Episode Details

When the Grave Isn't the Final Word: Hope in the Roman Catacombs

What the early church carved into a place of death, and the anchor that still holds in grief

Just outside the old city of Rome, beneath the ground, there are miles of narrow tunnels called the catacombs, and they were the burial place of the early church. Going down into them is one of the stops on our Rome trip, and it may be the most powerful place you can stand to understand the faith of the first Christians. We have already gone into a prison and walked an ancient road in this series. Today we go back underground, but into a very different kind of dark, and what the early believers left on these walls is not despair. It is hope.

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In this episode

00:08 Welcome and the bonus series

00:34 Back underground: what the catacombs really are

03:00 The early church's cemetery and the underground church

04:53 The symbols on the walls: the fish

06:44 The anchor and the Good Shepherd

08:41 Hope in the middle of death

10:31 Refusing to let the grave have the last word

12:31 What standing there does to your faith

14:39 Losing my mom, and "she's here and she's whole"

18:24 A prayer and an invitation

What Are the Roman Catacombs?

The catacombs are miles of narrow tunnels dug into soft rock beneath the outskirts of Rome, running level by level, sometimes four or five stories deep, and in places even deeper. Laid end to end they would stretch for hundreds of miles. Carved into the walls are tomb after tomb, resting places for tens of thousands of the Christian dead, including many martyrs who died for their faith in Jesus. In simple terms, the catacombs are the cemetery of the early church.

Why Did the Early Christians Build the Catacombs?

Not to hide. You may have heard that Christians used the catacombs as secret hideouts to escape persecution, but that is the movie version, and it does not hold up. If believers had gone down there to hide, the guards would simply have waited for them to come back up. The real reason is more moving than that. Christians in Rome were not allowed to bury their dead inside the city, and they did not want the common Roman practice of cremation, because they believed the body would rise again one day. So they needed ground. They went outside the city, dug down, and over the years carved out a vast underground network where they laid their loved ones to rest.

Where the "Underground Church" Worshiped

When believers were forbidden to worship during times of persecution, they would go down into the catacombs under the cover of visiting their dead, and they would worship there among the graves. There were rooms for gathering and even for teaching, and you can still see what is left on the walls. It is part of why we still speak of the "underground church" today. In some parts of the world it remains dangerous or illegal to follow Jesus, and believers gather in back rooms and behind storefronts under the appearance of something else, just to worship the Lord. Some of Rachael's own missionary friends lead underground churches now.

Hope Carved in Stone: The Fish, the Anchor, and the Good Shepherd

Among all those graves, the early Christians painted and carved symbols that still undo you when you learn what they mean. The most common is a simple fish, scratched into the stone again and again. The Greek word for fish is ichthys, and each letter stood for a word in the phrase "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior," the whole gospel packed into a symbol you could draw in a second. When a believer saw a f