Bible Review

Dölger identified some Christian funeral images of the former (kline) (in Dölger, Ichthys, vol. 4, pl. 246 and 252, for example).

These paintings are similar to other fish and loaves images, including a famous late-fourth- or early-fifth-century mosaic found in the Church of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha, where tradition locates the multiplication miracle. The mosaic depicts two fish flanking a basket of bread and is similar in design to the small symbolic paintings found in the catacombs (which date to about 200 C.E.) and to the fish and chalice mosaic in what is thought to have been a house church in Ostia Antica.

Throughout the Middle Ages, some of these elements came to be incorporated in Last Supper images: A mosaic in the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, for example, shows Jesus reclining at the head of a sigma-shaped table with the apostles (see last supper mosaic). On the table are seven small loaves of bread and a platter bearing two fish.

Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 1.14.

See the eucharistic services described in Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 65, 67; Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 4; Cyril of Jerusalem, Cathecheses 3, and Apostolic Constitutions 8.6–15, for fairly detailed descriptions of the rite at different times and places.

Some scholars have suggested that this rather inconclusive image is evidence that women were permitted to act as celebrants at early Christian Eucharists. See, for example, D. Irvin, “The Ministry of Women in the Early Church,” Duke Divinity School Review 45:2 (1980), pp. 76–86, esp. 81–84.

See Josef Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1903), p. 289f; See also Fractio Panis: Die alteste der eucharistischen opfers in den “Capella greca” (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1895); and commentary in Franz Joseph Dölger, Ichthys: Der Heilige Fisch in den antiken Religionen und im Christentum, 5 vols (Münster: Aschendorffsche, 1922–1943), vol. 5, pp. 527–533.