Christianity has made radical claims for the whole-hearted fidelity of its converts beginning with the traditions ascribed to Jesus himself: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Lk 15.26 RSV). North African Christians did not baulk at taking this injunction literally. One would expect to find evidence of this at initiation. After all, it was a North African, Cyprian, who declared that one could not have God as Father who did not have the Church as Mother.[1] But this paper presents the evidence of the Church as family at the other end of life, i.e., in death and burial. First, I will present evidence on non-Christian North African families represented in epigraphy, This will be followed by the Christian evidence, from epigraphy supplemented by literature. What I intend to show is that North African Christians, at least to the time of Augustine, valued the family of faith over blood relatives.

Family in traditional North African life

Death was preeminently a family affair. More often than not, people died at home, surrounded by the family who marked the moment of death by calling out the person's name and kissing them good-by.[2] The preparation of the body was a responsibility of the women of the family. The body was attended by members of the family or those they hired from the time of death until burial.[3] In the procession from the home to the burial grounds, the family attended the corpse, not just living members of the family, but also the family dead, through the presence of their bust--at least for upper classes. Burial was often in family groupings, Witness to this are the innumerable families of the catacombs, most notably the non-Christian family vaults preserved under the Basilica of Saint Peter at Rome. At death, a person did not leave the family but became a family member in another form.

[I don't wish in this section to denigrate the roles played my those who were not household members. Here we cannot count slaves as outsiders. If we look at associates, we must often count them as kin through their inheritance. The outsiders who would be of importance would be members of burial clubs, professional musicians, etc.]

Traditional epigraphy

Even in death families remembered their dead in terms of their family relationships. Evidence from two cemeteries just outside Carthage bear witness to the intensity of family relationships.[4] The cemeteries are near Malga and were unearthed as a group at the turn of the century. These cemeteries include burials from the period between Augustus and Antoninus Pius (to 161). They were chosen for their relative untouched state and as a benchmark for what earliest Christian families in North Africa would have been accustomed to do. Here where family members are buried together one would expect that families could be more casual about relationships since everyone would already know the relationships of the deceased to each other and to the living. On the contrary, the relationships are maintained across the boundary of death. In the first cemetery, of the 285 epitaphs or fragments of epitaphs at least 93 mention family relationships. This is about 32.6% (including fragments). In the second cemetery, where the number of illegible fragments is much higher, of the 310 epitaphs or fragments of epitaphs, 60 mention family relationships, about 19%. The overall percentage is about 27%.

North Africans would also have been accustomed to sharing a commemorative meal at the grave of the beloved but also originally with the beloved. North African burials are well known for the survivals of both offering tables at the grave site and methods of including the deceased in the feasting itself. Here are the traditional tables for grave offerings and the way in which drink offerings were provided to the memory of the dead members of the family.

The Christian Family and the Dead

With the evidence for the intensity of family relationships across the boundaries of death, one might expect Christians to maintain the same practices as their neighbors. Surely the surviving literature gives some evidence of the Christian practice of customs we have found among non-Christians. Augustine portrays his mother Monica as practicing the North African custom of feeding the dead, even when she was resident in Italy.[5] Augustine himself faced pastoral problems when family members interceded for their own dead with respect to the positioning of their burial.[6]

The question I would like to focus on here is why the issue arose at all. Why was not burial with other family members good enough for Christians? Why was burial next to a person of another clan superior to burial near one's kin? What can the epigraphical and literary evidence tell us about the situation in North Africa which caused Christian families to value burial near other church members over other family members?

In a sense, Peter Brown has already offered what has become the standard answer. He affirms that the funeral and burial are preeminently family, but that sometimes the affairs of the community override the privacy of the family.[7] The bodies of martyrs had become focal points for the holy power and that bishops sought to gain control of that power by burying martyrs in areas under their control.[8]

But when we consider the evidence of North Africa, I think Brown does not go far enough. He says that the "Christianity did not attempt to touch the average grave. For the overwhelming majority of the Christian congregation, the family grave remained a fine and private place."[9] Perhaps this is so for other places, but Christianity in North Africa had early on taken to heart the Christian invitation to call no man father and to prefer Christ--and by extension the Christian community--to any family member--not just the martyrs. Therefore, whether one was a martyr or not, one's body belonged to the Christian community as family and connections with the family by blood are effaced..

Christian Family as absent: the epigraphical evidence

As we have done for the non-Christian community at Carthage, we will do for the Christian community. Let's look at the epigraphical evidence for concern for family relationships at the time of death. The earliest evidence comes from the catacombs at Hadrumetum (Sousse). There were three Christian and one non-Christian catacomb. The conservative date for the beginning of burials here is about 200-238, i.e., within a generation of the non-Christian burials just mentioned.[10] Burials continue here until the middle of the fourth century. In the non-Christian necropolis, the proportion of epitaphs mentioning family is even higher than those of Carthage, but admittedly it is a small sample. But the Christian burials present a stark contrast. Of the 267 epitaphs, 25 mention family. This is 9.4%, a figure substantially lower than the aggregate for the non-Christian cemeteries in Sousse and from Malga.

More evidence comes from Carthage. The first set comes from the Basilica called Saint Monica. Inscriptions here range from the end of the fourth to the sixth century. Of the 401 epitaphs extant from this site, only four, less than 1%, mention family relationships. The second set are from the Basilica of Mcidfa, also known as the Basilica Maiorum. These range from the fourth to the seventh century. Of the 785 there, only 11 or 1.4% mention family relationships. But might we have a collection of special cases here, i.e., the self-select who bury within the walls of the churches? As Ian Morris sugggests, might location of burial have eclipsed other concerns?[11] To offset this variable, let us look at a third set, catalogued by Liliane Ennabli, which come from the environs of Carthage inside and outside the walls, a somewhat less select group with respect to hyper-Christian affiliation.[12] Among the 615 inscriptions ranging from the second half of the fourth century to the Byzantine period, 11 or aprroximately 1.8% mention family relationships. This figure is reasonably consistent with those found on burials within the two major churches .

In summary, thus far the evidence indicates that in funerary inscriptions, Christians identify their dead as relatives by blood significantly less than non-Christians. But the question is why they do so.

Family as reconfigured: the literary evidence

The literary remains of early Christianity illuminate the epigraphical evidence. What the texts point to is the reconfiguration of the Christian community into the family of faith.

When Tertullian, for example, enumerated the services the Christian community provides for its members, including burying the dead, he does so in terms which equate the destitute with children of the family in need of care.[13] Tobit is a model for Christians in their burial of the dead, according to Cyprian, but note that Tobit is famous for burying not only family members but only co-religionists slain in persecution.[14] For both of these North African leaders the duties of family have become the duties of the family of faith.

Many stories include mention of Christians as brothers and sisters, but stories from North Africa do so to an uncommon degree. If one takes only the stories in Musurillo's Acts of the Christian Martyrs, one can see the difference.[15] The book contains twenty-eight stories, ten from North Africa and seventeen from elsewhere. If one considers mention of Christians as the familial addressees of the stories or as communal brothers and sisters of the saints, North African stories are twice as likely than non-North Africans to use the family terms.

We can use Musurillo's stories and expand the field with stories of other North African martyrs. Some of the most interesting stories include those of the third century, Perpetua and Maximillian of Theveste; the fourth century, Maxima, Donatilla, Secunda and The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs; and the undated redaction of the martyrdom of Salsa of Tipasa.[16]

North Africa's premier hagiography, that of Perpetua (d. 203), is a fascinating study of family relationships. From the outset our heroine is described as matrimonaliter nupta, respectably married, but by the end of the account we discover that her true spouse is not the mysteriously absent father of her young child, but Christ himself, as she is named delicia Dei and sponsa Christi, sweetheart of God and spouse of Christ. All the family relationships of the story are muddled from the start. It becomes increasingly obvious as the story unfolds that unqualified mentions of sister and brother mean not members of Perpetua's natural family but her fellow Christians. When she does mean her natural family members, she qualifies their relationship. As she moves from dependence on her natural kin, like her father and her baby son, to dependence on members of the church community, she discovers her true identity and gains personal strength.[17]

The story of Maximillian of Theveste (d. 295) is an interesting one. It provides the first known story of burial ad sanctos. After the young conscientious objector to military service is executed, it is not his supportive Christian father (sometime later a martyr himself) who buried him but a pious, otherwise unrelated member of the congregation. She buried him first in her own family burial place--he is true kin. Then she has him disinterred and reburied near Cyprian.[18] Here in the late third century, before the legalization of Christianity, we have church taking priority over the family, even in burial, a hyper-traditional area of family life. Maximilian is buried by his sister-in-faith in the tomb of the man both would have called 'father'. She herself was later buried near him.

Early fourth-century texts provide us with more evidence of Christianity as the dividing line within families. These are the Passion of Saints Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda and The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs. An undated story, The Passion of Salsa of Tipasa rounds out the group. All three stories include accounts of young women martyrs who turned their back on family desires and refused marriages, opting instead for church-sanctioned asceticism and eventually martyrdom. They anticipate the gospel dictum that in the Kigndom Christians do not marry but live like the angels (Mt 22.30). Even when Maxima, accompanied by Donatilla, pleaded with Secunda to consider the fact that she was the only child of an ageing father, Secunda threatened those who opposed her with the wrath of God. Then she exclaims: "It is better for me to defy my father according to the flesh and to love my spiritual Father." So all three young women proceeded to martyrdom.[19]

Similarly Victoria in The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs rejects a marriage arranged by her family. When offered the chance to leave prison under the guardianship of her non-Christian brother, she replies, "I do not want to as I am a Christian and my brothers are those who keep the will of God."[20]

Even more vocal is Salsa. Her non-Christian parents had put up with her refusals of marriage, but on a major festival they dragged the unwilling young woman off to a celebration in honor of a local divinity. This was a literal dragging; they skinned her knees as she went. The festivities took place in the temple devoted to the town's tutelary divinity, a location backing up onto a cliff. Once the festival was winding down and the participants tipsy or snoozing from drink, she lectures her parents on the true divinity and pushes the image of the false one over the cliff and into the sea.[21]

Do family members ever get any positive treatment in the North African stories? Yes, they do, but only under special circumstances. They are praised when they themselves are martyrs[22] and when mothers exhort their children to martyrdom, like the mother of the Maccabees.[23] Blood relatives find a privileged place only when they give up claims as blood relatives and assimilate themselves to the true family, the family of faith. Matthew had the logion from Jesus: "Whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother" (Mt 12.50), so Cyprian warned Christians that what is most precious to the family, their own children, are to be counted as naught. As Abraham stood ready to sacrifice his child, so must they if it meant keeping their faith.[24]

Pintercessory prayers to the dead are another indication of the inclusion of all dead in the family. Neither Tertullian nor Cyprian differentiate prayers for the dead on the basis of the manner of their death--martyrdom or not.[25] Victor Saxer sees the traditions of celebrating both sorts of dead as proceeding side by side. With the exception of the reading of the passiones of the martyrs, his evidence displays no clear distinction between the two types of celebrations up to the time of Augustine.[26]

Here it is significant to return again to Monica and her celebration at the graves when she was in Milan. She had no deceased relatives in Milan. She must have been celebrating members of the family of faith, including Milanese Christians as her own family.

If this inclusion of all Christians as dead members of one's own family is important, now I would mention exclusions from the family of faith. Augustine wrote to the mother of an catechumen, no, her son could not be buried among the Christians, as he had not yet been baptized.[27] The unbaptized were excluded. And even some baptized were not remembered in the family of faith after their demise. Even before Cyprian's time a Council of Carthage threated the untimate punishment for clerics who transsgressed tits edicts and accepted the task of executors of wills. When they had died, they were to be excluded from commemoration at the liturgy.[28]

Thus one sees that Brown's interpretation of the martyr as the special dead must be nuanced in North Africa. All members of the Church were special, as members of the Christian family, whether martyrs or not. All family bonds were secondary to the bonds of faith. Thus it should be no surprize that Christians do not claim their dead as members of specific families in epigraphy and that the Christian community offers prayers for all its dead.
 

This material was not included in the talk but is material for further research.

Christian families changing: Augustine and the Vandal period

When one examines the epigraphy of the period after 430, that of the Vandal and Byzantine period, something significant happens. The families previously absent come out of the woodwork, so to speak. Once out, they do not mill around, but they begin to gather in significant numbers. Their names appear in epitaphs again especially the epitaphs of officials of the Church. But that is another paper.

Conclusion

If in previous centuries, the Church has colonized family cemeteries and took the dead for her own, during the Vandal and Byzantine periods, families retake their dead by colonizing and leaving their mark on the Church.

1. Cf. Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, on the Church as artificial kin group, cited in The Cult of the Saint, p. 31.
 

2. Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1992), p. 135.
 

3. See "The Tale of Telphron," in Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass , trans. Jack Lindsay (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1960), pp. 63-69.
 

4. This analysis is based on the tombs of families excavated near the amphitheatre close to the cisterns of Malga in 1880. These are documented in CIL 8:12501-13186.
 

5. Augustine, Confessions 6.2, trans. With an introduction by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Middlesex and New York: Penguin, 1960), pp. 112-113.
 

6. Augustine, De cura in The care to be taken for the Dead, trans. John A. Lacy, in Saint Augustine: Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, Father of the Church 27 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1955).
 

7. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), p. 24.
 

8. Brown, pp. 8-9 and Chapters 4-5.
 

9. The Cult of the Saints, p. 31.
 

10. Information on these catacombs comes from A. F. Leynaud, Les catacombes africaines - Sousse-Hadrumete, 2nd rev. and augmented ed. (Algiers: Carbonel, 1922). This is the evidence from Bon Pasteur, Hermes and Severus. I have separated out the evidence of Hermes which is classified as non-Christian by the archeologists. See also Louis Foucher, Hadrumetum (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), p. 345.
 

11. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1992), pp. 170-171.
 

12. Liliane Ennabli, Les inscriptions funéraires chrétiennes de Carthage III: Carthage Intra et Extra Muros, Collection de l'Ecole française de Rome 151 (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1991).
 

13. Tertullian, Apol. 39 (ANF 3.46b),: "they become the nurselings of their confession."
 

14. Cyprian, Mort. 10 (ANF 5.471b); v. Tobit 1.17-19, 2.3-8.
 

15. Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
 

16. For the first two, see Musurillo; for the middle two, see Maureen A. Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1996); for Salsa, see Catalogus Codicum Hagiographicum

. . . in Bibliotheca Nationali Parisiensi (Brussels: Bollandists: 1889), p. 344-352..
 

17. See my treatment of her family relationships in "The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity," in Searching the Scriptures, vol. 2: A Feminist Commentary, ed. By Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994), pp. 829-858, especially pp.836-846.
 

18. The Acts of Maximilian 3.4 (Musurillo, pp. 248-249).
 

19. The Passion of MDS 4 (Tilley, p. 22).
 

20. The Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs 17 (Tilley, p. 42-43). Cf. 7 (33).
 

21. Salsa 2, 4-5 (pp. 345-346).
 

22. Parents and children as martyrs: Marian and James 11.5 (Musurillo, pp. 208-209), Montanus and Lucius 8.1 (Musurillo, pp. 220-221), Maximillian 3.5 (Musurillo, pp. 248-249), Acts of the Abitinians 2 and 3 (Tilley, p. 29), 15 (39-40), 18 (43).
 

23. Marian's mother in Marian and James is likened to the mother of the Maccabees in 13.1 and the mother of Jesus in 13.3 (pp.212-213); the mother of Flavian is praised as a true daughter of Abraham like the mother of the Maccabees in Montanus and Lucius 2.11 and 16.3-5 (Musurillo, pp. 230-231 and 236-237).
 

24. Cyprian, Mort. 12 (ANF 5.472a).
 

25. See Victor Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne: Les témoinages de Tertullien, Cyprien et Augustin à l lumiére de l'archéologie africaine (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), pp. 106-107.
 

26. See Cyprian, Mort. 12 (ANF 5.472a). Manichaeans critique the Catholic celebration of their dead as indistinguishable from that of traditional families and Augustine is hard put to provide a defense. His only response seems to be a pastoral one, to move all celebrations of the dead--martyrs and non-martyrs--into the Church and to control the distribution of food--all must go to the poor. See Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean 20.4 (NPNF ser. 1, 4.253b); On the Morals of the Catholic Church 34.75 (NPNF ser. 1, 4.62b); and Confessions 8.27 (Bettenson, p. 341).
 

27. Reference:
 

28. Cyprian, Ep. 1.2.1 (ANF Ep. 65, p. 5.376)