Almost 300 years after Jesus was said to have died, early Christians began gathering secretly in a small cave on the Mount of Olives.

[3] The issuance of the Edict of Milan by the Roman Emperors Constantine and Licinius in 313 made it possible for Christians to worship without government persecution.

However, a later tradition attributes the first Ascension Church at this site to Empress Helena[clarification needed] claiming that during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land between 326 and 328 she identified two spots on the Mount of Olives as being associated with Jesus' life—the place of his Ascension, and a grotto associated with his teaching of the Lord's Prayer—and on her return to Rome, she ordered the construction of two sanctuaries at these locations.

The Frankish bishop and pilgrim Arculf, in relating his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in about the year 680, described this church as "a round building open to the sky, with three porticoes entered from the south.

During this time, Saladin established the Mount of Olives as a waqf entrusted to two sheikhs, al-Salih Wali al-Din and Abu Hasan al-Hakari.

By the 15th century, the destroyed eastern section was separated by a dividing wall and was no longer used for religious purposes[clarification needed].

The entrance faces west, and the south wall of the mosque/chapel consists of a mihrab indicating the direction of Mecca for Muslim worshippers.

The faithful believe that the impression was made as Jesus ascended into Heaven and is venerated as the last point on earth touched by the incarnate Christ.

[12] Archaeologists Jon Seligman and Rafa Abu Raya, who carried out a short salvage excavation outside the southern wall of the mosque in 1995, have dated the underground chamber to the Byzantine period, identifying it as the burial crypt of a chapel that was part of the Church of the Ascension.

[14] However, most Western Christian pilgrims of the 14th century venerated the tomb as that of Saint Mary the Egyptian, although the Pelagia tradition also lives on.

[12] Maqdisi's mid-14th-century counter-crusade propaganda work Muthir al-gharam fi ziyarat al-Quds wa-sh-Sham ("Arousing love for visiting Jerusalem and Syria"; c. 1350–51)[15][16] places the death year of Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya around 781/82 and has her buried in this burial crypt.

[12] However, Denys Pringle suggests a Crusader date, based on features such as the western entrance which could indicate an east–west orientation of the structure, and the fact that the mihrab is set into an older window niche.