June 13, 2008 - BiblePlaces.com

Earliest Church in Jordan

When a sensational but unsubstantiated archaeological discovery is reported, my inclination is to ignore it. Since the goal to gain headlines and popularity (and sometimes to stir up tourism), the best way to thwart the guilty is to not publicize their claim. As they know, all publicity is good publicity.

This doesn’t work very well when mainstream news sources carry the story and one gets multiple requests about the accuracy of the report. So I succumb.

The claim by Jordanian archaeologists that they have found the “earliest church” ever is the latest in an apparently on-going competition by archaeologists. According to everything I’ve read about it, there is no basis for this claim whatsoever. All evidence noted in the story runs counter to this claim.

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor says it well:

“Pushing the (date) back to the year 70 is very speculative. (The Jordanians) are desperate to create church sites (for tourism),” Father Murphy-O’Connor said. “I would be suspicious of this sort of hype.”

Be suspicious of archaeologists, pseudo-archaeologists, and government departments of tourism.

Tagged Analysis, Discoveries

2,000-Year-Old Palm Tree Now 4 Feet Tall

National Geographic has an update with a couple of photos. We mentioned this before here.

The oldest-sprouted seed in the world is a 2,000-year-old plant from Jerusalem, a new study confirms. “Methuselah,” a 4-foot-tall (1.2-meter-tall) ancestor of the modern date palm, is being grown at a protected laboratory in the Israeli capital. In 2005 the young plant was coaxed out of a seed recovered in 1963 from Masada, a fortress in present-day Israel where Jewish zealots killed themselves to avoid capture by the Romans in A.D. 70…. Methuselah beats out the previous oldest-seed record holder, a lotus tree grown from a 1,300-year-old seed in 1995 by Jane Shen-Miller, a botanist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues.

The Jerusalem Post has a similar story.