Nice carving. I'm not sure the crosspiece on the staff makes it a cross, but perhaps. I'd have to see other contemporary Christian art.
Pinging SunkenCiv, just FYI.
Posted on 12/29/2012 2:05:01 PM PST by george76
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a buried Christian empire in the highlands of Yemen, leading to theories that there may have once been a church in Mecca.
A stone carving of a Christian figure was found in Zafar, some 581 miles south of Mecca, and is thought to have been made in the era of the Prophet Muhammad.
Paul Yule, an archaeologist from Heidelberg in Germany, has dated the 5feet 7inch tall relief which shows a man with chains of jewellery, curls and spherical eyes to around 530AD.
...
The figure is barefoot, which was typical of Coptic saints. He is holding a bundle of twigs, a symbol of peace, in his left hand, and there is a crossbar on his staff, making it look like a cross.
The crown on his head is similar to the ones worn by the Christian rulers of ancient Ethiopia, reported ABC News.
All this led Mr Yule to believe that the man was a descendant of conquerors from Africa who came to the region in 525AD to spread Christianity.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Was there a church in Mecca? Chiselled stonework with Christian figure discovered at holy site in Yemen
If it was holding a symbol of peace, then we know it has nothing to do with the warring piggod of the cult of islam.
in the era of the Prophet Muhammadin the error of Muhammad
Nice carving. I'm not sure the crosspiece on the staff makes it a cross, but perhaps. I'd have to see other contemporary Christian art.
Pinging SunkenCiv, just FYI.
Before being replaced by a violent replacement cult of Islam that is.
Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570 AD. Two hundred years earlier Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Mecca was at the edge of the Empire. Yes, there were Christian churches there. There were synagogues there too, as well as pagan temples (which is what the Kaaba in Mecca was before Muhammad conquered Mecca).
I’m sure there was a Church in Mecca—as the spread of Christianity in the 7th Century was remarkable, even in Arabia, until it was literally snuffed out by the sword of Mohammed.
Of course the great news is, there IS a Church, even now, in Mecca... (even though the Saudi’s don’t know where it is, and deny it exists...)
There they go again. Don’t they know that this will incite violence?
It is fairly clear that their “prophet” (or at least the people who wrote it all down)...did have some contact with Christians and Jews, albeit they got a very distorted version of the Biblical faiths. We do know that there were types of Christian churches in the 200-600’s or so that either did not believe Jesus was a material (real) person, but rather just a spiritual entity that only appeared human..(so there there was nobody to die on any cross)...and there were a few more odd (to us, anyway) versions..... the Church Councils in the 300-600 years discussed all that stuff and, as we know, decided on the “fully Divine, fully human” formula (the latter part meaning that he really did die on the cross after all).
If we look at where these variant versions were most popular, it was mostly in Egypt and Syria (and trans-caucasia). These are the regions closest to Arabia, and also areas where there was frequent contact vis-a-vis the Arabian desert region.
So, (from my limited knowledge, anyway) it would both seem possible and indeed make sense, stand to reason....
as it would have placed a non-orthodox (what we now call a heretical) variant of Christianity in the region where the authors of their Koran resided.
It would make sense that Christians were in Mecca before the demon visited Mohammed in a cave and convinced him that a minor pagan moon god was the same God as Yahweh/Jehovah. Its too bad that they weren’t more successful. The history of humanity would have been much more peaceful if the locals had laid hands on Mohammed and removed his demons rather than taking up arms and following him to battle.
Mecca could have been Rome and Medina Paris and not the current camel litter boxes infested with benighted bloodthirsty barbarians as they are today.
The upper right has the Icthus Cross with the fish as the crossbar, tail on left.
This is a common misconception. The Edict of Milan was granted by Emperor Constantine in the West and Licinius Augustus in the East in 313 granting religious freedom throughout the Roman Empire. In addition, the Edict of Milan ordered the restitution of property confiscated from Christians.
Christianity had to wait many years later under a different emperor to become the official religion of the empire.
Regardless, there were lots of Christians and Jews living in Mecca when Mo was born.
Agreed. It is generally recognized that Mohammed cobbled his new religion together from information about Christianity he received from a relative of his wife (who was a monk belonging to a heretical sect), some things he knew about Judaism, and native pagan beliefs.
“as it would have placed a non-orthodox (what we now call a heretical) variant of Christianity in the region where the authors of their Koran resided.”
This is my understanding as well after reading a couple of books calling into question the actual historicity of Mohammad himself.
Got thrown out of a facebook forum because I dared to suggest that Mo never existed!
He was nothing but a murderous sand pirate with delusions of spiritual grandeur.
As to Mecca, it is not quite fair to describe the pre-Mohammedan Kaaba as a pagan temple. It was a focus of Arab unity and had areas devoted to the worship of all the Arab tribe in the area, including both Jewish and Christian tribes. Yes, most of its floor and wall space were devoted to pagan cults, but that is not the whole story.
There is a tradition passed down among Arab Christians that when Mohammed destroyed all the pagan idols in the Kaaba, he found Torah scrolls, which he returned to their Jewish Arab owners, and he also found icons of Christ and the Theotokos, which he did not destroy, but allowed to remain in the Kaaba along the the meteorite fragment his followers associate with Abraham.
Please henceforth get your Imperial and Church history straight: St. Constantine (we Orthodox honor both him and his mother St. Helen with the title “Isapostolos” usually Englished as “Equal-to-the-Apostles”) did not make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. He joined his co-Emperor in legalizing Christianity and moved the capital to a city which was consciously built as a Christian city (Constantinople, or New Rome as he called it, had no pagan temples, but many Christian churches). From edict of Milan in 313 until the proclamation of (Nicene) Christianity as the state religion of the Empire in 380 by St. Theodosius, the Empire had no state religion, which Christianity, Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism all being religio licita (though the latter two came under increasing restrictions during that period — the reign of Julian the Apostate, when Christianity was again persecuted excepted).
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