Subject: tc-list Church Buildings

From: CLeM Croll <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 05:15:24 EST

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>From Charles Croll 

Vinton A. Dearing wrote:

> This is not a tc question but perhaps listers can help me answer it:
> when and where was the first Christian church built (a question posed
> by an attendant at my church)? The earliest I can find reference to
> was on Sion in Jerusalem when Hadrian visited the city in 130
> (Clemens Kopp, The Holy Places of the Gospels, p. 323). What the
> questioner was asking for was a church not in someone's house but I
> suppose that a building converted to a church would qualify.
>    Vinton Dearing.

I am certainly no expert in this field, but I offer this as being perhaps of
some interest. In 1972 I was taking some time out to travel overland to Israel
and passed through Antakya in what is now southern Turkey. This is the old
Syrian Antioch of biblical days where believers where first called Christians.
I was taken to a large cave there which is locally reputed to have been the
first dedicated christian meeting place and was at that time still being used
as such by some local Orthodox christians. I doubt if there is more to prove
that than local legends, which undoubtedly go back a long way, but it
interested me at the time.

Charles Croll
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