No one answered for a moment, then the trooper called Josiah from Philadelphia came into the room. “I was raised in a Christian family, sir,” he said. “I remember hearing my grandfather speak of churches like this; the Christians were persecuted often, so they used homes as meeting places. You can see where the wall was tom out between two rooms to make a larger room for the services.”
Constantine raised his torch and picked his way through the rubble to the other end of the room. The floor was raised there to form an elevated rostrum or dais, and when he looked through the open doorway of a smaller room he saw a sunken bowl, as if the space had been used for washing.
“This room must have been used for baptizing,” Josiah said.
“Baptizing?”
“A sacrament, sir, whereby the sins of those who believe are washed away and they are made pure.”
“Like the taurobolium!” Dacius exclaimed. “I went through that a long time ago.”
Adam and Eve
Above the bowl was a painting of a man and a woman in a garden representing, Josiah said, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman on earth. On another wall of the same room, two soldiers in ancient clothing and armor were about to engage in battle. Josiah named them David and Goliath, the latter a mighty Philistine whom the smaller David was said to have bested with a stone flung by a sling.
On the north wall a sepulcher was depicted with three women
beside it; Josiah explained that this was the tomb of Jesus, from which his followers believed he had risen after death. On the upper part of the small wall, there was a strange scene depicting a group of men in a boat on the water. The same figure of the shepherd was walking toward them on the surface and another, apparently having tried to walk on the water but failed, was sinking and reaching out his hand imploringly to the walking figure.
“Jesus walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee,” Josiah said. “But when Simon Peter tried to do the same, his faith failed him and he sank, until Jesus lifted him up.”
Even though the colors were faded by time and weather, the paintings were strangely compelling, particularly those depicting the slender shepherd. His eyes, in the flickering fight of the torches, seemed almost to be alive, and seeing them Constantine felt again the same warmth of friendship and liking which he’d experienced toward King Tiridates that afternoon on the river bank and which he felt for Dacius.
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