From Synagogue to Church: The Traditional Design

Its Beginning, its Definition, its End

John Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317832423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The designs of synagogues and churches are acknowledged to be very alike. But the designers' procedure was confidential, and so far standard explanations have been unsatisfactory. A synagogue should express heavenly values with earthly materials. This combination was in fact expressed in numbers, for, as Plato said, they linked heaven and earth. Scripture described both the Jewish Tabernacle and Temple with a wealth of numbers. Proportions based on these numbers were used to design synagogues.
Only a few Jewish documents survive, but they reveal a symbolism, which Christians sometimes repeat. The synagogue sanctuary was designed to contain the 'Holy Ark', and the mosaic floors reveal the point 'Before the Ark' for the prayers and readings. These places faced each other, with the idea that God was facing his people. The synagogue was seen as facing heaven and in church buildings Christians repeated the same proportions. This was a joint tradition among Jews and Christians. It was easy to design, was carried out secretly and accurately, and - without a computer - was extremely hard to unravel. This book, for the first time, does just that.

CHAPTER ONE

The Shape of the Question

This is a book about the traditional plans of ancient synagogues and churches. Some of these plans are so like each other, that they may well have been laid out according to some kind of rule. But the precise nature of this rule has remained a secret. Even an experienced archaeologist like Professor Cyril Mango has asked the following question:

Early Byzantine basilicas can be noble buildings, as any visitor to, say, S. Apollinare in Classe will attest. When seen in quantity, however, they produce an impression of monotony, of a readymade uniformity. One cannot help wondering why this particular type of building should have maintained itself so long, in so many widely-scattered provinces, and, basically, with so little variation.¹

But this question is of wider concern. Travelling round England I can see dozens of medieval churches with one height of roof for the sanctuary and another height for the nave. Was there in fact any rule deciding how to divide these spaces?

I believe that I have now revealed the nature of this rule. This achievement is not, I hasten to say, by greater agility of reasoning, but by happening to be the first person to have used a computer to deal with this problem.

The beginning of my discovery was as follows. According to ancient documents synagogue and church design depended on the heavenly Temple,² and the Temple in Jerusalem was based on the heavenly Temple. So I began looking for some parallels in their shape and proportions. The trouble about finding proportions in buildings is that it is so complicated. To begin the game of hunt-the-thimble a child hides the thimble – a simple act like choosing a proportion. But when the other children come in, to find the thimble, they have to search the whole room, which may take some time. So to find all the possible proportions of a church, and to ask whether they have parallels in the Temple – which has over seventy proportions – quickly becomes excruciatingly boring.

And yet of course this is precisely the kind of problem which suits computers. When I had eventually compiled a computer program,³ I found not only that I was spared most of the boring details but that I was working fast enough to deal with many more churches, and to produce more positive answers. I began to have a new vision of the characteristics of design.

Based on these characteristics, this book gives the traditional rules for the design of early synagogues and churches. These rules arise from the belief that human beings might imitate the temple in heaven. It is based on two sets of data.

One set of data is a collection of ancient documents. There are no ancient manuals for designing synagogues or churches. Indeed the way synagogues and churches were laid out was a professional secret, so most documents dealt with it only indirectly and it was a subject about which a designer would only speak to his fellow designers or his superiors. Extracts from the main documents are printed in the second half of this book.

I find that I have quoted very few commentaries on these ancient documents. Since this book happens to be the first to reveal the secret of design, most of the main questions in this book have not seemed important to previous commentators.

The other set of data is the range of proportions in which the synagogues or churches are parallel with the Temple, or with some other scriptural model. I have had to devise for myself some standards of measurement. These are set out in Appendix 1. In other appendices there are samples of over forty ancient synagogues and over seventy churches. These are mathematically analysed to demonstrate that use of scriptural proportions was regular. But it would be tiresome to readers to increase the number of examples or to give more tables of figures. The original Apple computer program is available from the publisher, and if you wish to identify scriptural proportions it would save you time.

This chapter first gives an outline of the book, and then goes on to ask about the past. Why exactly has the design process of holy buildings been kept secret? And when and how was the word basilica connected with the church? Then it will examine the beliefs of two of my present colleagues, Dr Doron Chen on the design of synagogues, and Professor Peter Kidson, one of my teachers, on the design of churches.

Chapter 2 presents a problem. Everyone can see a new synagogue or church, but ancient Jews and Christians believed that the heavenly Temple was invisible. Is the proposal that visible buildings are imitations of this invisible Temple? This might well be nonsense. But ancient platonic philosophers dealt in these terms, and knew exactly how to deal with this problem. Sight was not, in their view, essential. And those who believed in the Holy Scriptures knew of at least two scriptural imitations of the heavenly Temple. Chapter 2 is about platonism, and since these two imitations were measured in cubits, platonists regarded the numbers of these measurements as of great importance. So if a designer wished to build a synagogue or a church he might well use these scriptural numbers.⁴

The next chapter examines the scriptural accounts of the Tabernacle and the Temples in Jerusalem. These were historically the central shrines of Judaism, and were a rich source of symbolism.⁵ Much of this symbolism is shared by the synagogue. The fourth chapter studies the ritual of the sabbath service,⁶ emphasising the duty of the whole of creation to worship God.⁷

The Scriptures record God as occasionally commanding men to make objects, like the Tabernacle, the Temple, or the Ark of the Covenant. He sometimes included the measurements of the objects, and hence their proportions. But I have found that all forty synagogues that I have measured are proportioned like the objects which God required men to make, particularly the Temple in the vision of the Prophet Ezekiel. The synagogues, stretch from the Herodian period to 800 AD. Their proportions are no coincidence, since they particularly apply to the most important places, namely where the Ark is set down, and where the leader prays and reads.⁸ Synagogue decorations and mosaic floors fit very well with this interpretation.⁹ So for platonist Jews the ancient synagogues are a fulfilment of scripture. They regarded the numbers of the measurements as an extremely important truth about the objects which God had commanded Israel to make. They thus regarded building synagogues as similar to Moses making the Tabernacle.

After this analysis of synagogues we shall examine churches. There are some informal house-churches, but most of the early remains of churches are lost. But at the beginning of the fourth century, when the formal Christian churches come into view, their design seems to follow the same rules as for synagogues. For churches we have additional evidence from the services of Laying the Foundations and Dedication.¹⁰ The ritual of the first part of Eucharist has many parallels with the synagogue service, and likewise the same scriptural proportions are used in the church building as in the synagogue.¹¹ In the second part of the Eucharist the main innovation is the altar, but even the interpretation of this owes a great deal to the Judaic context of the New Testament.¹²

This conventional layout which I have found in both synagogues and churches, I have called ‘the traditional design’. It starts from the earliest synagogue whose plan we can measure, and continues, possibly without exception, to churches which were built in 800 AD. When does it end? At different times in different countries. But in England Salisbury Cathedral is certainly traditional. In contrast most of Sir Christopher Wren’s churches are in a new style, legally defined by the Church of England.¹³

Jews have never described the way they design a new synagogue. They inherited a practice of keeping this subject secret, since it had to do with God’s creation of the universe, and ‘The Chariot’, that is, Ezekiel’s description of the place where God dwelt. Christians heard from Jews that there was some kind of secrecy. In the third century AD Origen described a secular love-poem which had somehow found its way into Holy Scripture, the Song of Songs. He starts out by saying that it was not advisable for young people to read it:

I advise and warn everyone who still has the lusts of flesh and blood, and has not yet escaped the desires of material nature, to refrain entirely from reading this book or from its contents. A Hebrew custom, they say, is that if anyone has not yet reached a mature adult age, he is not even allowed to hold this book in his hands.¹⁴

This passage is about a book which might otherwise cause lustful thoughts. But, as he continues, Origen points to another kind of restriction:

I have also learned from them this fact: that even though they have a practice of allowing educated and wise pupils to read Scriptures of all kinds, those Scriptures they call ‘secondaries’ are kept to the end. These consist in four books: the beg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Documents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 The Shape of the Question
• 2 The Philosophy
• 3 God-Given Buildings
• 4 Synagogues and their Liturgy
• 5 Heaven and Earth
• 6 Synagogue Proportions
• 7 The Mosaic Floors of Synagogues
• 8 Christian Dedication Services
• 9 The First Part of the Eucharist
• 10 The Second Part of the Eucharist
• 11 The End of the Tradition
• Documents
• Appendices
• Chronological List of Sources
• Bibliography and Abbreviations
• Synagogue Sample Plans
• Church Sample Plans
• Scripture Index
• Index of Sources
• General Index