{"id":1120,"date":"2010-07-18T08:46:14","date_gmt":"2010-07-18T08:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bibleandculture\/2010\/07\/lands-of-the-bible-2010--inside-the-cave-churches.html"},"modified":"2010-07-18T08:46:14","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T08:46:14","slug":"lands-of-the-bible-2010-inside-the-cave-churches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2010\/07\/lands-of-the-bible-2010-inside-the-cave-churches.html","title":{"rendered":"Lands of the Bible 2010– Inside The Cave Churches"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\"Bble<\/a><\/span>One of the more fascinating aspects of Capadoccia is of course the cave churches, and when I say cave churches,  you should not think primitive.  I mean elaborately carved, painted, decorated churches in caves. This practice of course began when the church had to go underground quite literally due to persecution but it continued thereafter into modernity.  Here are some of my pictures of these cave churches, mostly from the high Byzantine period.  As you would expect, what you find is the saints honored by the Orthodox tradition, as well as various Biblical figures. One of the more interesting aspects of the whole thing is the way John the Baptist (complete with wings since he is the angellos or messenger who came before the face of the Lord) is treated as a Christian saint.
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One of the more fascinating aspects of Capadoccia is of course the cave churches, and when I say cave churches,  you should not think primitive.  I mean elaborately carved, painted, decorated churches in caves. This practice of course began when the church had to go underground quite literally due to persecution but it continued thereafter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nLands of the Bible 2010- Inside The Cave Churches - The Bible and Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2010\/07\/lands-of-the-bible-2010-inside-the-cave-churches.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lands of the Bible 2010- Inside The Cave Churches - The Bible and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the more fascinating aspects of Capadoccia is of course the cave churches, and when I say cave churches,  you should not think primitive.  I mean elaborately carved, painted, decorated churches in caves. 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A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has also taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell. A popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings not only in the United States but also in England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has also led tours to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Witherington has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Beliefnet website. Along with many interviews on radio networks across the country, Witherington has been seen on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/author\/bwitherington"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}