Dr. Sandra Glahn

Dr. Kelley Mathews

Dr. Sandra Glahn, Professor at Dallas Seminary, joins BOW Team Member Kelley Mathews in this episode. They discuss the fascinating archaeological discovery of the Megiddo Mosaic and what it reveals about women and worship in the early church.

The Mosaic was found in what is the earliest Christian church known in the world

This Mosaic is currently on loan and can be seen at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

See pictures of the Megiddo Mosaic at the website of The Museum of the Bible.

BOW’s podcast series on how Biblical archaeology can enhance our faith with Angela Everett: 1. Biblical Archaeology: Why It Is Important; 2. Old Testament Discoveries; 3. New Testament Discoveries. Or link to the videos of each where you can see images of the archaeological finds: Part 1; Part 2: and Part 3.

This episode is available on video as well.

00:20 Introductions of Dr. Glahn & the topic

Kelley >> Welcome to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. I’m Kelley Mathews and I am delighted today to host Dr. Sandra Glahn, a longtime friend and colleague. And she’s a seminary professor. But today we’re going to talk to her in her context of being the co-founder of the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity. Welcome.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you. My pleasure.

Kelley >> This is fun. Yeah. So today we’re going to talk about something old, really old. And archaeology is a big part of biblical studies that gives us lots of background. And there have been some discoveries in recent years that really apply to women in particular. So tell us what we all heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls or most of us probably.

And those were discovered decades ago and they’ve really revealed a lot. What are people saying is the biggest discovery since then?

Dr. Glahn >> Since then. So it’s a floor that was found in Megiddo, which is connected with Armageddon. That’s where you hear the “magid” in there. So it’s not just notorious. It’s also known for some great stuff in church history and in biblical history.

And some folks were digging in a prison courtyard and came upon a preserved floor that’s a beautiful stone mosaic. And the thing I love about mosaics is they can look like they were set yesterday, whereas a fresco fades, a statue usually in 2000 years, loses a nose or an arm, or archer loses a bow or whatever.

But the mosaics are much more preserved. And this floor was intentionally preserved. So it was clear that it was hidden for a reason, but it was intended to hide it for a long lasting preservation.

So it wasn’t just covered over with sand and dirt as the years went by, it was more like a plaster-ish substance that said, “We want to protect this, but we want to hide it.”

So I should probably back up and tell you what in the world I do. I’m a seminary professor who mostly teach writing and all those hard verses about women in the Bible.

What do I have to do with archaeology? And because that will be relevant in what we talk about.

So one of the courses I teach at a seminary level is medieval art and spirituality. And we take men and women to Italy for about 17 to 19 days every other summer and look at the visual record of the church. That is particularly relevant for women because often when we teach church history, we’re teaching about the councils, which are the men gathering. And we can call something church history, which is really the history of the councils, and we need to broaden that toolkit. But what’s happening in the church?

I liken it to reading the elder minutes and thinking that’s all the church is doing. Rather than looking at the church bulletin and seeing there’s AWANA, there’s VBS, there are Bible studies, there are meals served there, prayers being prayed, there are sermons and messages and gatherings. And the visual record does a lot of that.

And I have to say that our African-American friends in particular have reminded us that the oral history is also legit. We tend to coming of many of us coming out of a written tradition, prioritize the written tradition over the oral tradition and then also the visual tradition. So you think about enslaved people. They might not have known their letters, but they were telling stories through quilts, for example.

We see something fairly similar in the walls of ancient churches. And so as I’m taking people to these spaces, I’m noticing women predominant in the early church and realizing my own education has been truncated and start noticing the thing I love the best is how often I would see men and women partnering together.

You see men and women serving communion at the altar. You would see men and women you know, you might have an ancient church like when in Ravenna we’ve been to together, where one side of the upper wall is mosaics of 22 women, martyrs the other side is 27 male martyrs. And, you know, they accommodated because they put the three magi in the first because it’s all Eastern women and Western men.

But you walk into this church that was a worship space for over a thousand years, and you’re flanked by not just the men and women, but their names are written in the mosaic above them so we can trace who it was the early church is honoring as those who we want to remember and be inspired by.

Well, if you fast forward to the Protestant tradition, we got rid of the Saints, and rightly because in one sense, because we’d read our New Testament and say, well, if we’re calling somebody saints, we’re all called saints. You’re Saint Kelley. I’m Saint Sandra. Right? So we shouldn’t be elevating people like there’s some sort of spiritual step.

But the problem with getting rid of the Saints altogether is that we lost the biographies as part of our worship. And so this course led me to start noticing and collecting. And that led to the Visual Museum of Women and Christianity, because as I wanted to teach on some of these things, I found that all the photos were behind paywalls.

Kelley >> Let me ask you a question real quick.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, yeah, sure.

Kelley >> All right. Give us a little bit of background on the museum. We may have covered this in other podcasts, but no telling who’s watching or listening here. So give us a brief just explanation of what the museum is.

Dr. Glahn >> So it was driven out of a desire to get great visual images outside of the paywall. So we got a grant we’ve now had two. It’s a partnership of Lynn Cohick at Houston Christian, George Kalantzis at early Christian Studies at Wheaton. I’m at Dallas Theological Seminary. The grant organizations really wanted collaborations, which is great. We have male/female, we have different institutions.

George, you know, grew up within a stone’s throw of Athens. He has a beautiful accent. And so we were looking for diversity in our team and we hired professional photographers to go with us to document some of these—whether it’s statues, whether it’s mosaics, whether it’s frescoes, it’s the early art and make it accessible at Visual Museum Galleries.

So your listeners can download it for free in their high quality images, and you don’t even have to credit the museum. We wanted just to take that out of the equation and ultimately we’d love to have all the women of the Bible represented it. But anyway, so this was part of what it was rooted in me noticing all these women and the story they tell and how they’re often in leadership positions.

What in the world is that have to do with the Megiddo thing? Well, it’s why in the world am I involved in art and archaeology? So back up—2005. These people were excavating this floor, and as they uncover it and study it, they discover that there are five different women mentioned and one man mentioned.

The man is a Roman centurion, and he’s the one who bankrolled the thing. And it was probably, it’s been dated to 230 the year 230, which is long before Constantine is legalizing Christianity. And so he bankrolls it. And that tells you that there are is at least one Roman Christian here.

And it’s not so it’s not a church because you can’t build a church structure legally at this point is probably a prayer hall. It’s in a garrison. So like it’s on a military base but it has never a name of a Semitic name for a woman. It’s got a Latin name for a woman. It’s got a Jewish name. So you have a Roman centurion. So the first thing we see is Jew and Gentile evidence. We know from Galatians they’re working together, but this is the art history evidence that tells us of a place and how male and female are worshiping together.

And then then we think about the New Testament and what it says about centurions. And there are at least three really good guys who are, you know, appear to be concerned for helping the infrastructure of their community. So you have him bankrolling it. And then you have four women who the inscription says, remember these four and then and this is the big deal.

Then there’s an inscription that says, “I Akeptous paid for this table, this memorial table.”

And it’s the same word for Memorial that we find in 1 Corinthians. So we know that this is the Eucharist table. This isn’t just some table. And it’s and it’s important enough to this gathering structure to be a separate donation. But that also tells us that the other four women that are not mentioned as donors are probably not listed because they’re donors. If you’re a benefactor, you’re named as such.

Kelley >> Okay.

Dr. Glahn >> Okay.

Kelley >> Okay. So we’ve seen benefactor in Romans. Romans 16. Phoebe is seen as a benefactor. Explain exactly what benefactors did.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, well, it’s a significant deal. It’s a very exciting time to be asking that question because for the longest time, people heard, oh, female benefactor, she’s the hostess is opening up her home and serving chicken. And that which is an honorable thing to do. I’ve been the recipient of that kind of hospitality. But that is probably included, but not the limits of what it involved.

And so often we think well, if you have your name on something, you’re really arrogant. And yet you look at all the church halls and you know, at my own campus we had a huge lounge that was donated by the Mabee family whose name I see elsewhere. Sometimes it’s a foundation. Sometimes the name of benefactions is to honor somebody else. So it’s not that you’re arrogant, right? You want to honor somebody.

So in Phoebe’s case, she has been a benefactor, both to Paul and to some of his friends. She probably bankrolled her trip to deliver his book of Romans, which is his most thorough and wow. It’s a pretty expanded theology of our faith. And good chance that she also would have read it out loud and maybe even done some explaining as part of that.

So in that tradition, you have the centurion which sometimes we wrongly think is 100 because we hear century of that. But by this time it probably is over 60 to 80 men. But it’s still it’s a massive job, a very respected job.

And then Akeptous. How do we know that’s a woman? Because you just hear that name and you’re not sure we know it’s Semitic, but the big deal there is that in the same way that Spanish has a, you know, “el” hombre or “la” donna may be an Italian that you know somebody is a male or female based on the gender of the article.

That’s a fancy way of saying the “la” or the “el.” And in this case the article in front of Akeptous’s name is female. So it’s like “La Akeptous donated it.” So we know it was a female donor bankrolling the beautiful communion table. Now all we have left is the stone foundation for it. The table itself is gone, probably removed when they covered the floor.

Kelley >>Makes sense.

Dr. Glahn >>Yeah, but then the other question is why? Why are these other four mentioned in it? And the reader is called to remember these women.

And the memorial is not the same as the word used in the memorial table, which might be (I’m guessing it’s not necessarily) that they’re memorialized because they’re martyrs.

It very well could be they are of, you know, members of the Order of Widows, which was a church office, as best we can tell, in the early church. So to me, it’s significant that there are five women, the earlier church that we have, the earliest church that we’ve had up to date has either the five women preceding to the tomb or more likely the five virgins who are waiting for the returning king.

Kelley >> So you think these are connected by biblical allusions?

Dr. Glahn >> I think it’s very possible that the church chose to name five women in a really early setting to honor. Could have been a wink to that simply because in those traditions that follow the church year, the last week of the year is Christ the King Sunday.

But then it’s followed by the first Sunday of Advent, which in the early church, the story for Advent in the beginning was those ten virgins, five of whom were waiting for the king. And Advent’s focus is not on Christmas coming and pretending Jesus has been born yet. It’s reminding us we’re going into the, you know, looking toward Christmas. But you’re going to wonder why it still really hurts. It still really hurts because we’re in the already, not yet.

Okay. All of that is interesting. Here’s the most interesting thing and here’s where we need to focus. This year marks what? I’m going to ask you.

Kelley >> Uh huh.

Dr. Glahn >> What is 2025?

Kelley >> It is the 17 hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.

Dr. Glahn >> Of Nicaea.

Kelley >> Which was in 322. Yeah, 325.

Dr. Glahn >> 325. Yes. 325. And the mosaic we’re looking at is 230.

Kelley >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> And what is significant about that is that up to this point we’ve had Philippians that tells us Jesus is God. We have the, the scriptures that tell us Jesus is God, but we haven’t had the art record that affirmed that. So when I’ve taken students to the earliest start in the catacombs, what I find is you might find fish and anchors. You might find the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace. You’ll often find the Jonah story because that’s, you know, Jesus uses that to refer to the resurrection of three days in the belly of the whale.

But what you don’t see in the catacombs is Christ on the throne as a king. And that has been—oh, Dan Brown loved that. In The Da Vinci Code he really popularized that—basically the idea that Jesus was just a good shepherd. And you do see the Good Shepherd a lot in the earliest art but he got promoted after Constantine. This is the lie—Constantine comes along and now Jesus becomes an emperor and God. But the early church just saw him as a good shepherd. Okay?

Kelley >> Was that a Dan Brown thing?

Dr. Glahn >> Well, it wasn’t it didn’t start with Dan Brown, like the Kahn Academy still says it. And in one of their videos is on the Church of Pudensiana or Praxedes in Rome in their early art. So it wasn’t sort of an academic thing, but that has been said for a long time. And we didn’t have the visual record until, drumroll, we have Akeptous dedicating her altar to, wait for it, Jesus God.

So this in the quote lips of a woman in the 2025 celebration of the 17 hundredth anniversary of Nicaea predates Constantine and the Council of Nicaea by 80 to 100 years. So we have the earliest testimony in writing in the art record outside of Scripture that the early church is worshiping Jesus as God. This is not a promotion that he got. It’s not an invention.

And my hypothesis this is. The last time I went to a funeral, Psalm 23 was on the front of the bulletin, not Philippians two. And the reason for that is because it’s true that Jesus is God. But when I’m grieving, I want the one who’s carrying me through the shadow of death where I’m very no evil, because you’re with me. And that’s a comfort.

And so I think I, I’m going to assume, hypothesize that the reason we see so much of Jesus as the Good Shepherd of the catacombs is because this is a burial space. The minute you get Christianity legalized and then you have another, you know, a few decades pass to get the places built, you do start seeing Jesus on the throne.

And so that’s where the argument came that the art changed once. Once they argue that Constantine came along and influenced the Council of Nicaea. And now we have solid evidence that that’s not the order in which it happened. And how fun is it that it’s in the testimony of a woman who’s dedicating a memorial altar for the Eucharist to Christ?

Kelley >> I’m thinking of arguments of how involved were women in church life and this really seems to affirm not only were they Benefactors like that continued on past the first century with Phoebe. And that this was a continued practice. So women had agency. Some of them had money and were able to do with it what they willed, and they were supporting the church.

And that, man, what we call the ancients right? They were into beauty, like art as a thing for them. I think even more than we in America probably appreciate. And of course, they made it to last. Mosaics when I first went to see them. You’re right. There was like, oh, that could have been put up last week, you know, still bright, shiny.

Dr. Glahn >> Stone never fades. It may get dusty but you can get up there with a rag and clean that off. Yeah.

Kelley >> Right. It’s pretty amazing.

So I’m thinking of the women named and how do we know that? Do we know anything about the four women? Is there any hint, the text or the design about who they might have been?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. So we see one of the names is a derivative of Christ. And so we think that was often a name of a martyr who, like we see it in the Ravenna mosaics—Christina or Christine. And it’s very possible that somebody whose name we don’t know or maybe like our Tomb of an Unknown Soldier, that could be a name—that might have been a proper name, but it’s also possible that it was a name Jane Doe.

Kelley >> Like a representative.

Dr. Glahn >> Doe is a real name but it’s probably not a real person. Right. So that’s a possibility of one that last name that is a derivative of the name of Christ. But the combination of acceptors, which is Semitic, the Roman Centurion, which is Roman, and then you have Greek and Latin there. And so the combination of names tells us there is diversity. The fact that there are five women and one man also is it aligns with what we know about the early church, which is that it had a massive number of women.

Now, here’s the wrong narrative with that and maybe a better narrative. One of the wrong narratives of that, which Jamie Levine.

Kelley >> Amy-Jill?

Dr. Glahn >> Amy-Jill. Thank you. Amy-Jill Levine. So she’s like a Jewish scholar who’s a New Testament expert, but not a Christian, but is helping us understand a lot of the Jewish idiom and backgrounds. Right? And one of the things that she talks about is how often Christians will say, “We have a lot of women because the Jews treated women badly.”

And that is that is not the right narrative.

A better narrative might be that the early church cared about the vulnerable and the powerless. They were the most likely to adopt a baby found exposed. And then the chances that a baby exposed is going to be a girl is much higher than it’s going to be a boy.

And so often if we read a reference to widows and orphans, we you and I might think today that means all the people who’ve lost husbands and all the kids who’ve lost parents.

And that would be true, but probably they go together that the widows in the Order of Widows are raising children, which could help us understand 1 Timothy 5. We might think it refers to widows and their qualifications. And it says they’ve raised children and they’ve washed feed of the saints. That doesn’t mean that they themselves had to have been mothers or married.

And in fact, the word widow could just mean without-a-man woman, very much like a nun.

Kelley >> So single for any reason?

Dr. Glahn >> Well, yes. It could be that you were married and lost your husband. It could be that you were a consecrated virgin and as you got older and turned 60, they called you a widow to differentiate the older and the younger, the virgins and the widows. So we need we need to think more broadly about the term widow.

And it’s very possible that Akeptous was a widow, because that is going to be the most common way that a woman is going to be moneyed and have her own money to spend, to invest. Very likely Mary Magdalene is going to fit in that category. And the women in Luke 8:1-2 that are bankrolling Jesus and the guys and what they’re doing, it’s not typical for women to be traveling around on their own unless they’re older and they’ve inherited and they’re not married or they don’t have sons to legally have to give all that money over to.

Kelley >> Makes sense. Makes sense. So we have a diverse early church. We have a church that this physical piece of evidence is confirming what we also see in their written record. So I feel like this big Megiddo Mosaic is kind of just a cherry on top of things that we think we know. And also it’s correcting some false narratives.

Dr. Glahn >> Correct? It’s about affirming some hunches. I mean, we’re like it’s in the written record. We just need to find the visual record that Jesus is called God. And now we have the evidence. So right now, as I’m speaking, this is on display at the Museum of the Bible. Till by the time your listeners hear this, it’ll be probably on its way back to Israel. [You may want to check.]

But the plan is for them to return it to Megiddo and for the Megiddo Antiquities folks to have a display so people can visit it and see it so that it will be available to the public. It’s taken 20 years to restore it, to research it to find out the names, to sort of get the history.

One thing that is maybe worth mentioning is that our hunch on why they covered it was in some decades of the church, emperors are more tolerant than others.

And we do know that there was a decade that followed an emperor that was a little more tolerant of Christianity, but long before Constantine, where things were really bad. And it’s entirely possible, maybe even probable, that that floor was preserved knowing that they could no longer be the aboveground church. And I say that not literally, like they weren’t literally having church in the catacombs. But right there they had to go into hiding and maybe not be so overt in their gatherings as a prayer hall would indicate.

So it’s fun that this is getting all this press and hit the museum to be closing in the year of the celebration of Nicaea. Because the big thing that happens at Nicaea is the church has worshiped Jesus as God. But we’ve been talking about how is he wasn’t created. We know that that’s bad doctrine.

Kelley >> Right.

Dr. Glahn >> But, you know, how do we give words to “begotten not created,” “very God of God.” “Light of life” that we sing about in a Christmas Carol is language out of that Nicene Creed that is said by Orthodox of the capital, Roman Catholic, Protestant like this takes us back to something that we are united on for 1700 years.

And we’re celebrating that this year. So what a great time to have somebody affirming you know 80 to 100 years before that was written down that Jesus was God and was worshiped as God.

Kelley >> Nicaea didn’t create our doctrine.

Dr. Glahn >> Correct.

Kelley >> It was already yeah no no that’s great.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah it gave a better as better language to articulate in what way is Jesus God he’s of the same substance of the father. He’s not a junior God, a demigod he’s not created. He is God of God, light of light of the same sort.

Kelley >> And this discovery kind of just confirms, well, this is what’s been believed all along, that.

Dr. Glahn >> Some of us had to learn it by faith. Now we have sight to go with it.

Kelley >> I love it. Well, that’s great.

So the mosaic doesn’t belong to America, obviously. So it’s an Israeli artifact. Are images going to be available up of this? I mean, I’ve seen a few around, but I’m sure the museum has been the one to release that. What I really want to know is, can we get it in the visual museum?

Dr. Glahn >> Sure. Well, I think BOW is going to get it first. But we’ll be working on getting it in the Visual Museum for sure. But yeah, so you can go to the Museum of the Bible website. And even after it’s gone, you can find images there. We’ll be uploading links to the BOW website. So your listeners will be able to access and look at. It’s very fun to look at. There are really just three sort of square sections, one for the Roman Centurion.

And then it names the guy who actually did the art as well.

Oh great. Yeah. And then the memorial by I’m going to call the La Akeptous calling Jesus God and then the women whom the worshipers are encouraged to remember these four women.

Kelley >> Great. Okay, well I’m excited that we can share that image with our viewers and our listeners will know where to go. So thanks for your time. This was wonderful and I’m sure that we will see you again here soon.

Dr. Glahn >> Okay, thanks.