Bible Synapse
Alexamenos graffito
Inscription · c. AD 200 · The early church
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. AD 200 (the graffito)
- Found
- Palatine Hill, Rome, Italy, 1857. Discovered in 1857 when the Domus Gelotiana on the Palatine was excavated. In imperial times the building housed the Paedagogium, a school for the emperor's page-boys. The graffito was later removed to the museum.
- Now
- Palatine Museum, Rome
- Passages
- 1 Corinthians 1:18–25
What it is
A rough drawing scratched into wall plaster on the Palatine Hill in Rome. It shows a figure with a donkey's head hanging on a cross and a young man raising a hand towards it, with a Greek caption that reads roughly “Alexamenos worships [his] god”. It is usually dated to around AD 200, well after the New Testament period.
How it connects to the Bible
This is later than the New Testament, but it shows how outsiders could mock Christians for worshipping a crucified man. Paul had written that he preached “Christ crucified”, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23). Christian writers of the period, such as Tertullian and Minucius Felix, also report the charge that Christians worshipped a donkey.
What scholars debate
Most scholars read it as mockery by a non-Christian; a recent study argues that Alexamenos may have drawn it himself as a Christian self-parody.