c. 1997 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ A craggy limestone rock revered as the resting place of the Virgin Mary on her journey to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus has been uncovered amid a newly discovered ancient Byzantine church, archaeologists announced Sunday (Nov. 9).

The Church of the Kathisma _ the”seat,”in Greek _ is mentioned in early Christian sources and was a pilgrimage site for Christians as early as the 5th century A.D., said Yuval Baruch, an archaeologist for the Israeli Antiquities Authority who co-directed the dig that uncovered the rock and the church surrounding the revered site.

Forgotten for hundreds of years, the church and the rock were finally identified in the past month during excavations triggered by a request to install water supply lines for contractors working on the controversial Jerusalem area settlement of Har Homa.”We have known that there were antiquities here for a number of years,”said Baruch.”But archaeologically, what we have found is a sensation. It is rare to excavate a site that can both be identified with certainty, and which is linked to a historical story.” According to early church tradition, Mary was enroute to Bethlehem with Joseph when she stopped near the rock, feeling unwell. Joseph left her to rest and continued on to find shelter in the town for the night, and then returned to fetch his wife.

The octagonal church that has emerged in view is the largest example of an eight-sided Byzantine structure in the Holy Land, Baruch said. It measures 173 feet long and 143 feet wide, and is centered around the revered rock, which measures about six feet in diameter.

The protrusion of the rock, a few inches above the still-preserved mosaic floor, reflects the preservation of the stone as a holy site, Baruch said. The eight-sided design, moreover, was a style reserved for sacred spaces.

Surrounding Mary’s”seat”is a flat plaza bordered by large corner pilasters and two octagonal rings: The interior ring served as a walkway (ambulatoria) from which worshippers could view the stone seat. The outer ring was divided into small chapels, or apses. Between the chapels on the east stood a larger apse, or chapel, with a raised prayer platform. Mosaic floors paved the chambers of the church. And a large monastery, still unexcavated, stood to the south.

Some of the floor mosaics of palm trees and grape clusters, uncovered nearly intact, are unlike anything seen before in the Holy Land, Baruch said. “They are of a color and design that has never been found in the land of Israel, at least not on mosaic floors,”he said.”I don’t know if it was the fantasy of a local artist or an imported design. We are still studying it.” The excavation, on land belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church, has already received the blessing of the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Deodorus I.

On Sunday (Nov. 9), the patriarch visited the site and labeled it a”great discovery with historical, religious and ethnic significance.” But while tourists and pilgrims have already begun spontaneously streaming to the site, which sits in an olive grove just along the main highway from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the site has not officially been opened to the public _ and it is not clear if it will be in the near future, said Baruch.”Right now, the plans are to cover it all back up again merely in order to preserve the site from further degradation,”he said.”Preservation and exposition of the site to the public will require an investment of large sums, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no one has yet proposed to fund such renovation.” Still, if private or government funds can be found for the site’s development, the church complex could develop into an important pilgrimage site for tourists who are expected to arrive in the Holy Land to celebrate the turn of the millennium, said Baruch. He also said the plan to run water lines through the area will, of course, be shelved.”There is a whole series of churches and monasteries along the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem which were used by pilgrims as rest places along the way,”he said.”But this would be the most important among them.” Baruch said the Church of the Kathisma is believed to have been constructed with a donation from the Christian widow Iqilia in the mid-5th century. This was a period in which the Holy Land’s Byzantine rulers were deeply engaged in the identification of sites associated with Jesus and his family that had already been established in religious and folk tradition.

Churches were then typically built to memorialize the location.

MJP END FLETCHER