More to the point, however, was that they inherited the use of incense from the Jews (most of the early Christians were Jews), who used incense in the sacrifices carried out at the Temple in Jerusalem. If you read the regulations for these sacrifices in the book of Leviticus, you will get some idea of why they needed clouds of incense -- the smell must have been horrendous, and not like a barbecue, either.
This explanation may have some merit, but, as I remember it from the Talmud, the incense was a separate offering, brought at a separate altar and at a particular time of day. To my understanding, the animals weren't stacked in dead heaps, but slaughtered and offered. Legally, it was impermissible to derive any pleasure from the fragrance of the incense (which, if you like frankincense, was fragrant, indeed). In any event, they would never have been permitted to rot, as this would have made an unfitting offering. Moreover, the sacrifices were either completely burned (the "holocaust") or eaten, either by the person offering it, or by a priest, depending upon the kind of sacrifice being brought. The blood-and there was a lot of it-was drained off through a pipe that led to the Hinim Valley, below the eastern slope of the Temple Mount. (This is the site of the gates of Hell I mentioned in another post-hell is called "gehinim" in Hebrew. The valley is still called the Hinim Valley, and there is a road sign pointing there on a major thoroughfare below the south-eastern corner of the Old City.) At the end of the pipe, the blood was gathered and sold as fertilizer.
Since there is apparently neither oil or natural gas worth mentioning in Israel, I suspect that the many years of soil pollution by sacrifices can have produced methane in this one spot. Sound reasonable?
Not likely, after over 2000 years. However, the valley between Mt. Zion and the Temple Mount was filled over the centuries-by rubble, when the town was sacked, and by garbage. The latter was intentional: the way the place of the Western Wall (*not* a part of the Temple) was discovered was that people specifically brought their garbage to dump there as a gesture of their dislike of Jews. I would think the methane would more likely have resulted from this long history of refuse disposal (and sewerage which, and I am guessing, would likely have been piped there) than from old sacrifices that were never left to rot in the first place.
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On another matter entirely, but for the sake of not depleting our dwindling reservoir of posts, does UK "arse" actually come from the Romanish "karsi," after all, and not the plowshare's stubborn friend? (see most recent rhyming slang entry)
