Under the Judgement of the Living God: The Early Christian Funerary Imprecations of Phrygian Eumeneia

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, the Phrygian funerary imprecation, known as the Eumeneian formula, has been considered one of the clearest indicators of Christian religious identity on inscriptions from Roman Asia Minor. After a brief précis of the early scholarly history of interpretation of this formula and the historiographical assumptions which underpinned its identification as Christian, this article attempts to reframe how we understand the specific context out of which these inscriptions emerge—that of the wider socio-religious context of Roman Asia Minor—and to examine the degree of continuity which these inscriptions have in terms of religious sentiment with similar pagan examples from wider Anatolia. The central contention of this article is that the Eumeneian formula inscriptions, quite apart from what they can tell us about the socio-political status of early Christians and their relationships with their wider civic environment, are also an important index for understanding early Christian popular religion in the pre-Constantinian period and how ordinary Christians expressed their religious identity in a potentially hostile environment.