World’s First Church Found?

• Dave
  June 12th, 2008 at 7:37 am

  Not to pick nits, but this cave isn’t a “church” any more than the house I live in is a “family”. The church, strictly speaking, is the people, not the building where they meet.

• Ira
  June 12th, 2008 at 8:25 am

  Really, Dave? Sounds exactly like nitpicking to me.

• ted
  June 12th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

  Yeah, that’s nitpicking.
  Let’s face it: the word “church” does mean both the building and the congregation.

  And the article does say “the oldest site of Christian worship”.

• Lenore
  June 12th, 2008 at 6:04 pm

  Linking to less biased article (e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7446812.stm) would have been preferable. There are some more photos here:
  http://www.monstersandcritics.com/science/features/article_1410384.php  /In_photos_Jordan_Archeology_-_oldest_Christian_church_in_the_world?p age=9

• Vickie
  June 12th, 2008 at 9:50 pm

  The first century believers did not worship in “church” buildings. They met in the homes of other believers (as mentioned many times in the Book of Acts). The Christian Church as a place came much later. I’d be interested to hear the results of the date testing.

• Moon
  June 13th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

  Any chance we can get them to go BACK underground?

• prophet
  June 14th, 2008 at 9:11 am

  At that time a term like “church” didn’t even exist. It could be pagan also.

• Otis Beard
  June 15th, 2008 at 3:36 am

  I have to wonder how rigorously they determined it was a Christian church rather some other kind of church, especially when they refer to it as possibly being “the first church in the world” as though no other religions existed before Christianity.

  Worshippers of Dionysus, Mithra, and Osiris all believed that their god lived as an earthly human, was born of a virgin, turned water into wine at a wedding, was violently martyred in order to redeem humanity, rose from the dead after three days, etc. etc. There are even iconic depictions of Dionysus showing him nailed to a cross in exactly the same posture commonly used for Jesus, with the knees together and the legs turned to one side.

  A reputable, unbiased, decently-educated archeologist would probably be aware of all this and be able to tell the difference… but I can see how some fundie dickhead who thinks evolution is a sham and who is working from an agenda to spread his delusions to the rest of us might well ignore or even be ignorant of the possibility of this being a temple of Dionysus. Or Mithra. Or Osiris.

  Meh, religion. If there was a button that could be pushed to make all true believers of every religion on the planet disintegrate into their component atoms, you’d have to kill me to stop me from pushing it at my very earliest opportunity.

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