Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: The “Frantic Passion For Purple”: Ancient Fashion, Snails, And The Advance Of The Gospel
Author: Michael A. G. Haykin

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 4

The “Frantic Passion For Purple”:
Ancient Fashion, Snails, And The Advance Of The Gospel

Michael A. G. Haykin

Michael A. G. Haykin is chair and professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies at Southern.

When I took what was called Church History I and Church History II in 1974–1975, the normal year-long survey of church history given to first-year theology students, I do not recall hearing anything about clothing and fashion. Yes, there was much about the “big” names in church history — Athanasius and Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin — but nothing about clothing. After all, surely God is not really interested in what we wear and what we put on our bodies? And even if he was, how does that have any bearing on the history of the church?

Now, the answer to that first question is an easy one. Yes, ever since God clothed our first parents after the Fall, he has been interested in what we use to cover our nakedness (see, for example, 1 Tim. 2:9). The answer to the second question is more complex, as shown by the following mini-history of the color purple.

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 5

Making Ancient Tyrian Purple

Purple was a highly prized color in the Old Testament world of the ancient Near East, where it was associated with royalty and prestige and power.1 In part, purple was so highly valued because obtaining it entailed monumental difficulties. According to the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the best purple dye in the ancient Near East was manufactured at the Phoenician city of Tyre.2 The raw material out of which this dye was manufactured was obtained from the glandular secretion — or tears, as the Christian commentator Isidore of Seville poetically put it3— of a carnivorous sea snail, which contemporary science knows as the Murex bandaris. Somewhere around twelve thousand of these snails had to be harvested from the sea to produce merely 0.05 of an ounce of dye.4 A foul stench emanated from the Phoenician factories manufacturing the dye, which were understandably placed on the outskirts of the city. Tyrian purple, as it was known, was literally worth more than its weight in gold, and purple-dyed fabrics commanded exorbitant prices. As Pliny noted of ancient fashion, “it adds radiance to every garment,” and this led to what he called a “frantic passion for purp...