If ‘first church’ dating is correct …

Theories of Christian origins get thrown in a cocked hat.

Jordanian archaeologists are claiming they have found a church that dates back to the purported lifedate of Jesus himself.

“We have uncovered what we believe to be the first church in the world, dating from 33 AD to 70 AD,” the head of Jordan’s Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, Abdul Qader al-Husan, said.

He said it was uncovered under Saint Georgeous Church, which itself dates back to 230 AD, in Rihab in northern Jordan near the Syrian border.

“We have evidence to believe this church sheltered the early Christians — the 70 disciples of Jesus Christ,” Husan said.

These Christians, who are described in a mosaic as “the 70 beloved by God and Divine,” are said to have fled persecution in Jerusalem and founded churches in northern Jordan, Husan added.

Before we let fundies go all ga-ga, a couple of caveats.

One, Jordanian archaeologists are surely seeing American tourist dollar signs in their eyeballs. I want more research, and by other archaeologists, before I come close to accepting those dates for this church.

Two, what if they’re correct?

For Jesus’ followers to be big enough to have had one subgroup of them big enough to start a church in 33 AD, the moment of Jesus’ death would have had to been long before that.

And that’s not just SocraticGadfly, atheist, speaking.

Per religious sociologist Rodney Stark, a 40 percent growth rate per decade for Christianity, with nothing more miraculous than that, would have gotten Christianity from a population of 1,000 in the year 50 to a slight majority in the Roman Empire at the time of the Council of Nicaea. (Stark gets the 40 percent growth rate from the 160-plus year history of the Mormons, bolstered by observations of the shorter history of the Moonies.)

Backtrack that 40 percent two decades from 50 AD and you have 500 faithful (ironic coincidence with Paul’s statement in I Corinthians 15 about resurrection appearances) in the year 30.

Take the book of Acts as having a grain or two of fact, that early Christians had some sort of diaspora beyond Jerusalem. Would there have been enough of them to have started a church in an out-of-the-way part of today’s Jordan?

I say no.

So, either the Jordanians are trying to blow smoke up tourists’ skirts, or else Christianity started earlier than the Christian Bible’s accounts claim. That, then, means either dates for Jesus’ life are wrong or he didn’t exist.

Beyond the fact that Yeshua bar Yusuf may not have existed, the rest of the story makes clear that the Jordanian archaeological institute is peddling a boatload of early Christian myth.