While working on other projects, it came to my attention that there are still a lot of myths and legends circulating about the so-called “Christian catacombs” under the city of Rome (or rather, under its suburbs, as cemeteries within the proper city walls were always forbidden). This article shall serve as a corrective.

The Myth

The myth still abounds that Christians built these catacombs, or hid in them, to gather and worship, in order to avoid persecution. The myth often includes claims that Christian burials (and associated inscriptions and art) date to the second or even first century. It will even be claimed Christians hid in these underground graveyards during the persecution of Nero in 64 AD. All of that is false. This was Christian propaganda deliberately produced and marketed by the Vatican in the late Renaissance and early modern period. None of it checks out.

Yet it is easy to still find examples of this mythology. Stephen Nichols has an episode of his 5 Minutes in Church History series on this, in which he confidently claims (without a single cited source) that:

Under the city of Rome lies a vast system of catacombs. The ancient Romans built these catacombs because they simply didn’t like death—they feared it and didn’t want to think about it. They wanted to push death out onto the margins, even out of sight, so they buried their dead underground.

This is also a myth. Cemeteries still existed on the surface in full view of everyone. In fact they were often monumental—in death Romans boasted to the public of their lives; they wanted their burials to be as conspicuous as possible. The catacombs were built beneath them only because the surface sites were full, or expensive. And pagans actually built catacombs to be navigable because they had a very special reverence for death and paying homage to the dead: the catacombs were specifically arranged so families could go down and pay their respects and even offer symbolic meals to the deceased. Jews also used the catacombs for burials. So there was nothing about them that was about hiding the dead or fearing death.

Nichols continues:

These catacombs play an interesting role in the history of Christianity. In the first few centuries after Christ, Christianity was at odds with the empire and Christians were marginalized, ostracized, and persecuted. Despite the opposition they faced, they found that they could worship freely in the catacombs.

This is false. As we’ll learn shortly, Christians never used catacombs in the first two centuries after Christ. They were then exclusively for pagan and Jewish burials. Likewise, Christians never used catacombs for worship. At all. Much less to avoid persecution. They were public locations shared by non-Christians.

The Romans wouldn’t go down there but would send slaves to dig out the catacombs and bury their dead. So, the Christians were relatively free to worship there. They even sometimes built seats into the walls of these catacombs and also left behind paintings on the walls.

This is false. Romans did “go down there,” in fact that was the point of them, to be able to go down there to celebrate their dead. So Christians could not “hide” in them even if they wanted to (and there’s no evidence they did want to). Likewise, it’s only incidentally true that the labor to dig them will have included slaves, because Rome was a slave society. But we have ample evidence of free laborers in the construction industry of the time; so it won’t always have been slaves doing this. It’s also silly, of course, to think Christians didn’t also use slaves to dig graves, or that pagan slaves wouldn’t rat out any fugitives they stumbled upon down there. Likewise, places for visitors to sit and rest were originated by pagans, no differently than in cemeteries anywhere else. And Christian paintings in them were a late development.

Nichols also claims some catacomb epitaphs attest belief in “the trinity” and claims that this “shows how important that doctrine was to the early church.” What he does not mention is that these inscriptions only post-date the Council of Nicea, when not affirming the trinity could get you exiled or killed (and outright banned from being buried there). The inclusion of its affirmation after that thus reflects the dark past of Christian fascism and its persecution of “heretics.” Some people were under so much suspicion, or so prideful of their orthodoxy, that they went out of their way to chisel this even on their gravestone. Which evidence indicates not how early this belief was, but how late it was—and that it had to be awkwardly asserted even in funeral epitaphs just to avoid persecution from fellow Christians, who had captured the power of the state to force sectarian compliance. Hence the real lessons in this evidence are not as lovely as Nichols lets on.

Another example comes from Wayne Jackson in the Christian Courier (citing only old and solely apologetical scholarship, from 1946 to 1971), who declares Christians “even met for worship in these dark hidden regions below the city during severe persecution” (none of which is true), and that Christian art and inscriptions in them prove the historicity of Jesus, indeed even his miracles. Which is impossible, because no believer centuries later had any way of knowing whether their god ever really existed or those miraculous events ever really occurred, and no propaganda can ever validate its own myths. Case in point: catacombs contain paintings of Orpheus and Hercules, too; yet no one would claim this is evidence they existed. Jackson also suggests the catacombs preserve evidence of Christian transmission of their faith from the apostles down through ten subsequent generations (which is impossible, since their Christian presence doesn’t start until the third century), and prove Christians already comprised a fifth of the population of the Roman Empire by the third century (in fact, that milestone is only indicated as being reached in the fourth century: see the last chapter of my book Not the Impossible Faith for data and sources).

Jackson even offers this bogus tale:

In A.D. 64, Nero launched a vicious reign of terror against the church, as did subsequent Caesars. The Christians went underground among the tombs where the superstitious Romans would not follow to worship. Amazingly, though, the catacomb graffiti reveal no images of sorrow or complaining; rather, a vibrant spirit of joy and triumph is everywhere evidenced. What faith those saints possessed!

All of this is false. Christians did not enter catacombs until centuries after Nero, and never for the purpose of evading persecution. And as already noted, Romans routinely went down there. And because the catacombs were never used as refuges from persecution, it is not “amazing” that they lack messages of “sorrow or complaining,” since a belief in a good ticket to the afterlife was a defining feature of these buriers’ belief system. Otherwise they’d not be Christian and would be burying their dead with pagan symbols of rest or immortality—or, indeed, Jewish.

You can noodle around the internet and find hundreds of examples of these myths still being asserted as facts (just sift through this search, for example, and you’ll see a lot of the resulting hits are still buying the myth). Indeed, the myth is so revered, that Diarmaid MacCulloch repeated it in his televised series as a fact, even though in his associated book he admits it’s a myth.

The Truth

In a chapter she contributed to Commemorating the Dead, “An Overview of the Intellectual History of Catacomb Archaeology,” Amy Hirschfeld provides a thorough history of how this false account of the catacombs arose and came to be promoted as propaganda. This included early modern Christian destruction and alteration of the physical evidence to push that narrative, a fact also discussed and documented by Nicola Denzey Lewis in “Reinterpreting ‘Pagans’ and ‘Christians’ from Rome’s Late Antique Mortuary Evidence,” in Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome.

For example, there were no chapels or worship stations in those catacombs originally. Those were physically invented by the Vatican after the Renaissance. Likewise, early published volumes of catacomb inscriptions deliberately “omitted” pagan burial inscriptions, and “hid” their existence in other ways (like not publishing relational maps of the burials that would expose the existence of pagans in the same catacombs). For example, the legendary Catacombs of Domitilla were associated with the the mythical Christian martyr Flavia Domitilla, who is supposed to have built that catacomb for Christians—but in fact it was commissioned as a pagan cemetery, and the real Flavia Domitilla never had any association with Christianity (as you’ll discover from Cassius Dio, Roman History 67.14, and Suetonius, Domitian 10; for an example of how pagan history gets coopted into a fake Christian history like this, see The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies).

Contrary to legend, the catacombs were not created as a way for persecuted Christians to evade discovery. They were first created by Jews and pagans, simply as a means to find cheap nearby real estate for their burials. So the earliest catacombs and earliest catacomb burials are not even Christian; but in the third century, Christians began producing their own, to meet the same needs. On this see the section on “Catacombs” by Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai in the 2022 edition of The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology, although his claim for there being any exclusively Christian catacombs in that century is challenged by Lewis (above). Nevertheless, even Nicolai admits “Christian burials were mixed among pagan ones,” even in “the Vatican necropolis in Rome.” In fact, as reported in the journal Nature (“Jewish Inspiration of Christian Catacombs,” by Leonard Rutgers et al.), radiocarbon dating confirms Jews were also burying their dead in Roman catacombs over a century before any Christians did. Jewish catacomb burials at Rome span from the year 50 A.D. to 400 A.D. There is no evidence of Christians beginning to use catacombs at all until the third century. And they didn’t invent them. And they only started building their own later in the third or fourth century, after first sharing pagan and Jewish sites.

And as the Catholic historian Candida Moss concludes in The Myth of Persecution, “Christians weren’t hiding in catacombs, they were out in the open” (p. 153; reflecting the current consensus, documented on Wikipedia). Because in historical reality, Christians were rarely persecuted at all, indeed hardly more than Jews were under Medieval Christendom. And we know Jews never had to resort to hiding, because their persecution was sporadic, not chronic, and though occasional pogroms and purges stain Christian history, most of what Christians subjected Jews to consisted of mere prejudice—bigotry, social stigma, the loss of privileges, exclusion from positions of authority. Christianity under pagan rule was similar. Indeed, it wasn’t even outlawed until in the late third century (and even then, too briefly and sporadically to correspond to any unique development in the catacombs of Rome). Until then, when Christians were prosecuted under the law, it was always for the general crime of illegal assembly, as Christians, not for their being Christians; or for other secular crimes (like refusing to take oaths to the emperor). Always a political crime, not a religious one. There was nothing illegal about their teachings or beliefs, only their congregating without state permit, or otherwise breaking ordinary laws. Hence the general imperial instruction was to leave them alone (Pliny, Letters, 10.96-97). And as Moss documents, that’s mostly what happened.

This picture is confirmed in The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries (2019), vol. 3, From Celsus to the Catacombs, where William Gruen supplies the article on “Roman Catacombs” (pp. 201–20). Gruen confirms that only four Roman catacomb sites are certain to pre-date Constantine; and all attest a Christian presence only by the 3rd century. The catacombs generally track an empire-wide shift in funerary fashion across all populations from cremation to inhumation; the Christians merely joined in that same shift at the same time, so there is nothing distinctively Christian about the catacombs at all; nor were they resorted to for any clandestine reason. Hence as Larry Hurtado put it in The Earliest Christian Artifacts (pp. 1–2), “Although one finds confident references to second-century [Christian] catacombs and catacomb art in some older publications, it is now generally recognized among specialists that these as well should probably be dated to sometime in the third century.”

Also from Gruen we learn that the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, where the martyrs Peter and Paul are supposed to have been buried, wasn’t even a burial site before the third century (when a quarry was repurposed for it). So one can certainly doubt the authenticity of any graves there alleged for Peter or Paul (Christian relic and gravesite fabrication has always been rampant: see Holy Bones, Holy Dust and Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics). Gruen also documents the problem that the earliest Christian art in Roman catacombs used a ton of pagan symbols to represent their faith, complicating even the identification of any burial as Christian. For example, the Good Shepherd image was always pagan (it even had funerary relevance for the mystery cults, symbolizing a guide leading the dead into paradise). This image was then simply coopted to represent Jesus. Likewise, Jesus is depicted in early Christian art using a wand to effect his miracles, just like a pagan wizard (see Clash of the Gods). Jewish iconography often was coopted by Christians as well. And of course, hardly any of this art actually represents Jesus as what he would actually have to have been: a bearded Jewish Rabbi, correctly adorned according to Torah law. Christian art was thus fantasy.

Conclusion

We need to abandon Christian myths about the catacombs. They were originally communal, housing pagan and Jewish burials. Christians only gradually started sharing them in the third century, with no special control or ownership over them; and only started building their own later in the third or fourth century. Visiting the dead in them was already a pagan custom, so there was never anything secret about them. Their purpose was always financial (shrinking real estate available for the dead required building down), not clandestine (they never had any purpose of “hiding” anything). Hence they were never used as “hideouts” for Christians to evade persecution. They weren’t used for worship or gatherings at all.

Moreover, no evidence of Christian presence in the catacombs predates 200 AD. So there were no Christian catacomb burials in the time of Nero (60s AD), for example, nor even in the time of Domitian (90s AD) or Marcus Aurelius (160s AD). Which also means all Christian evidence from these catacombs is centuries too late to be of any use in reconstructing the origins or even the first century-and-a-half of Christian history. We also need to stop conflating different centuries even within Christian occupation of the catacombs. The political and demographic situation of Christians in the third century is substantially different from the fourth century, and even more so the fifth, so identifying which century any given epitaph or painting comes from in the catacombs is crucial to correctly contextualizing it and what we can learn from it. Yet rarely is such context provided. Often it is not even available—not least owing to modern Vatican tampering.