But there were, in all probability, other more direct, though not more powerful reasons, which led them to the choice of this mode of burial.  We read that the Saviour was buried—­at least, the phrase appears applicable to the whole account of his entombment ... “as the manner of the Jews is to bury.”  The Jewish population at Rome in the early imperial times was very large.  They clung, as Jews have clung wherever they have been scattered, to the memories and to the customs of their country,—­and that they retained their ancient mode of sepulture was curiously ascertained by Bosio, the first explorer of the catacombs.  In the year 1602, he discovered a catacomb on what is called Monte Verde,—­the southern extremity of the Janiculum, outside the walls of Rome, near to the Porta Portese.  This gate is in the Transtiberine district, and in this quarter of Rome the Jews dwelt.  The catacomb resembled in its general form and arrangements those which were of Christian origin;—­but here no Christian emblem was found.  On the contrary, the only emblems and articles that Bosio describes as having been seen were plainly of Jewish origin.  The seven-branched candlestick was painted on the wall; the word “Synagogue” was read on a portion of a broken inscription and the whole catacomb had an air of meanness and poverty which was appropriate to the condition of the mass of the Jews at Rome.  It seemed to be beyond doubt that it was a Jewish cemetery.  In the course of years, through the changes in the external condition and the cultivation of Monte Verde, the access to this catacomb has been lost.  Padre Marchi made ineffectual efforts a few years since to find an entrance to it, and Bosio’s account still remains the only one that exists concerning it.  Supposing the Jews to have followed this mode of interment at Rome, it would have been a strong motive for its adoption by the early Christians.  The first converts in Rome, as St. Paul’s Epistle shows, were, in great part, from among the Jews.  The Gentile and the Jewish Christians made one community, and the Gentiles adopted the manner of the Jews in placing their dead, “wrapped in linen cloths, in new tombs hewn out of the rock.”

Believing, then, the catacombs to have been begun within a few years after the first preaching of Christianity in Rome, there is abundant evidence to prove that their construction was continued during the time when the Church was persecuted or simply tolerated, and that they were extended during a considerable time after Christianity became the established creed of the empire.  Indeed, several catacombs now known were not begun until some time after Constantine’s conversion.[C] They continued to be used as burial-places certainly as late as the sixth century.  This use seems to have been given up at the time of the frequent desolation of the land around the walls of Rome by the incursions of barbarians, and the custom gradually discontinued was never resumed.  The catacombs then fell into neglect, were lost sight of, and their very existence was almost forgotten.  But during the first five hundred years of our era they were the burial-places of a smaller or greater portion of the citizens of Rome,—­and as not a single church of that time remains, they are, and contain in themselves, the most important monuments that exist of the Christian history of Rome for all that long period.