The Rev Know-it-all’s guide to the Holy Land part 9

Continued from last week…

Back to the theme of the tininess of the Holy Land. Remember that the entire area is not much bigger than New Jersey if you count the farthest extent. Remember too that much of it is uninhabitable because of desert areas and the whole thing was divided into much smaller mini-countries. You had Galilee, Samaria and Judea all ruled by petty kings from the Herod family and you had the Decapolis. Smack dab in the middle of all these Semitic mini-countries you had ten cities that were thoroughly Greek. Decapolis means “ten cities” Gerasa (Jerash) in Jordan Scythopolis (Beth-Shean) in Israel, the only city west of the Jordan River Hippos (Al Huson) on the Golan Heights) Gadara (Umm Qais) in Jordan famous for the Gadarene demoniac, Pella in Jordan where the first Christians fled when warned of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem by the Christian prophets. This happened around 65 AD. Then you have Philadelphia, modern day Amman, the capital of Jordan, Capitolias, now called Beit Ras in Jordan, Raphana also in Jordan and Canatha (Qanawat) in Syria as well as Damascus, the capital of modern Syria. 

These towns were either established by or taken over by Greek-speaking immigrants as a means of Hellenization (Greek-ification) by Alexander the Great and his successors. It’s important to understand this. It means that Jesus probably spoke Greek fairly well. He was exposed to Greek culture and language. He seems to have preached in the Decapolis, and I bet he did so in Greek. It is likely that the sayings of Jesus were being written down by his followers while He was still preaching and ministering and they seemed to have done so in Greek. 

In the first three Gospels, the same Greek words are used to tell the same stories and sermons, so the source from which these sayings and stories were taken was probably written down in Greek. There were three common languages spoken in the Holy Land at the time of Christ: Aramaic, a Semitic language that seems to have been Jesus’ first language (He says “Eloi, Eloi lamah sabacthani?” which seems to be Galilean accented Aramaic); then there was Greek, the language of commerce and government; then there was Latin, the first language of a very few, like Pilate and the Herods. Some of the Herods grew up in Rome in the house of the emperor on the Palatine hill and their Latin would have been excellent. Most “Romans” didn’t speak Latin. The language of the army was probably Greek. It’s what everybody spoke back then, just like everybody speaks English these days. I think most Dutch and Swedes speak better English than I do. 

The Holy Land was never a mono-lingual, mono-ethnic country. Joshua failed to drive all the Canaanites out of the land in 1300 BC, the Maccabees failed to drive all the Greeks out of the land in 100 BC and Herod was a Latin-speaking Hellenized Arab. The Holy Land at the time of Christ was a multilingual multiethnic crass money-making hodgepodge just like it is today. Get thoughts of Bible pageants with people wearing bath robes and towels on their heads out of your mind. 

You will be overwhelmed by the traffic, the chaos, the crowding and the commercialism. You will be chased by peddlers shouting “ONE DOLLAR! ONE DOLLAR! ONE DOLLAR!” just like you would have been chased by peddlers at the time Christ shouting “one shekel, one shekel, one shekel,” or “one denarius, one denarius, one denarius!”  My point is this: The Holy Land is just the same in our times as it was at the time of Christ. Forget the Bible pageants you see at Christmas with people wearing towels on their heads. Forget starry-eyed visionaries. God so loved the world. The real world. The world I would rather escape. The world collides with itself in Jerusalem. It always has. It always will. God loves the world. This is why Jerusalem is so absolutely Holy. 

To be continued...

The Rev Know-it-all’s guide to the Holy Land part 8

Rev. Know-it-all’s guide to the Holy Land continued…

From Capernaum, home of St. Peter and his family we take a long walk of about twenty miles to the little towns of Cana and Nazareth (of course in the 21st century we will take a comfy tour bus). This distance could easily be covered in a day by people who were accustomed to walking as were Jesus and his contemporaries. For us it is an effort to walk to the corner grocery store. Of the two towns Cana was by far the more important. It had a reliable spring of water and had been settled for thousands of years before the birth of Christ. There are a lot of candidates for the Cana of the Bible, but the one commemorated in our times as the site of the wedding at Cana is, at least in my opinion, the best of the bunch because of the testimony of early pilgrims including St Jerome.

Modern excavations beneath the present church have revealed remnants of early first century houses and an ancient basilica. Kfar Kenna, as it is called today, is only a few miles north-east of Nazareth. Remember that Jesus was at the wedding feast with his mother, his relatives and his disciples, according to the second chapter of the gospel of John. For such a crowd to be invited to a wedding, one would think that there must have been some sort of familial or other neighborly association. It makes sense that Cana was just a short walk from Nazareth. Nazareth, however, was about two miles east of nowhere at all. It was about as unimportant as a town can be.

At the time of Christ, it was tiny, about 500 people, though it seems to have had its own synagogue. Fr. Bargil Pixner, a scholar who really knew the Holy Land in the twentieth century, says that much of the royal family of David had remained in Babylon. They were comfortable there. The situation of the returning exiles must have been a little like the return to the Holy land during the upheavals of the twentieth century. The hardy went back. The smart stayed home in New York. “We’ll be going next year after we’ve got the business sorted out. Write. Keep us posted.” 

The Davidic family started to return during the century before Christ. There was talk of the Messiah. The Messiah would of course be a member of the Davidic family. This meant government jobs. When the old royal family started coming back in greater numbers, the Maccabees and the Herodians, not descendants of David were running things, so they settled in two towns near the Sea of Galilee. One was a bit to the east of the Sea of Galilee and was called Kokhaba, or the “the Star” calling to mind the prophecy, “A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel.” (Numbers 24: 17) This is the only clear mention of anything resembling a Messiah in the Torah.

The other little town was called Nazareth, probably a word meaning “little shoot.”  This calls to mind the prophesy of Isaiah, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots, a Branch will bear fruit.” (Isaiah 11:1.) The tiny town of Nazareth, like most ancient towns everywhere, was made up of a lot of people who were cousins. It is interesting to think that the people of this proud little town, by and large descendants of King David, wanted to throw Jesus over a hill for blasphemy when he proclaimed himself the Messiah.

It is also quite remarkable to think that in our times, the Christians of Nazareth, quite possibly descendants of those Nazarenes two thousand years ago, built a stadium in recent times on that same hill to receive Pope Benedict, the vicar of the Messiah. History is an amazing thing.

More to come...

The Rev Know-it-all’s guide to the Holy Land part 7

Continued from last week…

I have already discussed the amazing tiny-ness (new word) of the Holy Land, but now I return to the absolute itty-bitty-ness of the area in which Jesus did most of His work. This area is called the Gospel Triangle and is a small patch of ground beginning at Capernaum. One walks up the hill from the valley of the Sea of Galilee to Chorazin. We are not quite sure that the current site actually is Chorazin. They have found no ruins there that date to the time of Christ, but there are plenty of ruins from just a little while later and the earlier town is there somewhere. 

Bethsaida, which I have already mentioned, is another four miles, give or take, to the east. It was a fishing village built where the northern part of the Jordan flowed into the Sea of Galilee by boat. Capernaum is just about five miles southwest of Bethsaida along the lake shore and that completes the triangle. These three little towns are named in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as the places where Jesus performed his greatest miracles, yet they failed to repent. Because these towns rejected the Gospels they would not be lifted up, but would be worse off than Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment. They would not be exalted but forgotten and so it was that these three towns were in fact lost to history in the first few centuries after the time of Jesus. They were only rediscovered by modern excavators.

Now they are uninhabited museums filled with tourists and pilgrims but have no real inhabitants. It is interesting to think that this is only one place in the Gospels where Chorazin is mentioned and Bethsaida is not mentioned much more. Jesus did most of his work there, yet they seem forgotten in the Gospels. One remembers the words of the Gospel of John, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) It is amazing to realize that we only have a taste of Jesus’ ministry presented to us in the Gospels.

All the wonder He worked in Chorazin and Bethsaida go unmentioned. Jesus seems to have made Capernaum his headquarters when He was there and one sees a marvelous modern church built over ancient ruins. In these excavations, visible under a glass floor of the present modern building there is an ancient house in which there is a very special room, which was plastered and marked with graffiti referring to St. Peter. The central room of this ancient house contained the remains of oil lamps, but no cooking ceramics. Thus, it is theorized that this first century structure was a church built into the house of St. Peter.  Some scholars say nonsense, but what do they know?

From here we move on to Mt. Tabor, the place venerated as the site of the transfiguration of Jesus. Mt. Tabor is a natural stone outcropping, not a typical “tell” which a hill is caused by a succession of ancient villages built one on top of another. It has been fortified at times, but seems never to have been occupied by a village. It is quite a walk up and there is no easy source of water there as far as I know. Jesus was transformed in the sight of Peter, James and John who wanted to put up three booths, one for Jesus, and the others for Moses and Elijah who appeared with Him. This is a clear reference to the Jewish feast of booths. It is interesting to note that Mount Tabor was one of the mountain peaks on which a beacon was lit to summon the Jews of Galilee for the celebration of the Holy Days. A light summoned people to the temple in Jerusalem, and a brilliant light on the mountain summoned us to the heavenly Jerusalem when Jesus was transformed.

As with all things archaeological, the identification of Mt. Tabor with the Mount of the Transfiguration is disputed. The New Testament says that Jesus brought Peter, James and John to a high mountain and that Jesus was transformed into a radiant light before their eyes. The Gospels omit which mountain this all happened. The earliest mention that Tabor is the mountain comes from a local theologian, Origen in the 3rd century. The town of Naim, now called Nein is down the hill form Mount Tabor. It is there that Jesus raised a widow’s son from the dead as his funeral procession left the town. He did this just after coming down the mountain with Peter, James and John. He raised the boy from the dead as if to repeat the promise of resurrection that he had made on the mountain. It seems reasonable that if Naim was at the foot of the Mount of the Transfiguration, that Tabor was that mountain.

The present church and the Franciscan priory were built in 1924 by the Italian architect Antonio Barluzzi on the ruins of an ancient Byzantine church and a 12th-century crusader church. The visit is well worth the hair raising cab ride up the side of the mountain which is much bigger than it looks from a distance.

More to come...