I was reading on Thursday an article in the Envoy magazine. Envoy is a very informative Catholic magazine. You can read more about it at the link I posted above. The article I read was in their most recent issue and it struck me as extremely interesting. In it a priest was talking about a discussion he had with an archeologist at his parish. What the archeologist told him of Christian burials was as follows:
The archeologist said that in his field of archeology they could often date an area of dig in and around Italy by whether they found graves sites of young children. If they did they could be pretty sure that the area had been influenced by Christianity. Since there were often good records in many places indicating when Christianity came to various parts of the Roman Empire this was an excellent way of dating a new excavation. If they did not find such graves, then the pagan practices of treating very young children (I think it was 2 years and above, but I am not positive) as less than human was still the prevailing custom. In other words, one effecting of the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ was to establish, in theory and practice, that babies were fully human with an invaluable dignity worthy of respect.
The Priest in the Envoy article did some research on what the archeologist had told him. He discovered that in Christian burial sites in and around Kellis something entirely different was discovered: the burial of infants and even fetuses. The burial of fetuses is of considerable interest for our understanding of early Christian concepts of the nature of status of the unborn children, and of the entrance of the soul into the body. The fetuses were individually wrapped with same attention that was paid to the orientation within the grave, implying, therefore, the expectation of resurrection. Fetuses have been discovered as young as 14 weeks.
What this means is that with the conversation to Christianity came as new found respect for human life at all stages of development. Thanks for reading this post. I hope you found it as interesting as I certainly did. Love to all!
~Rose