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Goddess worship persisted in Christian homes, dig finds

Three centuries after the birth of Christianity, at least one wealthy family in the town on Sussita, on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee, was still adorning its home with images of goddesses.

Archeologists from the University of Haifa in Israel and Concordia University in Minnesota discovered a wall painting of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune.

They also found a figure of a maenad, one of the female companions of the wine and fertility god Dionysus.

"It is interesting to see that although the private residence in which two goddesses were found was in existence during the Byzantine period, when Christianity negated and eradicated idolatrous cults, one can still find clear evidence of earlier beliefs," Prof. Arthur Segal and Dr. Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology said in a release....
Read entire article at USA Today