In 1626, workers took aim at four spots marked on the floor of the largest church in Christendom, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The structure’s immense dome hovered more than four hundred feet above them, for they stood at the intersection of the church’s nave and transept. They began to dig. These shafts, when eventually filled with masonry, would support a towering bronze tent (called a baldacchino) over the high altar. As shovels and picks hacked deep, the excavation took laborers back through layers of history. After breaking through the floor of the Renaissance church, they burrowed through the fill separating it from its fourth-century predecessor. They then cracked through that building’s pavement and struck an ancient cemetery (Fig. I.1). If authorities expected to find anyone’s remains, they were those of Peter himself or one of his papal successors, for they believed the key apostle and later popes were buried here.

Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Having established that God is the goal of belief, that God is physically visible in Jesus, and that physical sight can lead to belief, Chapter 6, ‘Seeing Jesus and Seeing God’, draws these three points together by asking whether John portrays visual encounters with Jesus as visual encounters with God. The chapter argues that the physical act of seeing Jesus is a necessary condition for seeing God in him despite the challenge that God emerges as most visible in Jesus’s most acutely human moments. Evidence for this position arises from exegesis of three passages in which Johannine characters see Jesus (John 6:19; 19:6; 20:14–29) as well as John’s account of the crucifixion as glorification (12:1–50; 19:28–37). The chapter closes by turning to the crucifixion and examining the profound irony of Jesus’s death as the high point of divine visibility in the Gospel.

Chapter 3, ‘God on Earth’, argues that, for John, Jesus’s body is the place where one may see God. It opens with John’s association of Jesus with the tabernacle and the temple, the most comprehensive descriptions of Jesus’s flesh and body in the Gospel, and asks whether one can read Jesus’s body as the literal ‘house of God.’ Evidence for this reading comes from an overview of Israelite and Early Jewish theologies that portray a God who can be in two places at once. John evidences a corresponding understanding of God’s dual presence in his association of the flesh and body of Jesus with the tabernacle and temple and in the Farewell Discourse. The chapter concludes that God can be on earth in Jesus’s body as well as in heaven.

Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.

In the Introduction, I referenced a coin minted under the emperor Titus (Fig. E.1). On one side appeared the figure of the emperor sitting amid a heap of weapons, a reference to his roles in the Jewish War, the capture of Jerusalem, and the construction of the building depicted on the coin’s opposite side, the Flavian Amphitheater. The coin adopts an unusual perspective, showing the Colosseum’s façade while also permitting a glimpse into the building. We spy the columns tracing the uppermost reaches of the interior and a few heads peeping out between them. Lower down two more rings of spectators are visible, the lower one pierced by an entrance and split into wedges by staircases. When we last examined the coin, we remarked about how only one individual appeared – the emperor – while everyone else was merely an undifferentiated head.

This chapter imagines Flavia’s experience of visiting Rome’s principal sanctuary of Isis, the Iseum Campense. It weighs the impact of the space’s architecture, artwork, and rituals and the community that Flavia found there.

This chapter traces the travels of Flavius’ sculpture from Rome, via Paris and New York, to Indianapolis. The artwork’s movements reflect changing historical tides, and also took on different meanings as it passed through each context and historical moment.

As part of an “object biography” of Flavius’ sculpture, this chapter traces reactions to its discovery and subsequent exhibition in the Palazzo Barberini, which raises issues related to the collecting of ancient art in Early Modern Rome and the sculpture’s role in presenting the Barberini family and its history to visitors to the palace.

This chapter takes stock of Flavius’ worldview as presented by his funerary ensemble, noting especially the close nexus of dining, death, and philosophy. Since Flavius’ outlook contrasts with Flavia’s potential beliefs as an adherent of Isis, the chapter assesses the phenomenon of “mixed marriages” in the Roman world.