On Saturday morning we drive up to the mount of olives where we can see the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount from the Jewish cemetery in the east. These are the most expensive grave sites in the world and soon there will be no more available, but this is the point where Jews believe the resurrection will begin and where Christians believe Jesus will return.

Walking down the western slope of the Mount of Olives, following Jesus route on Palm Sunday, we see some first century cave tombs, complete with osuary boxes for the bones of the decomposed family members.

We paused at the Chapel of Dominus Flevet, where Jesus wept over Jerusalem and prophesied its complete destruction by the Romans about 40 years later. We have an excellent view of the Golden Gate through which he most likely entered Jerusalem. The gate as subsequently bricked up and Muslim tombs are placed in front of it. Our guide, Doron, pointed out that in bricking up this entrance, the Muslims unwittingly fulfilled the prophecy contained in Ezekiel 44:1-4. The golden domes of the Russian Orthodox convent of Mary Magdalene are visible though the trees.

There is still an active olive grove where Franciscan nuns harvest the olives from trees, including a couple that could be as much as 2000 years old.

We finally come to the magnificent Church of All Nations constructed in the 1920s at the foot of the Mount of Olives to commemorate the end of WWI and the mistaken belief that Christian nations would no longer go to war against each other. Today, the bigger question might be whether there are any Christian nations.

Getting back on the bus, we leave the mount of olives, driving down the Kidron Valley and head toward Bethlehem which was a sleepy little village four miles south of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day, but now has become a virtual suburb of greater Jerusalem, although it is separated by a wall.

We stopped for lunch at Ruth’s for Falafel, schnitzel or shawarma

In Bethlehem, famous as the birthplace of both Jesus and King David, we first go to The Shepherd’s Field. This is the traditional place where Boaz owned a field and met Ruth, the great grandmother of David and also where the angels appeared to the Shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus.

we hold a brief devotional inside one of the caves celebrated as where the shepherd’s stayed while caring for the sheep that first Christmas day and visit the beautiful church built to commemorate the site.

We finally arrive at the Church of the Nativity, or traditional birthplace of Jesus. This is very likely the place. What happened in the first century was that Christians were congregating at these sites while Christianity was illegal. To prevent this the Romans would put up pagan shrines to profane the ground in the Christians site. At the time it seemed obvious that the Roman Empire was there to stay, and Christianity was not, so it seemed like a logical thing to do. However, what the pagan Romans inadvertently did was to mark the sites for later generations of Christians who demolished the temples and erected churches in the 4th century. In turn the pre-Muslim Sassanid Persians came through and demolished the churches when they conquered the land in 614 AD. But the Church of the Nativity they left in place because of the frescoes depicting the Persian Magi. So the Church of the Nativity is one of the oldest in modern Israel.

The modern structure is divided and squabbled over by the Roman Catholic Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox, and the Armenians who own the structures to the left, right, and center respectively.

Entering the Church is only possible though a door constructed to force people to bow upon entering.

Due to the massive crowds, we do not go into the actual grotto marking the traditional site of Jesus’ manger, but instead visit the Franciscan Convent of St. Catherine which contains the cave where one of my favorite saints, St. Jerome, created one of the most important pieces of literature in the history of the world – the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible from Greek New Testament and Apocrypha and Hebrew Old Testament.

Coming out of the Church of the Nativity, the muezzin starts the Muslim call to prayer from loudspeakers in the minaret of the Mosque across the street, reminding everyone that Islam is the dominant religion of the area now.

We joined Doron and Harriet at the coffee shop next door where she was enjoying an ice cream and beer.  Here’s to Ken

Some enterprising Palestinians set up a coffee house on a street between the bus stop and the Church of the Nativity with a clever name that attracts people to a familiar beverage.

After a sunrise service with dawn breaking over the Golan Heights across the sea of Galilee, we prepare to leave our hotel at the Kibbutz Nof Ginosar to view more sites closer to the Mediterranean coast before moving on to the Holy City of Jerusalem.

First stop is Megiddo. The first mention of this strategic fortification (so far as we know today) in from about 1400 BC during the reign of Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose where it was an outpost of the Egyptian Empire. In the pic, Doron explains to us why Megiddo is so critically placed astride the Jezreel valley along the Way of the Sea between Damascus and Egypt.

The interactive model in the visitor’s center gives a brief demonstration of the status of the archeological exploration that showed Solomon’s (10th century BC) fortifications to be the 17th in a series of fortifications stretching back to the Canaanite period, each built on top of the preceding one.

The plaque gives a brief description of the City of Megiddo as it relates to the Bible. For etymology nerds like myself, Har Meggido is the same place that is called Armageddon in the book of the Revelation. In Hebrew Har means mountain, so Har Megiddo is mountain of Megiddo. There is no letter H in Greek (the one that looks like H is actually the vowel Eta and the H sound is represented by a breath mark over the first vowel or diphthong in Greek), so words starting in H often drop the H. As a neuter noun, it has to end in the letter N because otherwise the O ending would look like a masculine noun in the dative/instrumental/locative case of highly inflected Koine Greek. Therefore Har Megiddo becomes Armageddon in Greek. Of course the word Armageddon has picked up all kinds of not necessarily biblical meanings in our world today.

Excavations has uncovered the stairway leading up to the main gate of the fortress in Solomon’s day.

Ancient cities being built one on top of the other, it becomes tough to sort out which layer of strata belongs to which epoch and which one to emphasize for the tourists, so most of the displays are geared toward showing the city either in the Solomonic period or the period of the Northern kingdom of Israel after it’s division under Jeroboam.

 

Megiddo’s commanding view over the surrounding countryside can been seen from these pics. Pastor Brad, a retired ELCA pastor, now part time chaplain is in the third shot next to the flags. He was a GREAT addition to the trip, and was able to play #1 support for Pastor Dave’s exhausting duties.

Pastor Dave’s 14-year-old son Josiah was our group’s resident prankster as he was continually looking for ways to burn off excess energy, if not by climbing on things, then by annoying Pastor Brad or attaching snap-links to our baggage.

Helpful plaques are posted around in Hebrew and English to explain what it is you’re looking at.

This last part of the tour was perhaps the most interesting. It describes how a water supply system was developed and brought inside the protection of the walls, then its entrance as bricked up to camouflage it from would be infiltrators. Thus providing the fortress with a supply of fresh water in case of a siege while hopefully avoiding the fate of Jebustie Salem/Jerusalem when David’s men utilized the Gihon Spring to capture the city.

After Megiddo, we head off up Mount Carmel where a Church marks the spot of Elijah’s epic battle with the priests of Ba’al as recorded in 1 Kings 18.

he Kishon brook is just visible in the valley below Mount Carmel where the prophets of Ba’al were slaughtered after their god failed to send down fire and consume the sacrifice the way the true God did. The brook is in the foreground where it emerges next to a road under the highway overpass. In the second pic the Mediterranean is just visible in the distance where a cloud arose from the sea announcing the end of the drought in Elijah’s day.

after Mount Carmel, we head down to Herod’s specially built city of Caeserea Martitima (not to be confused with the Caesarea Philippi built by his son near Dan). The magnificent aqueduct was constructed to provide the city with fresh water before being buried under the sand until recently uncovered.

Herod’s massive theater has also been recovered and restored and is again the venue for concerts and plays today. In the Book of Acts, Herod Agrippa received the adulation of the crowd and because he agreed to pass himself off as a god, he was struck dead and eaten by worms. This is the spot where it transpired.

Ruined statuary and capitals of fallen columns are evidence of the intrusions of the invasion of the iconoclastic Muslims in the 7th century.

We move on to the remains of the once great harbor itself. Now mostly a beach for vacationing tourists and locals. Jackie and I, being Floridians from the land of beaches decide to forgo the incomprehensible pleasure of getting our feet wet and covering everything with sand.

This is a copy of one of the stones recovered from what had been paving stones used by subsequent builders in the post-Roman world. The original is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It’s a stone with Pontius Pilate’s name carved into it from the time of Jesus; again stifling the voice of critics who had maintained that Pilate was a fictional character in the fictional story presented in the four gospels.

We make a brief stop in Tel Aviv (actually Tel-Aviv-Yaffo) or what had once been the city of Jaffa, near the place traditionally assigned to Simon the Tanner, the friend of Simon Peter where he had the vision allowing him to go off and visit the centurion, Cornelius.

We arrived in the holy city of Jerusalem as the sun was setting. From our perspective south of the Temple Mount we hear the Shofars announce the arrival of the sabbath with the setting of the sun as the lights simultaneously start to come on in the city. We were welcomed into the city by the Order of Melchizedek which was the way Abraham was welcomed  by Melchizedek to Salem which is now Jerusalem. (Gen 14:17-18)

 

Excerpts from Scott Miller posts on Facebook

The next morning we get up and proceed with the other 10 billion tourist buses (maybe a bit of an exaggeration) to the Church of St. Peter’s Primacy. This marks the traditional spot on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus appeared to His disciples after his resurrection while they were fishing near the shore. After he calls to them and tells them to throw their nets on the other side of the boat, they catch a “boatload” of fish – literally. Peter swims to shore to see Jesus and going alone alone with him, Jesus asks him 3 times if he loves him. The English translation doesn’t carry them same emphasis of the exchange between them as the Greek, but the point is that Jesus tells Peter to feed his sheep, restoring him after Peter’s earlier denial at Caiaphas’s house and making him the leader of the soon to be established Church.

after a brief service and message on the beach where Jesus had cooked fish and bread (that part of the story fascinates me for some reason), we look around and I tool these pics of the stones that formed part of the older 4-5th century Byzantine church that had been destroyed by the Sassanid (pre-Muslim) Persians in 614 AD.

Inside the new church that was built over the stones marking the place where Jesus traditionally cooked and/or served the bread and fish breakfast.

Speaking of fish and bread, this is Tabgha, right down the street from the Church of St. Peter’s primacy. It’s the traditional place where Jesus fed the crowd of 5,000 men (not to mention women and children).

If you’re wondering where the name of the place Tabgha, came from, it’s an Arabic corruption of the Greek name επταπαγον, or Heptapagon. But to simplify things, a German community runs the place and gave it the nice easy name Brotvermehrungskirche. That’s Bread Multiplication Church for us Anglophones. The word Heptapagon actually means seven springs, but not wanting the place to be confused with a golf course in Pasco County, the ancient Byzantines picked something that would confuse the Arabs when they took over.

After milling about with the crowds rivaling the one that Jesus fed, Doron did what he does best. He took us aside to a place almost completely missed by most tourists and showed us this ancient baptismal font recovered on the grounds of the church and now seemingly forgotten.

Continuing clockwise around the Sea of Galilee, we come to Capernaum, Jesus’ adopted home town. We don’t know why Jesus decided to move here after his neighbors from Nazareth decided to try and throw Him over a cliff, but it probably has a lot to do with the fact that his best friend Simon (a/k/a Peter) lived there with his mother in law and presumably his wife – if she was still alive at that time.

These are ruins unearthed in Capernaum (I believe) from the time of Christ. The black stones are quarried or collected from the nice basalt collection on the Golan Heights, while white limestone rocks in the background are from later construction and gathered from somewhere else, but they give an idea of the size of some of the common houses along the main street in Jesus’ day.

Capernaum’s mostest favoritest house. This is the one traditionally assigned to Peter where Jesus healed his sick mother-in-law and immediately got up to resume her Jewish mother roll and served everyone. They know it was Peter’s house because it seemed like the nicest one in town and, of course being the future first pope, it stands to reason he must have lived in the one house closest to being a palace.

 

These are the remains of what was a beautiful synagogue built over the remains of the one from Jesus time. The original synagogue was destroyed by the Romans in 66 AD during the Jewish War. You can see the black basalt rocks from the first synagogue under the foundation from the later synagogue that (I believe) was destroyed by the Muslims in their 7th Century conquest.

 

This elaborately carved piece appears to be one of the lintels from atop of the columns in the Synagogue. The actual details of the carvings are rich with important symbology to Jewish worshipers, and not just the magan (shield or star of) David evident in the picture.

We had lunch at a restaurant owned by a Russian Jew in the beautiful little city of Tiberias. In Jesus’ day Tiberias was mainly a gentile city, but I took the pictures of us eating lunch because the restaurant was in a building that was once the Crusader fortress of Tiberius. It was here that the Countess of Tiberius was holding the city against the marauding army gathered by Salah-al-Din (Saladin) while her husband was with the Christian army gathered by King Guy of Jerusalem in the hot summer of 1187 AD. Her husband advised Guy that his wife knew what she was doing and would be fine and that he should not advance the army in an effort to relieve the siege. Of course King Guy goes down in history as one of the most incompetent military leaders in history because he ignored the count’s advice and ended up getting it slaughtered at the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187, dooming the castles and cities of the kingdom to fall one by one with no army to relieve them.

We arrive at what in Jesus’ day was a little village, but today is the growing Palestinian city of Nazareth. Once a predominantly Christian town, the residents today are mostly Arab speaking Muslims. The Christians have either lower birthrates and/or have emigrated abroad due to being considered infidels by the Palestinian leadership and just more troublesome Palestinians by the Israelis. But details of such complicated political matters are best left the subject of other discussions. While expanding the city, developers came across an ancient olive press in this field and decided to make “Nazareth Village.” It’s a picture for tourists to see some details of daily village life in Jesus’ day. Of course the city continues to grow around the site and now people in period dress harvest olives surrounded by modern high-rises.

n this reconstruction of what might have been a 1st century home, one of the “locals” is spinning the home grown-wool into strands that she works into a loom to produce a rough woolen cloth.

In the nearby carpenter’s shop, a worker and our tour guide demonstrate the use of tools that are very familiar to most of us today, indicating how long some of the technology has been around.

This reconstruction of the olive press is accompanied by an animated film showing how the precious oil is extracted from the olives for its multiple uses in the ancient world.

The highlight of our tour was the visit to the reconstructed synagogue where we read from Luke chapter 4 where Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth and told them he was the fulfillment of the prophecy. At first they were astounded at is words, but when he mentioned that God performed miracles for gentiles, they got all riled up and wanted to toss him off a local cliff – maybe the site of our net stop.

As with many of the stories in the gospel, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact location, but this hilltop near Nazareth with a fantastic view of the Jezreel Valley is the most likely place where the local denizens of Nazareth decided to toss Jesus off the cliff. Of course the scriptures almost dismissively indicate that he walked through their midst, thus making his escape. Then he moved apparently to Capernaum. We didn’t go to the Church of the Annunciation due to the massive crowds and long lines to get in.

Our tour “chaplain,” Pastor Dave, who is also Aunt Harriet’s home town LCMS pastor leads us in another Bible study about the story of Jesus being rejected in his hometown. Aunt Harriet, Will, Jackie and I pose for a group pic before moving on with the tour.

 

The morning was beautiful to those who woke up early enough to see the glorious sunrise over the sea.

 Our first stop was the Mount of Beatitudes. The grassy floor with the stone pathways made a truly tranquil place to stop and read at. Exploring the landscape we could not help but catch another glance a the shining blue sea.

We couldn’t believe the sea of buses we had to plow our way thru to find ours.  We heard the other day there were 70 buses at one time trying to fit into the parking lots and lining the streets later today.  It seems like Isaiah 2:2 is being fulfilled where it says “…all the nations shall flow to it…”

Our next stop was Dan where Jeroboam built the alter to the Golden Calf. The journey up to it was magnificent as the natural park was very well taken care of and clear running water made you want to take a refreshing drink on the spot. I could feel the smooth,solid, green leaves brushing against my arm and each area had something unique to it.

Next was the Abraham Gate that at one time was possibly the gate that Abraham entered to rescue Lot in Genesis 14. Seeing the sudden change in landscape was fascinating as it went slowly from tranquil and flushing green to a rocky and tan sand.

Our next stop was to the marvelous Banyas Falls. As we trecked down to the waterfall we could hear and feel it from the top all the way to the bottom. It was like hearing a marching army off in the distance and the breeze felt like it was coming from an air conditioner. We had a glimpse from time to time of the falls through the thick jungle like trees. The water flowing beside us was giving us a hopeful look at what smooth blue water we were going to see ahead.  The sight when we finally arrived was like nothing i had ever seen before, a pure and almost angelic white waterfall poured into a smooth pool of blue.

After lunch in a Druze Village our next stop was The Valley of Tears where we learned about the war of 1972. We could see off in the distance the border between Israel and Syria.  The tanks on the hill looked like they were still guarding the border like hallow sentinels. The sun was hot but the temperature was low and science as we all took the battlefield in fell over us but we spoke up and discussed and took photos of the closer tanks.

Our last stop was the home of Mary of Magdala which has just recently opened to the public. We saw the ruins of the oldest synagogue ever dug up dating back to the time of Jesus. We also got to see a beautiful new church they had built there. The art decorating the walls were meaningful to so many of us and the design was incredibly creative. Our great guide Father Kelly gave us great information,explanations and moving words.

We depart from our Hotel again but with passports and luggage in hand on our way to the border. The drive was long and full of the last sights to see. Jordan treated us will mountain high views of the land full of green off in the distance with plain desert standing in front.  At the border we said goodbye to our wonderful guide Omar and hello to our new guide Doran.

We were ecstatic to see the holy land and all she has to offer. Immediately we noticed the difference of landscapes. From trash ridden deserts to fields of vegetation and care. We met with our new five companions at Bet she’an and explored the ancient and destroyed roman city. It was fair to say the elements were not merciful to this historic place but we were still able to see so much of the old city. The old theater were debates took place and even the bathrooms held up quite well, so well that we could imagine ourselfs there back when the streets were bustling with Romans.

After a great pizza we ran back onto the bus and hustled to the Sea of Galilee. Not many sights we have seen so far could match the beauty and relevance of the sea. The boat ride we took put a cool refreshing breeze on our backs matched with the warmth of the sun. Daniel Carmel sang to us  and then we all sang together and had a peaceful time out on the smooth water.

After returning we went inside the ancient boat museum and saw the 2000 year old wonder. We learned about how the boat was taken from the sea and how it has been preserved for all this time.

We finally rested in our new hotel and waited with twitching anxiety for our next day and what treasures it would hold.