This post is the continuing series of articles about the historic stones in the Cathedral, written by Senior Guide Tom Fedorek.– RM
Set in the floor in front of the high altar of St. John the Divine is a salmon-colored marble slab, fourteen inches square, known as the Ephesus Tile. Surrounding the stone, this inscription:
Whosoever shall have prayed at this spot will have pressed with his feet a tile from the ancient church of St. John the Divine at Ephesus built by the Emperor Justinian in the year DXL over the traditional site of St. John’s grave.
The Ephesus Tile is the most ancient of the Cathedral’s historic stones and, due to its association with the Cathedral’s patron, the most precious. Because the area around the high altar is not open to the public, visitors never see the Ephesus Tile, and even many regular congregants are unaware of its existence.
This article tells of the stone’s origins and its journey from the ancient city of Ephesus to New York City.
St. John and Ephesus
In the first century, Ephesus (now Selçuk in Izmir, Türkiye) was the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire after Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. It was the principal city in Asia Minor (now the Anatolia region of Türkiye) and the biggest and busiest seaport in the eastern Mediterranean – a multicultural, multilingual crossroads of trade routes.
Ephesus was the New York City of the Roman Empire – that is, New York as it was in the days when its waterfront bristled with cargo-laden wharves and bustled with longshoremen and stevedores (a living memory for this writer). The following passage from the Revelation of St. John the Divine vividly describes the sights that its author would have seen on the piers of the city’s harbor:
… gold and silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, silk, and scarlet, scented wood … ivory and bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spices, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, human souls. (Rev. 18:12-13).
Ephesus was the site of the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Built in 340 BCE, it was one of the largest temples of antiquity, with a length of 350 feet and marble columns that soared to a height of 60 feet. (One might say it was the Cathedral of St. John the Divine of the Roman Empire.) When the apostle Paul visited Ephesus, he provoked a riot by preaching that “gods made by human hands are not gods,” thus incurring the wrath of the silversmiths who ran a brisk trade selling small shrines to temple tourists (Acts 19:23-41).
John, the author of Revelation, was almost certainly an Ephesian, by either birth or adoption. Historian Elaine Pagels suggests that he was a Judean who emigrated to Ephesus after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. He was steeped in the writings of the Old Testament prophets; more than half of Revelation’s 404 verses quote or refer to them.
By his own account, John wrote Revelation while exiled by Roman authorities to the Aegean island of Patmos, about 70 miles off the coast of Ephesus. On the Cathedral’s west front, we see him gazing upward to the apocalyptic visions he experienced on Patmos, while holding his pen at the ready to record them.
John addressed Revelation to the Christian communities of seven cities in western Asia Minor, beginning with Ephesus, praising and admonishing each in turn. He was evidently a leading figure in Asia Minor’s Christian community for he appears to be personally familiar with each of the seven churches.
At four places in Revelation, he identifies himself as John without providing any other qualifying information. From this, New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger concludes: “… it is probable that the author intends his readers to understand that he is the John, who was so well known that he needed no titles or credentials.” Given John’s apparent celebrity, it is plausible that his tomb in Ephesus would become a shrine.
We shall leave it to the academics to hash out the question of whether the author of Revelation was the same John as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and the author of the fourth gospel and the three Johannine epistles. In the second century, St. Justin Martyr declared that they were all one and the same person. The church has followed Justin ever since, venerating St. John in all his aspects on his feast day, December 27. Some modern scholars think otherwise, such as Raymond Brown, who probably speaks for many when he writes that Revelation was “written by a Jewish Christian prophet named John who was neither John the son of Zebedee nor the writer of the Johannine gospel or of the Epistles.”
John died in Ephesus and was buried there. Or was he? The Golden Legend, a widely-read thirteenth-century compilation of the miracles of the saints, recounts a story about the death of St. John that circulated for centuries.
The story has it that John, at age 98, had a vision of Jesus and the apostles summoning him to heaven. The following Sunday, John gathered his followers at the church in Ephesus that had been built in his honor. There he preached his final sermon.
Then he had them dig a square grave near the altar and throw the earth outside the church. He went down into the grave and, with arms outstretched to God, said, “Lord Jesus Christ, you have called me to your feast: here I am, and I thank you for deigning to invite me to your table. You know that I have longed for you with all my heart!” When he had said this, he was surrounded by light so brilliant that he was lost to human sight.
Giotto’s fresco imagines the moment of John’s assumption into heaven. The artist injects a touch of gentle humor at the confusion of the onlookers – two of whom gape dumbfounded into the empty grave while another strokes his chin in bewilderment.
There is yet another narrative that the saint lying in the tomb is not dead but asleep. Clive Foss’s history of Ephesus quotes the memoir of Jordanus Catalanus, a fourteenth-century visitor to the tomb: “… from hour to hour, a very loud sound is heard, as of a man snoring.”
The Basilica of St. John
Whether empty or occupied, the tomb of St. John has long been a destination for pilgrims. According to Foss, the tomb “was revered well before the conversion of Constantine [312 CE].” Soon after that date, a small shrine was built over the tomb. It was replaced around 450 by a much larger church three hundred feet in length with a cruciform plan of four arms radiating from the shrine of the saint. A century later, the Emperor Justinian replaced it with an even larger basilica.
Justinian (482-565) was a prolific developer of churches, roads, bridges, and aqueducts throughout the Byzantine Empire. Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia is the best-known of the forty-eight churches commissioned by Justinian.
The new basilica was cruciform like the previous church, but with a western arm double the length of the old one, expanded north and south arms, and an apse extended eastward. Barrel vaults and six domes replaced the peaked roof of the earlier structure – four circular domes above the crossing and the east, north, and south arms, and two elliptical domes above the extended west arm. Massive marble columns supported the domes, while the rest of the structure was mainly brick.
According to ancient historian Bettany Hughes, the basilica was built of “choice building fragments from the old Temple,” that is, the Temple of Artemis, which had been destroyed by an earthquake and a fire in 262 CE. Its marble was subsequently salvaged for other buildings.
The image above is a digital reconstruction of the basilica’s interior by Mieke Pfarr-Harfst of the Technical University of Darmstadt. Note the baldachin over the shrine and the iconostasis standing before it. According to Foss, all the interior surfaces were covered with mosaics and frescos. As you look at the digital reconstruction, try to imagine it filled with the multisensory experience of Byzantine liturgy – mosaics shimmering in the flickering light from oil lamps, chants echoing through the reverberant space, clouds of aromatic incense billowing upward to the domes.
By the fourteenth century, the basilica had become a mosque. In the latter half of that century, earthquakes toppled the arches and domes. Beginning in the nineteenth century, extensive archaeological investigation made the site accessible for modern pilgrims and tourists. A partial reconstruction of the baldachin now designates the location of what is believed to be John’s grave.
The Ephesus Tile Arrives
How did a fragment of Justinian’s basilica (and possibly of the Temple of Artemis) wind up in New York City? For this we can thank Frederick Joseph Kinsman.
Kinsman was an assisting priest at the Cathedral in 1905-08, years when the Cathedral was under construction with services conducted in the crypt’s bygone Tiffany Chapel. He taught at the School for Deaconesses in St. Faith’s House (now Diocesan House) and served on the building committee headed by Rev. William Reed Huntington. In that capacity, Kinsman advised sculptor Gutzon Borglum on the period-appropriate vestments for the twenty figures at the entrance to St. Columba’s Chapel.
In the summer of 1905, Kinsman traveled to Asia Minor in what was then known as the Ottoman Empire. Kinsman’s autobiography, Salve Mater, recounts that he “spent the early days of July exploring the hills and ruins of Ephesus.” There, he encountered Austrian archaeologist Georg Weber, an authority on ancient Ephesus.
According to correspondence recorded in the minutes of the Cathedral’s Committee on the Fabric, Weber gave Kinsman two stones from the ruins of the Basilica of St. John: the marble stone now known as the Ephesus Tile and a brick from one of the basilica’s vaulted arches. Weber marked each stone as authentic.
Kinsman donated the stones to the Cathedral in 1909. By this time, he had been consecrated as the Bishop of Delaware. He held that position until 1920 when he resigned to join the Roman Catholic Church. His autobiography details the reasons for his conversion. He spent the rest of his career teaching church history at Catholic University of America.
Huntington wrote the inscription for the stone. According to Kinsman’s account: “The drafting of an inscription for this was the last work done by Dr. Huntington for the Cathedral. He dictated a letter to me about it the day before his death.”
Christians of all major communions – Roman, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox – still visit the tomb of St. John and the ruins of ancient Ephesus. How fitting that a fragment of that sacred site should now reside in a cathedral that ministers to the multicultural, multilingual crossroads that is New York City.
Sincere thanks to diocesan archivist Wayne Kempton for access to the papers of the Committee on the Fabric.
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Sources:
Brown, Raymond E., An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997) ● Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Committee on the Fabric, Minutes, March 22, 1909. ● Foss, Clive, Ephesus after Antiquity: A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) ● Hughes, Bettany, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (New York: Vintage Books, 2024) ● Kinsman, Frederick Joseph, Salve Mater (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1922) ● Krautheimer, Richard, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986) ● Metzger, Bruce M., Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993) ● Pagels, Elaine, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012) ● Procopius, Buildings (Loeb Classical Library), H.B. Dewing, translator (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940) ● Voragine, Jacobus de, The Golden Legend, Christopher Stace, translator (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).