In Front | Christians and Defilement

While early Christians did many things that conflicted with Roman society, it may be that nothing was more offensive about Christianity than its approach to defilement. Specifically, the Christian approach to corpse defilement deeply offended Greek and Roman sensibilities. 

Contact with the dead was considered defiling in Jewish, Greek and Roman society. Early Christians ignored these prohibitions. The early Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, describes the willingness of Christians during a plague to embrace the bodies of deceased loved ones:

With willing hands they raised the bodies of the saints to their bosoms; they closed their eyes and mouths, carried them on their shoulders and laid them out; they clung to them, embraced them, washed them, and wrapped them in grave-clothes.

For non-Christians this behavior was bizarre and unacceptable. The emperor Julian, who ruled in the 4th century AD, complained of Christians, “carrying … corpses of the dead through … great assembl(ies) of people, in the midst of dense crowds, staining the eyesight of all with ill-omened sights of the dead.” He asked, “What day so touched by death could be lucky? How, after being present at such ceremonies, could anyone approach the gods and their temples?”

Rather than accommodate prevailing attitudes toward defilement, the church doubled down on its disregard for matters of impurity. The Didascalia, an Early Church treatise that dates to the early 3rd century, says:

O bishops, and the rest, who without such observances touch the departed, ought not to think yourselves defiled … Neither the burial of a man, nor a dead man’s bone, nor a sepulcher, nor any particular sort of food, nor the nocturnal pollution, can defile the soul of man; but only impiety towards God, and transgression, and injustice towards one’s neighbor … Do not load yourselves again with something which our Lord and Savior has taken away from you.

Early Christians were convinced that the death and resurrection of Jesus broke down the old barriers between God and human imperfections and death. The idea of death defilement in its many forms became unthinkable for a community whose most basic conviction was that God became fully human and died.

Sources: Peter Brown, Cult of the Saints: Its rise and function in Latin Christianity, 1982, p. 7; Richard Rutherford, The Death of a Christian: The Rite of Funerals, 1989, p. 11.