The period of travelling at the end of Paul’s third missionary journey appears uneventful, until a moment of miraculous grace suddenly breaks in. The death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost form the spiritual backdrop to the gathering at Troas, where the church is growing and a young man is saved from death. 

For the Renaissance designers of the tapestry and the engraving in this exhibition, the cultural backdrop, the Graeco-Roman world of the first Christian communities, was equally inspiring.

The tapestry was designed by Antwerp master and humanist scholar Pieter Coecke van Aelst during the 1530s, while translating the architectural treatises of the Roman Vitruvius (Cleland 2014: 86–90). Coecke’s version of the Troas house church is a textbook exercise in the Ionic order, a perfectly proportioned edifice of coloured marble more like a Renaissance Italian church than the inconspicuous three-storey townhouse described in Acts (20:8–9). Its well-ordered symmetry reflects a cosmos built by a rational, omniscient, and all-loving creator. Against this background, we see the broken body of Eutychus restored to wholeness and perfect order by Paul’s embrace and the life-giving fire of the Holy Spirit. 

A generation later, Jan van der Straet attempts a reconstruction of the architectural and social layout of the meeting house. The design closely matches the description of church ordering in the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, which had recently been published in Venice. Here we read: ‘In the middle let the bishop’s throne be placed, and on each side of him let the presbytery sit down; … And let the women sit by themselves, they also keeping silence’ (Apostolic Constitutions 2.7). The preacher’s seat is at the centre of the meeting room, as in many Reformed churches of the artist’s own time.

The Constitutions go on to address the question of behaviour in church: ‘let the deacon oversee the people, that nobody may whisper, nor slumber …; for all ought in the church to [have] their attention fixed upon the word of the Lord’ (2.7). In the fourth-century church, as in the time of the book of Acts, weekly meetings appear to have taken place on the evening of Sunday, which was then a working day (‘the first day of the week’; v.7), and often late into the night: drowsiness must have been a common nuisance. 

Sunday evening preaching was still putting young churchgoers to the test 1800 years after the writing of Acts, when John Everett Millais painted My Second Sermon. The traditional conflation of physical failings with moral ones must have caused young Christians agonies of shame, but the seventeen-year-old Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux, writing in 1890, took a more pragmatic view. ‘I ought to be very upset that I fall asleep during my prayers’, she wrote. ‘Well, I don’t feel upset. I just think that little children are as dear to their parents when they are asleep as when they are awake ….  After all, “The Lord knows our weakness; he remembers that we are but dust [Psalm 103:13–14]”’. (Thérèse 1911: 132).

While restoring the young life of Eutychus, Paul was well aware of his own impending death as he moved towards Jerusalem and imprisonment (Acts 20:23). This story of a fatal accident and Paul’s life-restoring intervention are a reminder that, in the light of the resurrection, death has been conquered (1 Corinthians 15).

Like Christ, Paul teaches with authority and heals a young person who is ‘not dead but sleeping’ (Mark 5:39). He hurries downstairs to save Eutychus then returns to the gathering to finish the night’s business. While the community gathered above is celebrating Christ’s rising to eternal life, the boy outside slowly revives. Although Paul has already effected the healing, he leaves its conclusion to other members of the congregation (Acts 20:11–12).

In these visual representations of the church at Troas, we see how those many different members knit together to form one body. We see the preaching and healing apostle, the presbyters presiding at the gathering, men carrying a share of their goods to their poorer brothers and sisters, the solicitous women praying and nurturing children, the deacons keeping order, and little children learning from Christ, Paul, and their followers what it is to be fully human and fully loved.

References

Cleland, Elizabeth A. H. (ed.). 2014. Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Donaldson, James (trans.). 1885. ‘Constitutions of the Holy Apostles’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Edinburgh: T&T Clark)

Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus et de la Sainte Face. 1911. Histoire d'une âme écrite par elle-même (Paris: Librairie Saint-Paul)