Holy Ash Heaps
Marlin Connelly
10/1/97
Holy Ash Heaps
After the middle ages, just outside the old city of Jerusalem, north of where the temple once stood, there were the
Holy Ash Heaps. Tradition said they were the remains of ashes dumped from the millions of animal sacrifices once offered at the temple. During those centuries, the ashes became a kind of holy relic linking the present with the biblical past. A steady stream of pilgrims visited the heaps to fill boxes or vials with some of those leftovers from the temple.
During the nineteenth century, however, as new buildings sprang up outside the old city walls, builders began to expropriate the ashes for the making of cements. By 1900 the heaps had disappeared, but not before archaeological tests had shown them to be not ancient, but only the rubbish of a long-forgotten soap factory.
Through the centuries there accumulated in the environs of Christendom a heap of practices and beliefs which do not date back to the days of the apostles. And although these might be revered as ancient and holy, they are not the remains of First-Century Christianity. Going back to the Bible helps one to see the difference between genuine doctrines of the apostolic church and latter soap factory ashes. Let us speak where the Bible speaks and be silent where the Bible is silent.
If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.
—
Marlin Connelly
