Chapter 10 - Shaping Buildings into Stories

Summary

The New Testament Letter to the Ephesians hypostatizes the church’s qualities of unity into those of a bounded, ideal human body and building. As both a temple and a heavenly Colossus, the church has a vast architectural interior equal to divine grandeur reaching up to the same dominating heights of Christ’s own enthronement in heaven. This chapter examines how this architectural ekphrasis participated in aesthetics shared by many authors in Roman literary culture to turn buildings into stories in the final decades of the first century. In this period of cultural change, narratives about buildings shifted from an architecture of tyranny to encomiastic memorials of divine benefaction, unity and power associating grand architecture and the ideal human body. Attention to Roman architectural ekphrasis in Ephesians thus makes the mixed metaphor in Ephesians intelligible. It also offers a solution to an interpretative crux in the text previously considered insoluble. In these ways, therefore, this chapter rethinks the question of early Christian intertextuality as one of connectivity, examining the parallels as products of shared responses among discrete reading communities to Roman cityscapes.