10. Borrowed Verse and Broken Narrative: Agency, Identity, and the (Bethesda) Sarcophagus of Bassa

Abstract

Sometime in the late fourth century, a young woman named Bassa was laid to rest in the Catacomb of Praetextatus near the Appian Way, roughly two kilometres outside Rome’s Aurelian walls. Bassa’s marble sarcophagus – ravaged and scattered in time by vandalism and landslide but reassembled in the early twentieth century (Figure 10.1) – now stands in the handbooks as an (anomalous) example of the socalled Bethesda type. Thirteen other representatives of this sarcophagus group are currently known and each of these thirteen, as far as can be determined, presents the same five New Testament scenes in the same order. In every case, as illustrated by well-preserved examples from the Vatican cemetery and the Cathedral of Tarragona (figs. 2 and 3), a central tableau arranged in two registers portrays (at least in its upper half) an episode from the Gospel of John in which Jesus heals a paralytic at Jerusalem’s pool of Bethesda (Jn 5.1–9). On either side of this central panel appear four other standard scenes, two on each side, and these also reference