부산대학교 도서관

In an essay of 1957 S. Mazzarino stressed the importance of the history of Roman church between Commodus’principalities and Severus Alexander’s one as the key event of the process of the democratization of culture: in particular he focused his attention on the pontificate of pope Callixtus who after the defeat of his enemy Hippolytus proponed a real “open” church community, not intolerant, inclined to forgiveness and to reintegratio. This kind of church was a sort of Noah’s ark « in which there were dogs, wolfes, ravens and all clean and unclean animals ». All in all it was an egalitarian process that may be checked in Christian funerary inscriptions of the first half of the IIIrd century; differentely from the coeval pagan epigraphic praxis there is no reference to retrospective events of life: on the funerary incriptions there is only the name of the dead, even for bishops. This “new” praxis may constantely be verified in the original nuclei of the cemeteries of Callixtus, Domitilla, Praetextatus, Priscilla, Novatianus, Calepodius, Maius: therefore it was a widespread practice that made all people equal before death without any reference to social, economic, cultural differences. So a strong ideological connotation emerges that seems to be inspired by the strict position of Paulus expressed in Gal. 3, 28 and Col. 3, 11.