By Patricia Reaney
London - Jewish customs may have influenced Christian burial in ancient Roman catacombs, Dutch scientists said on Wednesday.
The famous catacombs of Rome, both Jewish and Christian, were thought to have dated from between the third to fifth centuries AD. But researchers from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands have discovered that the Jewish Villa Torlonia catacomb predated its Christian counterpart by 100 years.
"We believe the Jewish catacombs are older than the Christian ones and therefore might have influenced the supposedly typically Christian idea of burial in catacombs," Professor Leonard Rutgers, an expert in late antiquity and Jewish studies at the university, said in an interview.
The finding, reported in the science journal Nature, raises questions about the extent to which Judaism has influenced Christianity.
"The work we did in the Jewish catacombs gives us further confirmation for the theory that the Jewish roots of Christianity are quite tangible and quite important," Rutgers said.
Rutgers and his team used radiocarbon dating to determine the age of wood from the Villa Torlonia.
"This evidence indicates that the Villa Torlonia catacomb came into use in the second century AD, a century before the building of the earliest Christian catacombs started," the scientists said in the journal.
They know that the Villa Torlonia was a Jewish catacomb by the wall paintings depicting the seven-branch candelabra and inscriptions, which refer to the synagogue, that have survived, according to Rutgers.
He and his team estimate the upper and lower catacombs range in age from 50 BC to 400 AD.
Historians have known that there was a Jewish community in Rome in the first century BC but were puzzled about where they had buried their dead.
"Now with these data we can actually argue that they (the catacombs) might have been first century AD or even first century BC," Rutgers said.