Bible and Gold Glass
The Materiality of Bible
For the past several years, I’ve been toying with some questions about what, exactly, we think the bible is. We who have grown up immersed in Christian culture (either in churches or simply as part of the United States’ pervasive Christian atmosphere) tend to take the bible for granted, as a discrete thing with its own agency and being, a given in our world. We give it a lot of power, even when we might not mean to, saying things like “the bible says,” or “according to the bible,” as if it were a being that speaks with a single, active voice.
Most recently (beginning with a conference paper I wrote and delivered in 2020) I’ve been thinking through these questions alongside gold glass, which is a really interesting category of material from the 3rd-5th centuries (mostly) in Italy (mostly). These glasses can have a variety of motifs, including pagan scenes, festive and celebratory images, Jewish symbols and stories, and Christian symbols and stories. The glasses are made by sandwiching a thin layer of gold leaf between two slabs of clear glass, and there is a big debate about whether they were once drinking vessels or bowls, or whether they had always been discs as they are now. These are sometimes found in grave settings, sometimes sunk into the mortar sealing a grave, or loose in a tomb. They also turn up a lot on the antiquities market, meaning that they were looted from graves sometime in the past. The one pictured above, the glass about which I have thought most carefully recently, was acquired this way. It was in the private collection of a priest (so, probably looted), and then donated to the church, where it made its way into the Vatican Museums. The photo above is one that I took in November 2021 at the Vatican; there is a large gallery full of such glasses.
This particular gold glass is interesting to me because it seems to depict two stories, both unique to the Gospel of John: the raising of Lazarus, and the miracle at Cana. The raising of Lazarus is pretty common in early Christian art, especially funerary art (for obvious reasons), but the Cana scene is rarer. Their depiction together is, as far as I know, unique. Why are they here together? What do they have to do with each other? Who decided to do it this way? I think this glass is a view into a fascinating hermeneutical decision, and it’s fun to try to think through what would have led someone to juxtapose these stories with each other and think about them alongside each other.
This glass sparked another question for me, though. What distinguishes this gold glass, with two stories from John, from other places where stories from John are collected, like the Gospel of John itself? Can we think about this glass as a form of bible? If so, how, and if not, why? What makes the printed, textual bible special, as a physical or categorical repository of stories, and what makes us reserve the category of bible for that form alone? Why not think of something like this object as bible too?
A few weeks ago I had an article come out in Bible and Critical Theory, which is a journal that publishes research that privileges theoretical considerations. You can read it here, if you want. That article was my attempt to work out some of these questions. I also talked about this particular gold glass on the The Bible and Beyond podcast with Shirley Paulson, which you can check out here. I’m not quite done thinking about it yet, as I haven’t arrived at any kinds of answers, but I’m enjoying my journey through the world contained in this small glass disc.