Pagan Graveyard

With the beginning of the NHL hockey season I haven't had time to do much blogging, but hopefully I'll get back into it soon.

I just read an interesting article at the MSNBC website about a pagan graveyard that has been dug up at the Vatican. It's a good article, but this comment doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence in the author's knowledge of history:

The Necropoli dell'Autoparco (literally Necropolis of the Parking Garage), a
2,000-year-old burial ground, which opens to the public Oct. 20, offers a rarely
seen glimpse of the close ties between pagans and Christians during the Augustan
era (23 B.C.-14 A.D.).

While it is quite true that the reign of Augustus ended in 14 A.D., I don't think there were very many Christians around at the time with whom pagans could have "close ties." I couldn't help but think that the author of this article, Barbie Nadeau, is trying to push the idea that this is suggestive of the "pagan roots" of Catholicism a little bit further than it can reasonably be pushed. This is not to say that Catholicism -- and Christianity as a whole, for that matter -- does not have significant pagan influences evident from very early in it's history. As uncomfortable as many Christians are with admitting this, no one who has seriously studied early Christian history would deny that this is the case. But I don't think this graveyard attests to that at all.

Whatever, it's still an interesting story.