In the second century that great father of the Church, bishop and martyr, Irenaeus, not only vouched for it, but gave his approval to the belief that the soul of Lot's wife still lingered in the statue, giving it a sort of organic life: thus virtually began in the Church that amazing development of the legend which we shall see taking various forms through the Middle Ages—the story that the salt statue exercised certain physical functions which in these more delicate days can not be alluded to save under cover of a dead language.
This addition to the legend, which in these signs of life, as in other things, is developed almost exactly on the same lines with the legend of the Niobe statue in the rock of Mount Sipylos and with the legends of human beings transformed into boulders in various mythologies, was for centuries regarded as an additional confirmation of revealed truth.
In the third century the myth burst into still richer bloom in a poem long ascribed to Tertullian. In this poem more miraculous characteristics of the statue are revealed. It could not be washed away by rains; it could not be overthrown by winds; any wound made upon it was miraculously healed; and the earlier statements as to its physical functions were amplified in sonorous Latin verse.
With this appeared a new legend regarding the Dead Sea; it became universally believed, and we find it repeated throughout the whole medieval period, that the bitumen could only he dissolved by such fluids as in the processes of animated nature came from the statue.
The legend thus amplified we shall find dwelt upon by pious travellers and monkish chroniclers for hundreds of years: so it came to be more and more treasured by the universal Church, and held more and more firmly—"always, everywhere, and by all."
In the two following centuries we have an overwhelming mass of additional authority for the belief that the very statue of salt into which Lot's wife was transformed was still existing. In the fourth, the continuance of the statue was vouched for by St. Silvia, who visited the place: though she could not see it, she was told by the Bishop of Segor that it had been there some time before, and she concluded that it had been temporarily covered by the sea. In both the fourth and fifth centuries such great doctors in the Church as St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Cyril of Jerusalem agreed in this belief and statement; hence it was, doubtless, that the Hebrew word which is translated in the authorized English version "pillar," was translated in the Vulgate, which the majority of Christians believe virtually inspired, by the word "statue"; we shall find this fact insisted upon by theologians arguing in behalf of the statue, as a result and monument of the miracle, for over fourteen hundred years afterward.(430)
(430) See Josephus, Antiquities, book i, chap. xi; Epist. I; Cyril
Hieros, Catech., xix; Chrysostom, Hom. XVIII, XLIV, in Genes.; Irenaeus,
lib. iv, c. xxxi, of his Heresies, edition Oxon., 1702. For St. Silvia,
see S. Silviae Aquitanae Peregrinatio ad Loca Sancta, Romae, 1887, p.
55; also edition of 1885, p. 25. For recent translation, see Pilgrimage
of St. Silvia, p. 28, in publications of Palestine Text Society for
1891. For legends of signs of continued life in boulders and stones
into which human beings have been transformed for sin, see Karl Bartsch,
Sage, etc., vol. ii, pp. 420 et seq.
About the middle of the sixth century Antoninus Martyr visited the Dead Sea region and described it, but curiously reversed a simple truth in these words: "Nor do sticks or straws float there, nor can a man swim, but whatever is cast into it sinks to the bottom." As to the statue of Lot's wife, he threw doubt upon its miraculous renewal, but testified that it was still standing.
In the seventh century the Targum of Jerusalem not only testified that the salt pillar at Usdum was once Lot's wife, but declared that she must retain that form until the general resurrection. In the seventh century too, Bishop Arculf travelled to the Dead Sea, and his work was added to the treasures of the Church. He greatly develops the legend, and especially that part of it given by Josephus. The bitumen that floats upon the sea "resembles gold and the form of a bull or camel"; "birds can not live near it"; and "the very beautiful apples" which grow there, when plucked, "burn and are reduced to ashes, and smoke as if they were still burning."
In the eighth century the Venerable Bede takes these statements of Arculf and his predecessors, binds them together in his work on The Holy Places, and gives the whole mass of myths and legends an enormous impulse.(431)