Is this Jesus?
Looking at images found in 1932 at Dura-Europos, Syria
Published in
7 min readSep 26, 2021
The earliest images of Jesus tend to be unknown to Christians—like those found buried in a lost city in Syria called Dura-Europos.
It’s a fascinating story. In 1920, British soldiers were digging a trench along the Euphrates, and saw fragments of paintings. Archaeologists came, and realized they stood on top of an ancient city.
Persians called it ‘Dura’, and to Romans it was ‘Europos’.
The citizens were pioneering in many ways. Around 256 A.D., under siege, they’d been gassed to death in an early use of chemical warfare.
Dura-Europos was buried and forgotten. And seventeen hundred years later, its ruins were raised from the sand.
There were ‘pagan’ temples bearing images of deities.
And there was a Jewish synagogue with a vast mural of the Bible. The archaeologist Clark Hopkins writes of the moment in 1932 when it was uncovered:
