Theodotos fils de Vettenus

Origins and early life

Theodotos son of Vettenus is known from a single object: a Greek dedicatory inscription on a limestone block found in 1913 by Raymond Weill in a cistern on the Ophel, in the City of David at Jerusalem, and dated on palaeographic grounds to the period before the destruction of the Temple in the year 70. In it he names himself priest and archisynagogos, head of the synagogue, son of an archisynagogos and grandson of an archisynagogos, recording three generations of the same office in one Jewish family.

Work and career

He states that he built the synagogue for the reading of the Law and the teaching of the commandments, and that he added a hostel with rooms and water installations for the lodging of those who come from abroad and need them. That formula is the earliest direct evidence anywhere of what a synagogue was for: not a substitute Temple but a house of reading and teaching, standing in Jerusalem within sight of the Temple itself and serving pilgrims of the Greek-speaking diaspora.

The stone is the oldest archaeological attestation of a synagogue building yet found, and it is now in the Israel Museum. Nothing else is known about the man, and this fiche says so plainly: his name and his father's suggest a family with Roman connections, possibly freedmen of the gens Vettena, but the inscription is all the evidence there is, and it is his own words.