Cave inscriptions reveal how early Christians evangelized natives on Caribbean island

Suzette Gutierrez Cachila Thursday, July 21, 2016

Inscriptions found in a cave on a Caribbean island give clues as to how Christians shared the message of the gospel to the island's inhabitants despite the language and cultural barriers.

Playa Pajaros, Mona Island, Puerto Rico. The road down to the only existing housing at Mona Island leads to the staging and docking areas for the restoration workers, Summer 1997. | Wikimedia Commons/Erik Zobrist, NOAA Restoration Center

The drawings, discovered in Mona Island by archaeologists from the University of Leicester and the British Museum, showed how Europeans communicated to the local inhabitants regarding spiritual truths.

Mona Island, which is no longer inhabited, lies about 40 miles west of Puerto Rico. It has an intensive cave system composed of about 200 caves. Of these, 70 have been explored by archaeologists, who reported seeing various figures drawn on the cave walls using fingernails or sharp-edged tools.

"These finger-fluted designs reflect the spiritual beliefs of the indigenous people," Jago Cooper from the British Museum said, according to National Geographic.

Archaeologists also found more than 30 inscriptions of Spanish and Latin phrases. One of the inscriptions read, "God forgive you." Another one said, "God made many things."

A Latin inscription was lifted from the Vulgate and quoted a text from John 1:14: "And the Word was made flesh [and dwelt among us]."

Some of the inscriptions were abbreviations of the name of Jesus. Drawings of Christian crosses were also found.

"What we are seeing in this Caribbean cave is something different," Alice Samson from the University of Leicester said, according to The Guardian. "This is not zealous missionaries coming with their burning crosses, they are people engaging with a new spiritual realm and we get individual responses in the cave and it is not automatically erasure, it is engagement."

The names of the persons who wrote the inscriptions were also found on the cave walls. One of the names was that of Francisco Alegre, a Spaniard from Puerto Rico who was in charge of several royal estates including the island.

The discovery is "truly extraordinary," according to Cooper. He said the drawings and inscriptions were "proof" that early Europeans had an encounter with an indigenous worldview.

As reported in the journal Antiquity, the researchers said the spiritual encounters documented in the cave give a new insight about "intercultural religious dynamics in the early Americas."