by Hannah Lents
Elizabeth Rees
Archaeology and the Early Church in Southern Greece
Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2020.
216 pages. ISBN: 978178925575.
$80.00. Paperback.
Elizabeth Rees fills a gap in the scholarship of Christianity in Greece by presenting the most significant literary and archaeological evidence for early Churches south of Athens in a single monograph. The primary purpose of Archaeology and the Early Church in Southern Greece is to describe early churches by taking readers on a guided tour of archaeological sites, all of which Rees has visited herself. The book’s structure and Rees’s interpretive framework subtly argue that women and ordinary Greeks shaped Church history as much as the apostle Paul and later famous, male, Church leaders. Historically, scholars have focused on the New Testament letters 1 and 2 Corinthians, and therefore Paul and the city of Corinth, to write the history of Christianity in southern Greece. Rees joins other feminist historians by centering the deaconess and Paul’s coworker Phoebe of Kenchreai in the first chapter and continues to spotlight women leaders thereafter. Rees’s choice to delay presenting Corinth until chapter 4 further dislodges the city’s dominance in scholarship and shifts inquiry to the role of ports (Kenchreai, chapter 2 and Lechaion, chapter 5), pagan sanctuaries (Isthmia, chapter 3 and cults of Asclepius, chapter 8), and cities that did not receive letters from Paul (Nemea and Sikyon, chapter 6 and Athens, chapter 7).
Texts are the only direct evidence for the earliest Christianity in Greece; thus, Rees privileges literary evidence arguing, “archaeology can be understood only within the context of the early Church… I examine the texts before archaeology, so that material details can be placed within a larger framework.” This methodology lends itself to more traditional readings of the archaeological evidence, particularly for Isthmia where Rees argues that the Panhellenic games inspired Paul’s athletic imagery in 1 Corinthians. The text-driven approach accounts for the inclusion of Athens as the isolated location north of the Corinthian isthmus; using the New Testament Acts of the Apostles as a historical source, Rees traces the city’s Christian history from the first century based upon the story of Paul’s visit to the city.
This book is an excellent introduction to the evidence for and recent scholarship of Christianity in southern Greece. Rees’s footnotes cite all the major publications about the region in the last twenty years. This book is likely the best-illustrated book on the subject, containing 96 black and white figures of wall murals, architecture, archaeological site plans, and artifacts, as well as 24 color plates.
ABOUT THE BOOK AUTHOR
Elizabeth Rees is a Roman Catholic nun with a Master’s degree from Oxford. She is one of Britain’s leading authorities on the Celtic saints in relation to the sites where they lived and worked. She lectures on Celtic Christianity at venues around Britain; for seven years, she was a guest lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Religion in Celtic Societies at the University of Wales, Lampeter. She now adds southern Greece to her eight-book catalog of regions she has studied through extensive travel and research. Elizabeth is also a counselor and retreat leader. She runs a House of Prayer in rural Somerset.
ABOUT THE REVIEW AUTHOR
Hannah Lents is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department in the Ancient Mediterranean Religions subfield at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work explores rural sacred space in the Mediterranean world through the archaeological and literary record. She is preparing to write her dissertation on Christianity around Corinth from the first to seventh centuries CE.
