On August 17, 2004, the New York Times devoted an entire column in its A section to the discovery of a cave with a pool near Jerusalem that, it said, John the Baptist may have used to baptize early converts to what later became known as Christianity.
The following day, Doubleday released a nearly 400-page book by the cave’s excavator, Shimon Gibson, entitled The Cave of John the Baptist. The book jacket announced that this discovery was “as momentous and far-reaching in its implications as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” The title page declares that the discovery “has redefined Christian history.”
In fact, few, if any, scholars in Israel think this cave has anything to do with John the Baptist.
The discovery is nevertheless extremely important—not because of what it says about John the Baptist, but what it says about life in Israel in the sixth century B.C. For that is when this enormous space was dug out of the rock. It is more like a hall than a cave, carefully dug in straight lines. It is nearly 80 feet long, over 12 feet wide and over 16 feet high, entered by descending 12 broad stairs. The space was made watertight with clearly datable plaster about half an inch thick—and it was never re-plastered.
The mystery is this: What purpose was the cave intended to serve? It seems clear that it was meant to hold water. But beyond this? Gibson nixes every suggestion: It was not used to irrigate fields, it was not a cistern, it was not located near anything, it was not created by a single enterprising individual but by a community. In brief, it remains a mystery. Israeli scholar Tsvika Tsuk, a leading water system expert, thinks it was used to store drinking and cooking water. But Gibson rejects this: Why would it have been used solely for drinking purposes in the middle of nowhere and far away from main roads, Gibson asks.
There is a saying among archaeologists that when something cannot be explained, interpret it as “cultic.” And that is what Gibson does: he posits some mysterious First Temple-period water ritual. I suspect Gibson will have few takers on this among scholars of the period.
In fact, the reservoir resembles other First Temple water facilities in Judah at 019sites such as Beth-Shemesh. Except the others were in towns and this one was not. So the mystery remains.
But how does Gibson get from this to John the Baptist? By the time of John the Baptist, the hall had silted up, and the floor was much higher than the original floor. That it was used at this time is clear from the pottery fragments. Similarly, at an even higher level, there is evidence of use in the Byzantine period (fourth-seventh centuries A.D.), when Christian monks lived in the area. At that time the floor was high enough that the monks were able to reach almost to the ceiling to scratch a few crude drawings on the walls. Gibson interprets these scratchings as John the Baptist and Christian crosses. Readers can decide for themselves. Other scholars I have talked to have had a risible reaction.
Gibson found a rock in the hall with an indentation, which he interprets as a place intended for the right foot, which would then be anointed with oil from a rivulet leading from a nearby cup in the same rock. Another mysterious ritual.
Is it all possible? Well, I suppose anything is possible. The Byzantine monks might have decided that John the Baptist used the waters in the cave for purposes of baptism. And possibly the tradition was correct. But Gibson himself says that “archaeologists always need something a bit more tangible than just a probability,” let alone a possibility. By this standard, Gibson’s imaginative speculations clearly fail.
On August 17, 2004, the New York Times devoted an entire column in its A section to the discovery of a cave with a pool near Jerusalem that, it said, John the Baptist may have used to baptize early converts to what later became known as Christianity. The following day, Doubleday released a nearly 400-page book by the cave’s excavator, Shimon Gibson, entitled The Cave of John the Baptist. The book jacket announced that this discovery was “as momentous and far-reaching in its implications as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” The title page declares that the discovery […]
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