the relief sculptures of the Arch of Galerius were not destroyed and these had to inform the "local culture" of Thessaloniki as well since the Arch was outside and much more easily seen. And among the surviving reliefs is one of Galerius and the imperial family offering thanksgiving to the gods (based on a prototype from the Ara Pacis), though the faces have suffered damnatio memoriae (The same thing happened, e.g., to reliefs of Geta, brother of Caracalla, who reigned briefly as co-emperor. After his murder in late December 211 his reliefs were also defaced in this manner and his name removed from inscriptions) . But, in any case, there would be no mistaking this for a Christian scene.