The building
At Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, excavators in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered a private house that had been remodelled for Christian use. One room was adapted as a baptistery.
The paintings
The baptistery walls carry some of the earliest surviving painted Christian images: the good shepherd, the healing of the paralytic, the women at the tomb, and Adam and Eve. Graffiti and inscriptions at the site include the name “Christ”, and Old Testament scenes appear to be used typologically.
Date
The building was destroyed when the city fell to the Sasanians around 256/AD 257. Its dating rests on the city’s destruction layer and on coins and inscriptions from the occupation, not on the paintings themselves.
What it establishes
Christian worship in a purpose-modified domestic building in the window 235-256, with figurative art well before the Constantinian turn. It is a fixed chronological anchor for early Christian iconography and architecture.
Open questions
The community’s gospel texts have not survived at the site, so the building cannot tell us exactly what they read, and its paintings were made long after Jesus’s lifetime rather than from life. What they preserve is how a third-century church pictured him: as shepherd and healer, and in the women’s visit to his tomb.
Where it is now
The wall paintings were removed and are in the Yale University Art Gallery, which holds the Dura-Europos collection from the Yale–French Academy excavations.
