A pilgrimage to the oldest church in the world

To visit the oldest surviving Christian church on Earth, you do not fly to Jerusalem, or Rome, or Antioch. You do not need a visa for Syria, which is just as well, because the place where the building once stood is now a moonscape of looters’ pits under military occupation.

You take a train to New Haven, Connecticut. You walk up Chapel Street. You go through the doors of the Yale University Art Gallery, which charges no admission, and you climb the stairs.

And there it is: the painted walls of a house church from the year 240, standing in a gallery in New England.

The Pompeii of the desert

Dura-Europos was founded by Seleucus Nikator in 300 BCE, a frontier city on the Euphrates that evolved under Parthian and later Roman rule before its destruction by the Persians in the third century CE. It was a garrison town at the edge of empires, and its population reflected that position: Greek, Roman, Palmyrene, Jewish, Christian, Persian, all living inside the same walls.

Excavations in the early twentieth century, led by Yale and the French Academy, uncovered evidence of a multicultural, religiously pluralistic society. The city housed Graeco-Roman temples, a Mithraeum dedicated to the god Mithras, a synagogue adorned with vibrant Hebrew Bible scenes, and one of the earliest known Christian house churches.

The nickname the site acquired — the Pompeii of the Desert — is earned by an accident of warfare. In 256, the Sasanian Persians besieged the city. The defenders, trying to reinforce the western wall against the assault, heaped an enormous earthen embankment against it from the inside. The city fell anyway and was abandoned. But the embankment heaped against the western wall during that final siege preserved the wall paintings of the Christian building, sealing them under packed earth for seventeen centuries.

Everything that survived at Dura survived because someone was trying to stop an army.

The house that was also a church

The wall paintings were discovered in 1932, in what archaeologists call a house-church — so called because the building’s exterior was indistinguishable from other houses. To avoid persecution, early Christians met inside homes.

This is the detail that makes Dura extraordinary rather than merely old. We know from the letters of Paul that the earliest Christian communities met in private houses. What we did not have, until 1932, was one of those houses.

Unlike earlier Pauline house churches, which lacked distinct architectural features, the Christian building at Dura underwent significant renovations — changes to walls, ceilings, and decorations that set it apart from over 90% of the city’s household spaces. Someone had taken an ordinary courtyard house and, without altering its exterior at all, converted its interior into something else. A wall was removed to create an assembly hall. A small room was fitted with a font and covered, floor to ceiling, in painted scenes.

The most elaborate and ritually significant room in the building was the baptistery, where Christians welcomed members into their community through the sacrament of baptism.

That baptistery is what you can now stand in front of in New Haven.

What is on the walls

Six wall paintings on display at the Yale University Art Gallery once decorated the baptistery of the earliest known church. The paintings, which date to about A.D. 240, include some of the earliest known depictions of Jesus.

They are not what most visitors expect. There is no crucifixion, no Nativity, no cross. The theology on these walls is entirely about water, healing and rescue — which makes sense, because the room was where people got baptised, and every image was chosen to be looked at by someone about to enter the font.

In one fragment, Christ encourages his apostle Peter to walk over a stormy sea as a ship carrying other apostles sails in the background. The image told viewers that, just as Christ saved Peter from drowning in the waters of Galilee, he would save baptized Christian souls through his death and resurrection.

In another, Christ heals a bedridden man. The man appears twice: in the foreground he is shown paralysed, and on the left he joyfully carries his bed away. The scene signified the healing quality of baptism in the nearby font, where initiates received forgiveness for sins and began new lives as Christians.

In a third, which survives in three fragments, several elegantly dressed women carry torches and bowls in procession. Additional fragmentary figures indicate that there were originally ten women depicted, moving from right to left through the space just as the initiates would have done. What they approach is unclear — possibly the empty sepulchre of Christ on Easter morning, or the tent of the heavenly bridegroom, adorned by two stars, perhaps representing angels.

There is a painting of David and Goliath, unusual because it is the only story that does not come directly from the text of the gospel. And beside it, scratched into the plaster by hand, a graffito that reads: “Christ Jesus: remember the humble Siseos.”

Siseos is a name we know nothing else about. Someone stood in that room in the third century, wrote his own name on the wall, and asked to be remembered. Seventeen hundred years later, in Connecticut, he is.

And then there is the argument. One panel shows a woman drawing water from a well. According to the gallery’s description, the painting depicts a scene recorded in the Gospel of John in which Jesus converses with a woman from Samaria. But a scholar from Fordham University has argued it could be the earliest known image of the Virgin Mary. There is no inscription. Nobody can settle it.

Why it is in Connecticut

The uncomfortable part of this story is also the part that has saved it.

The paintings were excavated by the Yale-French Excavations at Dura-Europos, block M8, the Christian Building, between 1928 and 1937, under the division-of-finds arrangements standard for archaeology in that era. Yale took a share; the rest went to Damascus. The synagogue murals were reconstructed in the National Museum of Damascus, while the remaining artefacts went primarily to the Yale University Art Gallery.

For most of the twentieth century, that arrangement looked like a straightforward case of Western institutions removing another country’s heritage. Then the war came.

Dura-Europos is now among the most extensively looted urban archaeological landscapes in the world. Looting during the Syrian conflict turned the walled area and large necropolis into a moonscape of craters between 2012 and 2014. Satellite analysis identified 3,750 looting pits at the site, with some buildings totally demolished. For the past decade the site has been occupied by military units.

Lisa Brody, the Yale curator responsible for the collection, has put it plainly: “The fact that the site itself is basically gone now makes the fact that we have this collection preserved, on view, and cared for, together with the context provided by the excavation records, that much more important.”

The question of who ought to hold these paintings has not been resolved by the war. It has only been suspended by it.

Making the journey

Over 12,000 artefacts of daily life from Dura-Europos are preserved at the Yale University Art Gallery, displayed in a permanent installation that includes physical and virtual reconstructions of the site’s major monuments alongside the original excavation archives.

Admission is free. The gallery is a five-minute walk from the centre of Yale’s campus, in a city better known for pizza than for pilgrimage.

The other pilgrimage in New Haven

Which is, as it turns out, no longer quite true.

Three blocks from Union Station, at 1 State Street, stands a building that until recently was called the Knights of Columbus Museum. In a quiet act of self-redefinition, it is now the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center — the name changed to reflect what visitors were increasingly coming for.

Michael McGivney was a New Haven parish priest, the son of Irish immigrants, who in 1882 founded the Knights of Columbus at St Mary’s Church as a mutual aid society for working-class Catholic families. He died in 1890, aged thirty-eight. He was beatified on 31 October 2020, and his canonisation cause continues.

Father Michael J. McGivney and the landscape of American pilgrimage

The Center houses the McGivney Gallery and a Reliquary Room. Among the first- and second-class relics on display are a fragment of bone and the cassock Father McGivney was buried in, along with other priestly garments and items he regularly used before his death on 14 August 1890. The gallery also holds grade-school and seminary photographs, devotional items and newspaper clippings from his days in the city.

And there is a walking route. The “McGivney Triangle” in New Haven describes three locations central to the life and legacy of Father McGivney. Easily walkable, the pilgrimage starts at St Mary’s Church, where he founded the Knights of Columbus with a handful of Catholic men; proceeds to the plaza of the Order’s international headquarters, where three statues capture the vision and mission of the founder; and ends at the Pilgrimage Center. A special place of prayer is the sarcophagus where the bodily remains of Father McGivney are entombed, near the entrance of St Mary’s Church.

Admission and parking are free. The Center is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm.

So the pilgrim who comes to New Haven for Dura-Europos can, in the same afternoon and without ever getting into a car, walk from the painted walls of a third-century house church to the tomb of a nineteenth-century American priest — two ends of the same story, roughly seventeen hundred years apart, held within a few blocks of one another in a small Connecticut city.

There is something appropriate in the ordinariness of the setting. The building the Dura paintings came from was designed to look ordinary — a house on a street in a garrison town, indistinguishable from its neighbours, chosen precisely because it drew no attention. The people who gathered in it were not building a monument. They were meeting in a room with a font in it, looking at pictures of a man pulling a drowning friend out of the water.

McGivney’s Knights began the same way: a handful of men in a church basement, worried about what would happen to the families of workers who died young.

You can still stand where they stood, in both cases. You just have to go to Connecticut to do it.

The Dura-Europos collection is on permanent display at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven. Admission is free.

The Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center is at 1 State Street, three blocks from Union Station, open Wednesday to Sunday, with free admission and parking. Read our guide to America’s saints and the pilgrimage routes still waiting to be walked:

American saints and the road not yet walked

This post is also available in: