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Archaeologists in Jordan have discovered a cave underneath one of the world’s oldest churches and say it may have been an even more ancient site of Christian worship.
An outside expert expressed caution about the claim.
Archaeologist Abdel-Qader Hussein, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, said this week that the cave was unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and shows evidence of early Christian rituals.
The cave is under St. Georgeous Church, built in A.D. 230, making it one of the oldest churches in the world, along with one unearthed in the Jordanian southern port of Aqaba in 1998 and another in Israel discovered in 2005.
Hussein said there was evidence that the underground cave was used as a church by 70 disciples of Jesus in the first century after Christ’s death, which would make it the oldest Christian site of worship in the world.
He described a circular worship area with stone seats separated from a living area that had a long tunnel leading to a source of water. He said the early Christians hid there from persecution.
A mosaic inscription on the floor of the later church of St. Georgeous above refers to “the 70 beloved by God and the divine” who founded the worship there.
Thomas Parker, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Raleigh, who led the team that discovered the church in Aqaba, said that while he hadn’t seen the Rihab site, any such claim should be taken with a degree of caution.
“An extraordinary claim like this requires extraordinary evidence,” he said. “We need to see the artifacts and dating evidence to suggest such an occupation in the 1st century A.D.”
Parker asked how archeologists could be certain whether the “cave was actually a center of Christian worship.”
The archaeologist also noted that mosaics are difficult to date unless there is a precise date in the text of the mosaic inscriptions themselves and typical mosaic inscriptions with Christian themes are from the 5th to 6th century.
“It’s quite possible that there was a cave with earlier occupation which was later converted to Christian use. But to make the jump that this was actually used by Christians fleeing Jerusalem in the 1st century A.D. seems like a stretch to me,” Parker said.
Archimandrite Nektarious, Bishop Deputy of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in Amman hailed the discovery, calling it an “important milestone for Christians all around the world and right here at home.”
“It confirms that Christians in this region are not strangers,” he said. “They are real citizens who have always had roots in this region from those days until the present.”
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Unlike the order of monks founded by The Buddha, Jesus Christ left behind a bunch of disciples that did not evolve into a Church order till much later.
Discovery of this cave below an old church (St. Georgeous Church) claimed to have been built in A.D. 230, places the older cave church in 1 century AD, itself.
A church over a church, actually suggests the victor establishing his place of worship over a vanquished one.
Interestingly, “the 70 beloved by God and the divine” finds a mention in ‘a mosaic inscription on the floor of the later church of St. Georgeous’.
While the St Georgeous Church survived the ravages of time, which included the rivalry that the rise of Islam and Christianity witnessed in the area as well as the ‘crusades’, how come neither the Christians never made a determined bid to reclaim one of their oldest places of worship.
Its just possible that the cave might have been a more primitive place of ritual worship that was destroyed by the Christians and a Church was build over it, much like what Islam did centuries later.
To ascribe to the claim that this is the oldest place of worship of Christians, discovered till date, would be premature till more authenticated facts validate the claim.