Virgin Mary
The Female Figure of Christianity
The Dark Ages: When Gods Clash
When Christian art grew hungry for a distinct female presence to worship, a mother goddess who nurtured you and protected you. Isis, the mother of Horus, was an obvious model, and the two of them were soon successfully transported into Christian art.
This is the first known image of the Virgin Mary, holding the baby Jesus on her lap. It was found in the Roman catacombs of Priscilla, a touching fragment of a mother and her child. Mary, caring for the baby Jesus, became one of the most popular of all the Christian images of the Dark Ages.
With such glorious results. This great artistic discovery, the Virgin Mary, had an important bi-product because it did away with the need to feminise or soften Jesus. When Mary emerged as a powerful divine presence, Jesus no longer needed to be girlish. His image was free to become fully masculine.
But where to put all this powerful new art that Christianity was inventing.
It’s all very well finding a new image for Jesus and the Virgin Mary, but what also needed to be invented was the Christian church. The Roman Empire was huge. It stretched from the middle east at one end to this primitive cultural backwater at the other. The place we now call Britain.
When you are imagining the Roman Empire, you need to stop thinking about countries because there weren’t any. No clear divisions, either, between Asia and Africa or Europe. All of them… were part of this massive collar of power surrounding the entire Mediterranean. The mightiest empire the world has seen.
Christianity got to Britain quite early. In a village in Dorset called Hinton St Mary, they’ve dug up one of the earliest mosaic images of Jesus.
He looks stately, doesn’t he? More like a Roman senator than a Christian God. Except for the large Chi-Rho that surrounds his head, the sign of Christ.
This is Lullingstone in Kent. And we’re here because I wanted you to see what’s left of one of the earliest known Christian churches. If you’re thinking to yourself that this looks more like the remains of a big house, not a church, you’d be absolutely right. The first churches were ordinary houses adapted for Christian use.
Some Christians were richer and more active in the community than others. And their house became the neighbourhood house church.
The house church found in Dura-Europos, the one next door to the Jewish synagogue, was just a small townhouse in which the Christians had done some DIY, knocked down a wall, roofed over a courtyard to create more space for their meetings.
On the walls of this makeshift church, the Dura Christians painted Christ walking on water. And there he is again healing a cripple, making him walk, too.
Here in Lullingstone, the house church was on the first floor of this elegant Roman villa. It was just above that pagan shrine there. Basically, it was a simple room with painted walls. Decorating it was a procession of praying Christians with crosses on their robes. There was also a Chi-Rho. And around this Chi-Rho, the two momentous letters of the Greek alphabet again. Alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.
If you put all those four letters together, alpha, rho, chi and omega, you get the word “arco”, which means “I rule”.
From the outside, you wouldn’t have known the Lullingstone house church was there. It was a modest Christian conversion and almost invisible.
And for the first 300 years, all churches were like this. Humble spaces in people’s houses, wonky bits of DIY where Christians could worship and celebrate. And then… in 313 A.D., Constantine the Great converted to Christianity, and everything changed.
