Cave under church may be oldest Christian worship site
An outside expert expressed caution about the claim.
Archaeologist Abdel-Qader Hussein, head of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, said the cave was unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab and shows evidence of early Christian rituals.
The cave is under St Georgeous Church, built in AD 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 the underground cave was used as a church by 70 disciples of Jesus in the first century after Christ’s death, making it the oldest Christian site of worship in the world. He described a circular worship area with stone seats separated from a living area with a tunnel leading to a water source. 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 AD.”
Parker asked how archeologists could be certain the “cave was actually a centre of Christian worship”.
He said mosaics are hard to date unless there is a precise date in the text of the inscriptions and typical mosaic inscriptions with Christian themes are from the 5th to 6th century.
