Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This November 1981 Classic, Baylor archaeologists unearth an ancient Christian monastery.
Petros.
Simon Peter.
The Rock!
There is was — the mosaic floor laid some 1500 years ago. Twenty-four Baylorites and their professor on a summer dig in Israel had hit pay dirt. They were unearthing the floor of an ancient Christian monastery built 420-425 A.D., within a century of the legalization of Christianity by that powerful Roman, Constantine.
One by one the diggers carefully brushed away the final shift of sand from their little square plots and stared at the design unfolding— Greek letters, two roosters, crosses, the outline of an altar. It could mean but one thing. Christians!
The professor looked with an archaeologist’s eye but with a Christian’s faith at the religious symbols and noted with building excitement that not a letter was missing from the Greek inscription.
A student looked and saw the rightness of the classic Greek lines, the rich colors of the mosaic tile. And her artist’s eye began to transcribe those colors onto her palette.
A faculty wife looked and felt only awe, deep and moving.
One by one the diggers would call out in subdued excitement, “I have something,” and the others would gather to appraise.
Dr. Bruce Cresson, professor of religion and director of Baylor’s Institute of Archaeology, knew the mosaic floor was there when his group began its summer dig, but he didn’t know the scope of the floor or the specifics of it. For the floor to offer up a Christian message was indeed a bonus.
Cresson termed the floor a “very interesting find, an important find.” For the Christian, the mosaic floor with its design and dedication to Peter is evidence that the cross was used as a symbol of Christ more than 1500 years ago, and that the ancient monks were familiar with the story of the apostle’s denial of Christ.
“This was not the earliest church ever found but it was one of the earliest,” Cresson said, noting that the find will “add to our knowledge of the establishment of Christianity in the very early centuries.”
The monastery complex, measuring about 60 by 80 feet, was found at Tel ’Ira in the Negeb Valley near Beersheba, about forty miles from Jerusalem. Archaeologists know from former digs that the now barren land was once the location of a large, walled city, but they do not know its name.
Located in the monastery complex were the living quarters where it is believed twelve to fifteen monks lived; also an entrance hallway, a large room, (possibly a foyer), and the jewel of the desert, a tiny chapel measuring 15 to 20 feet wide and 25 to 30 feet long. One end is constructed in a semicircle, and in the curve is the limestone base of a five- or six-foot altar. Two mosaic crosses, encircled by a mosaic background, are positioned at the corners of the altar.
Another geometric cross was found in the large room leading into the chapel. It is in that room that the Baylorites found the dedication, written with tiny tiles in Greek, followed by a short prayer invoking God’s blessing on the building and its inhabitants. Next to the dedication to Peter is a mosaic medallion depicting two roosters, or cocks, and bringing quickly to mind the Gospel account that Peter denied Christ three times before the cocks crowed on the morning of the crucifixion, thereby fulfilling Christ’s prophecy.
Baylor senior Jennifer Smith, who accompanied the group as the official artist, said the colors as they emerged from hiding were breathtaking.
“Such beautiful tones,” Jennifer said, her voice still betraying her excitement. “Cobalt. Ultramarine flecks. Vermillion. The rose tones. Peach. All set in bone.”
The tiles, most of which measure three-fourths by three-fourths of an inch, were carefully crushed and then wet down before official photographs were taken. Airplanes were brought in for aerial photographs so that the entire area could be shown.
But it is Jennifer’s work which Israeli archeologists will use in the removal of the floor and its subsequent restoration, hopefully in a major museum. She spent many backbreaking hours carefully tracing each tiny tile, marking each for color.
“They were so lovingly hand-hewn and fit together in such a pleasing shape,” Jennifer said. “I kept trying to imagine the people and how they really lived there in the desert. And the Greek…
“Oh, it was so fine to see the inscription in Greek, everything so classic yet with an eastern influence. So fine. So moving. I am sorry I had to go to Israel to find this fascination with Biblical history. But it was so real there. So alive!”
Before the tiles were uncovered, Jennifer carefully recorded the progress of the dig in drawings, showing each layer before it was taken away. Those drawings are not on their way to Israel.
Jennifer’s parents have lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for three years, so she has visited there many times. Before that the family lived for two years in Holland. After high school graduation the Baylor student enrolled for the summer at an art school in Paris, and later returned to Europe with Baylor students on a summer study in Vienna. So she is world traveled. But right now her fascination with the Mideast desert is foremost.
“You have to learn to listen to the desert; my mother taught me how,” she said, her voice taking on that breathless quality again.
“Listen? To what? To the sounds of silence?”
Her hands opened as if in supplication, her face showing that she could indeed hear the desert. But for a while she was quiet.
“Some beauty is so simple,” she said at last. “You can hear the wind — it even has a name — and it changes during the day. It is a ruthless wind, dry, hot and carrying little fine, fine grains of sand. You learn to avoid it.
“And the land looks so worn, so weathered, so sturdy. Beautiful colors. All earth tones. It is a raw land. And often when you are walking in it a caravan will just suddenly appear over a hill and then disappear over the next one.
“Bedouins were camped near the dig. Once a friend and I walked the last two miles to the dig so we could see the camps better. We were going to take pictures but the Bedouins believe a photograph robs them of their soul, so they would turn their backs. So we mostly took memories. So we could have smiles.”
Dr.Cresson does not share Jennifer’s enthusiasm for the Bedouin camps. The nomads are enemies of archaeology teams and will often destroy evidence while digging for ancient graves which might hold treasure. In fact, one of the two tombs found under the mosaic floor, beneath the entrance to the chapel, had been destroyed by Bedouins. Cresson speculated that the skeleton remains had to be those of important monks, maybe one of them the head of the monastery.
“There is an eerie feeling about finding a tomb,” Cresson said. “There is something very private about a burial. You could see with what tender loving care these had been laid to rest. I was really, in a way, glad to say ‘we are going to seal it back up.’”
Barbara Patterson, accompanying the group for the third straight summer, also found the skeletons caused a strange sensation. “After all, they were people and so long ago,” Barbara said, adding that she was glad to leave that part of the dig to Cresson. “He is so scholarly, but such a sensitive person. And his wife, Joanne, is always so helpful.”
How did she react to the discovery of the mosaic floor?
“I was awed,” she said. “It gave me goose bumps.”
Now that her two daughters are in high school and junior college, Barbara, the wife of Dr. Bob Patterson of the religion department, has gone back to school to work on a master’s degree in counseling. Her undergraduate work was in social work, but she instructs part-time in Baylor’s physical education department. Barbara and Bob are personal friends of Bruce and Joanne Cresson, a fact reflected in Barbara’s conversation. Cresson’s annual six-week program always includes a two-week tour of some other countries, Barbara said. On weekends the professor schedules special trips “to some really great places,” she said.
The Baylorites lived in a “quite nice” youth hostel with five to a room. Because of the afternoon heat the day began at 4 a.m. with a small breakfast of tea, bread and jelly. The rough ride to the dig took nearly an hour, so the diggers were ready to go to work at 6 a.m. and would work without stopping until 8:30.
“The desert is nice and cool then and the summer sky is so very blue,” Barbara said. “It is very austere but it has its own stark beauty.” After two and a half hours of the hardest labor of the day, the diggers would stop for the main breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, fruit, bread and jelly. After two more hours of tedious work the group would take a juice break. But by 1 p.m. the hot wind would invariably come up and chase the diggers to their bus for the jolting ride back to the hostel. The main meal of the day was served back in the dining room when they first arrived.
“But the absolute high point of each day was getting clean,” Barbara said, laughing. Before the baths each digger had to put his own finds to soak so they could be carefully scrubbed after an afternoon break. About 5 p.m. the diggers would gather to wash today’s find — bits of cooking pots, ovens, knives, lots of restorable pottery. In fact, a candlestand, dating back to a time before candles were used, was found. (The people of that time used more of a combination oil lamp and candle for light.) After the finds were put away to dry, an archaeologist from the University of Tel Aviv would arrive to “read” the finds of the previous day, a term used to describe an expert’s appraisal of discoveries. By this method even the most inexperienced was kept abreast of progress.
About an hour after a 7 p.m. supper, the students would perform a nightly ritual, a half-mile walk to the city for ice cream. Sometimes they also visited the all-night bakery or explored the city.
Barbara is keeping her fingers crossed that Baylor’s small museum will be the recipient of some of the summer finds, but she knows it is up to the Israelis. She is even more concerned that an airfield is scheduled to be built on the site (bulldozers!), making the area off limits to archaeologists within a year.
But Cresson said the people of Israel and its leaders are very conscious of the riddles of history which lie buried beneath the ground. For example, Tel ‘Ira has been well explored, so its history is fairly well known.
“We know what is beneath the monastery because we did a few probes before we left,” Dr. Cresson said. “In some areas we reached bedrock but in one place the probes uncovered a segment of the Iron Age, in this particular case Seventh Century, B.C., about the time of the prophet, Jeremiah.”
Now on a writing sabbatical in North Carolina, Cresson waits to hear from his Israeli colleagues concerning the removal of the mosaic floor, section by careful section, and of its subsequent restoration. Until academic papers are published he cannot reveal the exact wording of the exciting inscription. But he has a scholar’s patience.
“It was not the Rosetta stone,” Dr. Cresson explained to his inquisitor. “But it confirms Peter’s denial of Christ in the interesting association of the cocks with Peter. It shows that so much of early Christian art was really a communication of the Bible.”
And then in typical understatement he added, “It will be of interest to archaeologists.”
