The Theodotos Inscription

In the winter of 1913–14, the French archaeologist Raymond Weill was excavating on the City of David ridge — the spur south of the Temple Mount that Josephus calls Mount Ophel — when his team uncovered a limestone block in a cistern fill, twenty-five inches by sixteen, inscribed in ten lines of formal Greek capitals. The block had been thrown into the cistern in antiquity, almost certainly during the Roman demolition of Jerusalem in AD 70. Its text reads: "Theodotos son of Vettenos, priest and head of the synagogue, son of a head of the synagogue and grandson of a head of the synagogue, built the synagogue for the reading of the Law and for the teaching of the commandments, and the hostel and the chambers and the water installations as a lodging for those needing them from abroad. The synagogue was founded by his fathers and the elders and Simonides." The inscription's stratigraphy and palaeography place it before AD 70 — the only securely pre-destruction synagogue inscription ever found in Jerusalem. The Vettenos family name is Latin, suggesting Theodotos descended from a Jewish freedman of the Roman gens Vettena; his trilingual heritage (Hebrew priestly office, Greek inscription, Latin family name) precisely matches the diaspora-Jewish profile of Acts 6:9, where the early Jerusalem church confronted opposition from "the synagogue of the Freedmen, as it was called, and of the Cyrenians, and of the Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia." The hostel and water installations — a pilgrim guesthouse with ritual baths attached — confirm the synagogue served Jewish travelers arriving in Jerusalem for the festivals. The Theodotos inscription is on permanent display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in the archaeology wing's Second Temple gallery. Sources: Raymond Weill, La Cité de David: Compte rendu des fouilles exécutées à Jérusalem (Paris, 1920); John Kloppenborg, "The Theodotos Synagogue Inscription and the Problem of First-Century Synagogue Buildings" (in Jesus and Archaeology, ed. James Charlesworth, Eerdmans, 2006); Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (Yale University Press, 2nd ed. 2005); Acts 6:9.