Day Two

hello everyone!

We spent today in lecture with Prof. James Walters, and then at the Ephesus site museum with our guide Gingas (who was a museum curator and archaeologist at the site for approx. 40 years!). It was raining too hard to actually go to the site today, but we are going tomorrow--rain or shine. After spending the day looking at artifacts, I am so excited to walk through the site!!

But the site museum was amazing!! Gingas provided us with priceless insider details on the artifacts. I'm including a picture of the marble statue of Ephesian Artemis. Gingas gave us the latest theory on this statue, which for much of Christian history has been identified as the many-breasted Artemis and disparaged by Christian tradition as being a sexually-charged cult deity. Gingas challenged this hypothesis, offering a counter theory that indeed these bulbus-looking objects attached to Artemis are really bull testicles. If the wooden Artemis statue, which would have been carried in procession, were part of the sacrificial ritual (as is likely), then it is possible that these round objects were bull testicles, nailed to the wooden statue to celebrate or indicate fertility. Not sexuality, but fertility; a significant difference. For those of us in Early Christian scholarship, this theory is extremely helpful in thinking through the ways that the wooden processional statues functioned, as well as the ways in which pagan traditions have been caricatured by Christianity.

By the end of the day, the sun had finally come out! But without leaving us enough time to still visit the site. So we went back to the open-air market, which we also visited first thing this morning, before the lecture. I'm including a picture from there, as well.

Will post again soon.

Love, 

Krista