Earliest church found at Megiddo
“The god-loving Keptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.”
Pious artwork from the hands of an artist named Brutius graces the floor of the Christian prayer hall at Megiddo. Four mosaic panels—one on each side of what must have been a Eucharist table—are bordered with black and white tesserae and decorated with rosettes, rhombuses (parallelograms), geometric shapes (tessellations) and frames with a guilloche pattern.
The southern panel, adorned with a carpet of rosettes, has two inscriptions. The northern panel also has an inscription and has an octagon surrounded by geometric shapes, including a meander (labyrinth), stars, a shield, a checkerboard, flowers and a three-dimensional prism, which encloses a medallion picturing a bass and a tuna—a clear visual reference to Jesus.
In the middle of the floor, under the center of a proposed arch, are two rectangular stones that most likely were the feet of the Eucharist table, or trapeza.
The inscriptions are in Greek and date to the third century based on their paleographic characteristics. The inscription at the top of the northern panel is dedicated to Gaianus, the centurion who paid for the floor to be paved with mosaics. It reads, “Gaianus, also called Porphyrius, centurion, our brother, has made the pavement at his own expense as an act of liberality. Brutius has carried out the work.”
The inscription on the eastern side of the southern panel is called the “Women Inscription” because it asks for remembrance of “Primilla and Cyriaca and Dorothea, and moreover also Chreste.”
The most important part of the floor, and the one that makes it undeniably part of a Christian place of worship, is the inscription on the western side of the southern panel, which is dedicated to “the God-loving Akeptous,” who “offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.” The table probably refers to the Eucharist table, and the text uses language such as the word mnemosynon for “remember,” which was not common to the time but is frequently used in the New Testament, and prosferein for “offer,” which is also used in the Gospels. The name for Jesus Christ is abbreviated using only the first and last letters and is delineated as a sacred name by a line placed above it, a practice that was typical of a later period; this is the earliest known example of it.
Vassilios Tzaferis, “Inscribed ‘To God Jesus Christ’,” BAR 33-02, Mar-Apr 2007.
See also-
- NY Times- Israeli Prisoners Dig Their Way to Early Christianity
- The Megiddo Expedition
- Biblical Megiddo
- Back to Megiddo, Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin, BAR 20-01, Jan-Feb 1994.
- Horned Altar from Megiddo, 1000-900 BCE
- Bronze Soldier from Megiddo
- Shoshenq Megiddo Fragment
- Tepper, Yotam and Leah Di Segni, A Christian Prayer Hall of the Third Century CE at Kefar ‘Othnay (Legio)- Excavations at the Megiddo Prison 2005. Jerusalem- Israel Antiquities Authority, 2006.