What's "The Image that Fell from Heaven" (Acts 19:35)?
It might be sitting in storage in the Liverpool Museums
At the time of the earliest Christians in Ephesus, the city clerk refers to a “Zeus-fallen image,” exclaiming, “People of Ephesus! What person is there who doesn’t know that the city of the Ephesians is the temple guardian of the great Artemis, and of the image that fell from heaven?” (Acts 19:35, emphasis added).
What did this clerk mean by “the image that fell from heaven”?
He’s possibly referencing an artifact once housed in the Ephesian temple of Artemis, then excavated by the British Museum, and now locked in storage as part of the Liverpool Museums’ collection.
Artemis silver workers cause a disturbance in Ephesus (Acts 19:21–41)
The apostle Paul despised the gods these silver workers sought to honor, though he was careful never to blaspheme them. Instead, he contrasted the idols with the uncreated creator of the universe and found them wanting because they were “made with hands” (19:26 NASB).
Paul, Priscilla, Aquila, and others who did gospel work in Ephesus for several years saw so much ministry success that, as Luke records it, their work cut into the profits of those who made such idols. The craftsmen, upset by their economic loss and led by a fellow worker named Demetrius, rushed into the city theater, which held about 25,000 people, and chanted their opposition for two hours.
Luke describes the result—the city clerk delivers the speech I mentioned earlier. In it he credits the city of Ephesus with being the guardian of “the image that fell from heaven” (v. 35 CSB). That phrase is how translators usually render two Greek words (τοῦ διοπετοῦς) into English (see CSB, NASB, NIV). But the KJV translates it as “the image that fell down from Jupiter.” That’s because the Greek word that Luke used actually bears the name “Dio”or “Zeus” (Roman, “Jupiter”). In other words, the city was the keeper of the “Zeus-fallen.”
Zeus was Artemis’s father. And Ephesus was Artemis’s natal city as well as the home of her great temple—one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
So what exactly was the clerk referencing when he mentioned that which was “Zeus-fallen” (διοπετοῦς)? An artifact that traces its provenance through the British Museum and Cambridge University presents us with an intriguing possibility.
British archaeologists used to dominate in Ephesus
In the 1860s, the British Museum funded excavations in many ancient sites, including Ephesus. Their support made it possible for archaeologist John Turtle Wood in 1869 to discover the location of the Ephesian Artemis’s ancient temple. Eventually, the Austrians took over the excavation. But many British archaeologists stayed with the work they’d started.
About eighty-five years ago, a British archeologist and classics scholar named Arthur Bernard Cook, (Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, 1940), described an object from Ephesus that he learned about from his fellow researcher—Sir William Ridgeway. The latter told him a member of the consular service at Smyrna (which is about as far from Ephesus as Fort Worth is from Dallas) found a remarkable artifact along with “arrow-heads and other items from Ephesos.”[1]
Initial interpretations said it looked like a god
Sir William saw the piece as a great example of an aniconic—a symbolic (rather than literal)— deity. And although he intended to publish his opinion, he died in the late 1920s before he could do so. But his daughter and the then-president of Queen’s College, Cambridge, where the piece was held, passed it along to Cook.[2] He analyzed it and said it was a sacred stone thought to be endowed with life or access to a deity, most commonly Zeus. Sometimes ancient people believed such stones were meteorites and dedicated to a god or revered as a symbol of the god him- or herself.
Cook dated the decoration on this piece to 2000 BC, noting its size as 6.25 inches high, and describing it as being of “dull green stone.” He believed it had been “facetted and inlaid with tin,” with the sort of faceting that occurred “sporadically throughout central Europe towards the end of the stone age.”[3] From his observations he drew a couple of startling conclusions: First, he saw in it a human-like form:
The really remarkable thing about our pounder is the arrangement of its decoration, which transforms the neolithic tool into a quasihuman shape. The head is surmounted by a conical tin cap, secured by three tags or tenons of tin, any one of which might suggest a nose. The shoulders are covered by a broad tin cape. The waist is represented by a deep groove. Below this is a double belt of tin. Lower down, the facetted surface looks like folds of drapery encircled by a tin band, from which hang four pairs of tin pendants symmetrically placed. Finally, at the foot, opposite each pendant is a hole for the insertion of a stud, perhaps of amber or vitreous paste. In short, we may venture to recognise a primitive idol comparable with the bottle-shaped goddesses figured on coins of Asia Minor.
But more significantly, it had an important link to Ephesus:
It is therefore tempting to compare this humanised pounder with the “Zeusfallen” image of Artemis Ephesia. And all the more so, when we learn that, by an impressive coincidence, the pounder actually came from Ephesos. [4]
Others said it wasn’t an idol, but headgear
About three decades later, in 1952 a British numismatologist (expert in coins), Charles Seltman, proposed an interpretation of the “Zeus-fallen” wording in the biblical book of Acts. Instead of referring to a cult statue, Seltman proposed the piece was actually a “small, additional object—perhaps a Neolithic artifact—which was also sacred and housed in the temple.”[5]
Seltman regarded the temple-shaped headgear of several images as “representations of a small shrine, replicas of which were made by the silversmith such as Demetrios, in which such an object would be housed.”[6] In his view, the piece was not a depiction of the goddess herself, but rather something she wore on top of her head.[7]
So, the piece was not actually from the sky
Eight years after Seltman did his work, Kenneth Oakley, an anthropologist, paleontologist, and geologist who dated fossils and collaborated with the British Museum, learned that Cook had sold this primitive piece from Ephesus to the City of Liverpool Museums.[8] So Oakley asked the British Museum’s Natural History department to analyze it.[9]
The British Museum’s Keeper of Mineralogy at the time confirmed immediately that the piece did not come from the heavens; rather, it was terrestrial schist—a greenish rock composed of mineral grains that can be easily split into plates or flakes. Subsequently, Oakley learned that someone at Cambridge had already made the same determination.
Further, Oakley noticed the figure was inset with four pairs of tin pendants, symmetrically shaped.[10] To him it seemed the piece’s shape looked similar to objects of worship resembling ancient Neolithic implements often supposed to have fallen from the sky. Oakley concluded, “It is therefore tempting to compare this humanized pounder with the ‘Zeus fallen’ image of Artemis Ephesia” mentioned in the book of Acts.[11]
Writing for Folklore, Oakley recounted how an archaeology professor at Cambridge had hypothesized that the diopet was preserved in the temple of Artemis throughout ancient times until the conversion of the Roman world to Christianity, after which the cult of Artemis petered out and the temple fell into decay. Further, Oakley recounted how one “late Miss Elaine Tankard, while Keeper of Archaeology in the Liverpool Museums, made an interesting suggestion as to how the Diopet was placed in the shrine. She said it would have fitted perfectly if worn in the crown of the statue of Artemis as this appears in existing replicas.”[12]
Oakley felt it was by “impressive coincidence” that “the pounder actually came from Ephesos.”[13] Thus, Oakley’s narrative and findings aligned with Seltman’s proposal that the diopet of Acts referred not to a statue but rather to a small, Neolithic, sacred artifact housed in Artemis’s temple, having been part of her statue’s head gear.
A scholar doing research more recently, Lynn LiDonnici, looked more closely at the head-gear hypothesis and concurred with Seltman:
Seltman regarded the temple-shaped headgear of several images of Artemis Ephesia as representations of a small shrine (replicas of which were made by the silversmith Demetrios) in which such an object would be housed. This is an interesting possibility, especially since it explains the mysterious change to masculine gender for adjectives modifying της μεγάλης ‘Αρτέμιδος (“the great Artemis”).[14]
Additionally, she felt, the evenly placed pairs of tin pendants may provide clues as to the identity of Artemis Ephesia’s so-called breasts—they were perhaps shapes borrowed from the diopet.
Was the clerk in Ephesus referring to this very artifact?
When researching my book Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the NT (IVP Academic, 2023), I contacted the Liverpool Museums to verify that the artifact was in their possession. They confirmed that indeed it was (and is) still there. Two experts in their employ even offered to take a photo of it for me (see above). And yes, the museum still has the piece labeled as the “Diopet of Ephesus.”
I suspect it’s the real deal. It was found in Artemis’s temple in Ephesus and has good documentation by credible experts. But even if the piece in the Liverpool Museums’ possession is not actually the diopet, the Zeus-fallen, mentioned in the book of Acts, it certainly affords readers of the New Testament more than an intriguing possibility. It also provides us with a range of options for what the city clerk of Ephesus could have meant when he referred to Ephesus as guarding an image that he and his compatriots believed to be of extra-terrestrial origin.
[1] Arthur B. Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 900. (Spellings of the city vary.)
[2] Cook, Zeus, 900, fn. 3.
[3] Cook, Zeus, 898.
[4] Cook, Zeus, 899–900.
[5] Charles Seltman, “The Wardrobe of Artemis,” Numismatic Chronicle 6, no. 12 (1952): 33–44.
[6] Seltman, “Wardrobe of Artemis,” 33–44.
[7] Seltman, “Wardrobe of Artemis,” 33–44.
[8] Seltman, “Wardrobe of Artemis,” 33–44.
[9] Margaret Warhurst, “The Danson Bequest and Merseyside County Museums,” Archaeological Reports 24 (1977–1978): 85–88.
[10]Margaret Warhurst, “The Danson Bequest and Merseyside County Museums,” Archaeological Reports 24 (1977–1978): 85–88.
[11] K. P. Oakley, “The Diopet of Ephesus,” Folklore 82, no. 3 (1971): 207–11.
[12] Oakley, “Diopet of Ephesus,” 207.
[13] Oakley, “Diopet of Ephesus,” 209.
[14] Lynn LiDionnici, “The Images of Artemis Ephesia,” Harvard Theological Review 85, no. 4 (1992): 395, fn. 27.