Strata

014

Site of Jesus’ Baptism Found—Again

Is It the Bible’s “Bethany Beyond the Jordan”?

Jordanian archaeologists have uncovered the remains of two Byzantine churches on the east bank of the Jordan River, about 5 miles north of the Dead Sea—churches that may mark the site of Jesus’ baptism.

But a site directly across the river, on the Israeli-controlled west bank, already claims that honor; it features a Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. John built in the fifth century and a Franciscan chapel from 1933.

Centuries-old accumulations of dirt, desert shrubs and land mines placed along both sides of the river during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war delayed discovery of the Jordanian churches.

Mohammed Waheeb, who heads the Jordanian dig, identifies the site as “Bethany beyond the Jordan” (John 1:28), where John baptized Jesus and where Jesus and John the Baptist preached. “The most important thing is that we have found everything as the pilgrims described it,” says Waheeb. “The Byzantines demolished everything that was there before them, but we found pottery and coins dating to the time of John the Baptist.” One of the churches stands at the mouth of the Wadi el-Charrar, where tradition says the prophet Elijah ascended into heaven. Waheeb said that his team has also uncovered the ruins of four small chapels, two of which were built on top of each other.

The Jordanians have been eager to get Vatican authentication of their site. But the Holy See’s charge d’affaires in Amman, Monsignor Dominique Rezeau, pleads neutrality, citing the impossibility of knowing where the baptism actually took place. What is important, he says, is the river in which Jesus was baptized—not the adjacent site.

Father Michele Piccirillo, an archaeologist with the Franciscan Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and the archaeological adviser for the national park being planned for the site, agrees. “It is a very stupid problem. We know from [ancient] pilgrims that the baptism was commemorated on both sides … Jesus Christ was baptized in the Jordan River.” It matters little, he adds, “if it was on the east bank or the west bank.”

The confusion over the location of Jesus’ baptism dates back to ancient times. The gospel writers differentiated between two towns called Bethany: The home of Lazarus and Mary, located just west of Jerusalem, is simply called Bethany (Matthew 21:17). And the locus of John the Baptist’s activity is referred to as “Bethany beyond the Jordan” in John 1:28, that is, on the far, eastern side of the river. In the third century, the church father Origen, who lived in Palestine, suggested that John 1:28 should really read “Bethabara.” Many later New Testament manuscripts include this change, which was eventually incorporated in the King James Version of the Bible. The sixth-century Madaba map locates Bethabara on the west side of the Jordan and depicts a church here dedicated to St. John the Baptist. The map shows no church on the eastern side of the river, however, although Byzantine writings indicate that the patriarch Elias of Jerusalem built a church and monastery there in the sixth century.

Piccirillo notes that pilgrims have mentioned visiting two churches on the Jordan, one on the east bank and the other on the west, since 530 A.D. In the wake of the Crusades, the east bank fell into Muslim hands, and pilgrims feared to cross the river. Gradually the shrines on that side were abandoned.

Piccirillo found samples of pottery sherds from the time of Jesus near the Jordanian site. The sherds, according to Piccirillo, were from stone vessels commonly used by Jews in that period, thus seeming to indicate the presence of some sort of community in the first century. “So at least the idea of the Byzantines that Bethany beyond the Jordan could be there is possible,” he says. “Archaeologically, we can say that people were living there at the time.”

Although the Israeli site lies within a militarized zone and is accessible to visitors only three times a year, Jordan plans to open its baptism site to the public for the year 2000. For now, however, Jordan is in the final stages of removing the mines from the territory, and archaeological work is still going on. For now, the site can only be viewed from a nearby road.

Piccirillo is intent on creating a national park in Jordan to rectify the centuries of neglect. It will feature a visitors’ center, an ecumenical statue to St. John, a small ecumenical chapel and a set of steps in the 015shape of an amphitheater that leads to a baptismal pool and to the Jordan River.

The late King Hussein was a great supporter of the project, but in the wake of his death, Piccirillo is uncertain how fast things will move along. If the Jordanians start work now, the modest project could be completed in six months, he says. “If they take their time, it can take them until next year.”

John the Baptist also figures in another recent archaeological discovery. In early March, excavators for the Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered a sixth-century Byzantine church dedicated to John the Baptist at Tel a-Shakef, near an Israeli military installation in the Gaza Strip.

The church, covered in marble floor tiles and adorned with multicolored, geometric and floral motifs, features three Greek inscriptions. An 11-line mosaic inscription found near the entrance dedicates the church to John the Baptist. According to this inscription, the church was founded in 544 and completed in 550 with money donated by two men, Victor and John.

Elvis Goes Sumerian

He’s Already Out in Latin

Elvis lives, even in dead languages. Finnish professor Jukka Ammondt, who has already recorded two albums of Presley songs in Latin, has announced plans to record another in Sumerian, a Babylonian language that has not been spoken for millennia. “Elvis would have liked the idea, because the ancient Sumerians had big parties and drums and rattles,” Ammondt told Reuters.

“Blue Suede Shoes” will be released first, as a single this spring. In Sumerian, the title translates “Esir Kus Za-gin,” meaning “sandals of leather the color of a blue gem.” The album is expected in the fall.

Ammondt’s earlier, Latin albums—The Legend Lives Forever and Rocking in Latin—include such Presley hits as “It’s Now or Never” (Nunc hic aut numquam), “Love Me Tender” (Tenere me, suaviter) and “All Shook Up” (Nunc Distrahor).

When he is not on tour, Ammondt teaches literature at the University of Jyvaskyla, 160 miles north of Helsinki.

Have Paper, Will Travel?

BAS Offers Annual Meeting Scholarships

The Biblical Archaeology Society is pleased to offer travel scholarships to Israeli and Arab archaeologists and Bible scholars presenting papers at the 1999 Annual Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS).

The $1,000 grants, which cover travel and lodging, are available to active Israeli Ph.D. candidates, Israeli women who have completed a Ph.D. within the past ten years and Arab archaeologists. Applicants must demonstrate that they could not otherwise afford to attend the meetings. Previous recipients of BAS travel scholarships are ineligible.

The 1999 meeting will convene in Boston, November 20–23, 1999. To apply, send us the title and abstract of your proposed paper by August 1, 1999. Please include information about your education, experience and financial need. Write to BAS Meeting Scholarships, 4710 41st St., NW, Washington, DC 20016; fax: 202–364-2636; e-mail bas@bib-arch.org. Scholars must arrange their own place on the program.

016

Resurrecting Nazareth

$60 Million Plan to Recreate Jesus’ Hometown Underway

Trimming olive trees, clearing underbrush and rebuilding terraces, 400 volunteers have begun work on a replica of Jesus’ hometown. When construction is finished, a village of 35 one-room stone houses, inhabited by actors and storytellers in authentic garb, will illuminate the life and teachings of Jesus. A Parable Walk, museum, study center and restaurant are also planned for the park in southwestern Nazareth. The project, dubbed Nazareth Village, is set to open with the new millennium, when millions of tourists are expected to visit the Holy Land.

According to the Bible, Nazareth is where Jesus grew up. At that time it was a small village of no more than 300.

“What attracts people to Nazareth is that Jesus was from Nazareth,” says Dr. Nakhle Bishara, the medical director of Nazareth Hospital, who came up with the idea of creating Nazareth Village.

Dr. Bishara decided that the best way to help people to understand the Nazareth of Jesus’ day was to create a living reenactment of the ancient town. According to Bishara, this would allow visitors to comprehend the images Jesus used in his parables—whether the man planting a vineyard in Mark 12 or the sower of Luke 8.

As it turns out, archaeological discoveries on the land Bishara and his team selected for the project may make the reconstruction more authentic than Bishara ever dreamed. In 1996 Bishara and an international team of developers purchased a 12-acre plot and commissioned an archaeological survey of the previously undeveloped site. The survey soon discovered the stone base of a winepress. Archaeologists Stephan Pfann and Ross Joseph Voss directed subsequent excavations, revealing the remains of stone irrigation trenches, three stone watchtowers, a stone quarry and numerous agricultural terraces. Most of the finds date to the early Roman period, and some as far back as the Hellenistic period, based on the pottery found with them. “There is a mounting body of evidence that these installations, these farms, were here in the time of Jesus,” says Mike Hostetler, the project’s executive director.

The Nazareth of Jesus’ day covered only 100 yards by 400 yards at most and had 80 to 100 houses, according to Pfann and Voss. “To give you some perspective, the area where Jesus grew up is about 500 meters, or a third of a mile, from the winepress,” says Hostetler.

An international partnership of Christian groups in Israel and abroad—called the Miracle of Nazareth International Foundation—has been formed to raise $60 million for the project. Backers in the United States include former President Jimmy Carter, Pat Boone and Rev. Reggie White, the former Green Bay Packer football star.

About eight of the stone houses, the Parable Walk, most of the agricultural terraces and a wine or olive press are expected to be ready for the site’s opening at the end of the year.

018

Six Feet Under

Ancient Turkish Church Turns Up Underwater

Equipped with rowboats, snorkeling equipment and global positioning satellite receivers, American archaeologists last summer discovered a 1,700-year-old church off the southern coast of Turkey, 15 miles east of modern Kas. It lies 6 feet under water at the site of what they believe, based on ancient texts, was once Aperlae, a 2,400-year-old city.

According to the directors of the excavation, Lindley Vann of the University of Maryland and Robert Hohlfelder of the University of Colorado, Boulder, the church probably ended up underwater as the result of earthquake activity over the centuries.

“There is a confusion of riches on the seafloor,” Hohlfelder told reporters. Measuring approximately 30 feet wide and 70 feet long, the church was the year’s biggest find. Its most unusual feature, according to Vann, is its apse. “Usually an apse is a semicircle,” Vann explained to BAR. “This one is a three-part apse—a central semicircle flanked by two quartercircles.” The shape may reflect a triconch, a square space with three semicircular extensions that earlier served as throne rooms in Roman and Byzantine palaces. The church, however, is “much too small for something so grandiose,” Vann said. “This might have been someone’s idea of how to emulate a more elaborate shape.”

The excavators found the remains of an earlier, western wall for the church, indicating that the building had once been larger. And the earlier church was itself built over another, more massive structure: A mosaic floor juts out from beneath its east side. “The floor is probably from a large public building,” says Vann. “What we are calling the early church was partially built over it.”

Seaside churches are common throughout the region of ancient Lycia. “Sailors would rush to these churches after successful voyages to give thanks,” explains Hohlfelder. But the preponderance of churches at Aperlae—at least three others have already been uncovered—has surprised the excavators, who estimate that the ancient town had only about a thousand inhabitants.

Previous surveys had discovered mounds of murex shells, three submerged stone tanks and 30 large water cisterns. The tanks were probably used to store a purple dye obtained from the snail shells. The cisterns were necessary because Aperlae lacked a natural source of fresh water.

According to the excavators, the city was abandoned by the seventh century, perhaps as a result of pirate attacks following the dissolution of the Eastern Roman Empire.

020

Like Grandfather, Like Granddaughter

Oldest Synagogue in Jerusalem Identified

Following in her late grandfather’s footsteps, Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar has identified the oldest synagogue in Jerusalem—a room in a structure dubbed “the House of Menoroth” (House of Menorahs, or Candelabra). The building was discovered by Benjamin Mazar, who in 1967 began excavations at the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount, an area now set aside as an archaeological park.

An engraved cross on the building’s lintel led scholars to conclude that it was originally a Christian public building from the Byzantine period. According to the younger Mazar, however, the paintings of seven-branched menorahs that cover the walls of one room suggest that the building was later reused for Jewish worship. The ubiquity of glass lamps, as well as indentations in the doorjambs likely used for mezzuzot (doorpost fixtures containing small Hebrew scrolls), leaves little doubt in her mind that the structure was briefly used as a Jewish public building during the period of Persian rule in the first part of the seventh century. (The second-earliest known synagogue in Jerusalem dates from the twelfth century.)

“Menoroth in a room like this can only mean a synagogue,” Mazar said. “People did not decorate their homes with so many menoroth, and you would never see such decorations in a classroom.”

A niche in the southern wall of the room may have held the Torah scroll, which worshipers faced during prayer, according to Mazar. Positioning the Torah niche in the southern wall would, however, have been contrary to the Jewish tradition of praying towards Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Mazar offers two reasons for the southern placement: First, the door of the room faces the Temple Mount. If people prayed in that direction, they would have appeared to have been praying to whoever entered the room. Second, the room was in use when the Al Aqsa Mosque was being built. If worshipers faced the Temple Mount, it would have seemed that they were praying to the mosque.

To buttress her argument, Mazar also points to a document discovered in the Cairo Genizah (the repository for worn-out 021scrolls in Cairo’s medieval synagogue), which indicates that Caliph Omar ibn Alhatab (634–644) granted permission to 70 Jewish families from Tiberias to settle in Jerusalem following the Muslim conquest of the city. The families naturally would have sought out a place to pray. This building, says Mazar, would probably have fit the bill. It was “not a very fancy synagogue. It was a very simple place and typical of poor families.”

Although this is the earliest synagogue room found in Jerusalem, there is archaeological evidence of at least one earlier synagogue. A dedicatory inscription found in Jerusalem mentions one Theodotus, who “built this synagogue for the reading of the Laws and for the teaching of the Commandments.” Discovered by French archaeologist Raymond Weill in 1913 in a Jerusalem cistern, the inscription dates to the Herodian period (37 B.C.–70 A.D.).

020

Got Milk?

New Technique Identifies Ancient Dairy Remains

The dirty dishes of antiquity may provide archaeologists with their next breakthrough. According to a pair of chemists, residues left on ancient pottery can be examined to determine whether the people who used them drank milk.

Until now, evidence of ancient dairying has been only available in written records. From these texts, scholars have determined that Mesopotamians and Egyptians were using milk products by 4000 to 2500 B.C. However, archaeologists believe that the people of those regions had domesticated cows, sheep and goats as early as 9000 B.C. Now they will be able to test their theory.

Richard Evershed, of the University of Bristol, in England, has been studying organic material left on ancient pottery found in Europe in hopes of determining the diet and lifestyle of the people who used the pots. He found traces of animal fat, cabbage leaf wax and beeswax (which might have been used in candlemaking), but no dairy fat. “We were looking more generally to identify animal fats on pottery,” Evershed told BAR. “[Dairy] was one of the major classes of fat likely to have been processed in pottery vessels.” To figure out how dairy fat might look after millennia, Evershed and colleague Stephanie Dudd decided to create truly rotten milk in their lab.

Dudd and Evershed’s experiment was simple. They placed milk in an incubator for 90 days and examined the result. They found that decomposed milk resembled animal fat residues, which is why they had not recognized it before. Using highly sophisticated and relatively new instruments to distinguish among the types of residue, Dudd and Evershed measured stable 021isotope values with a process called gaschromatography combustion isotope ratio mass-spectrometry. They determined that milk fat residue has fewer carbon 13 atoms than regular animal fat residue. The difference is due to the low number of carbon 13 atoms present in plants, the main source of protein in dairy products. Using the new technique on pottery residues previously identified as animal fat confirmed Evershed and Dudd’s results; what had been identified as animal fat on pottery discovered in Northamptonshire and dated to 300 B.C., for instance, was actually milk fat, according to their test. “This technique,” said Sebastian Payne, environmental scientist at the British Heritage department, “appears to offer the prospect of detecting milking back to the beginning of animal domestication.”

Mosaic Found Under Manger Square

A Facelift for Bethlehem

Excavators with the Palestinian Department of Antiquities (PDA) have found a large Byzantine mosaic while renovating Manger Square, in front of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

According to Hamdan Taha, director of the PDA, the mosaic may have been part of a public building that belonged to the church complex. The church, too, dates to the Byzantine era (sixth century).

The mosaic consists of red, black and white geometric designs. Eighteen square feet have been uncovered so far, but Taha believes more of the mosaic remains underground. He says the work is delicate because the mosaic rests on top of sloping bedrock.

The Church of the Nativity was built over a grotto that tradition identifies as the place where Mary gave birth to Jesus. Until recently, Manger Square was used mainly as a parking lot for tourist buses. It was ringed on two sides by souvenir shops and fast food restaurants and on the third side by a police station. However, Manger Square is now undergoing a major facelift, with a preliminary archaeological excavation as part of the renovations. The plan is to turn the square into a plaza with trees and water fountains, and to replace the police station with a tourist center and museum. The mosaic was uncovered where the police station once stood.

The excavators have also found two cisterns and two water tunnels. One of the cisterns held a collection of Byzantine plates and five or six lamps.

018

Mark Your Calendar

Seminars

Guilford Summer Vacation Seminar

June 20–26, 1999

The Biblical Archaeology Society vacation seminars give participants the opportunity to learn from Biblical scholars in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere. Leading the seminar will be C.Thomas McCollough, professor of religion at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, and James Tabor, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. McCollough’s lectures will include “The Ancient Near East and the Patriarchs,” “Herod the Great and the Architecture of Roman Occupation,” “Sepphoris: Jewel of the Galilee” and “The Christianization of the Holy Land.” Tabor will speak on “Skeletons at Masada: Jewish or Roman?” “A Messiah Before Jesus?” “The Essenes in Jerusalem” and “The Book of Revelation—Then and Now.”

For more information call 800–221-4644.

St. Olaf Summer Vacation Seminar

July 11–17, 1999

Participants will study the Bible and archaeology with Bart Ehrman, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who will lecture on Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, and P. Kyle McCarter, of Johns Hopkins University, who will lecture on the history, religion and literature of ancient Israel. St. Olaf’s 350-acre wooded campus offers the quiet charm of a rural community yet lies only 35 miles from the excitement of the Twin Cities.

For more information call 800–221-4644.

BAS Tour of Turkey

July 28–August 14, 1999

Experience the beauty, history and archaeology of ancient Anatolia with acclaimed BAS tour guide (and archaeologist!) Avner Goren. Discover the magnificent treasures of Istanbul, ancient Hittite ruins and the remarkable landscape of Cappadocia and tour such sites as Ephesus, Aphrodisias and Pergamum. And, as a special added attraction: See the last total solar eclipse of the millennium!

For more information call 800–221-4644.

1999 Oxford University Seminar

August 18–20, 1999

Join us for a BAS seminar at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University. Walk along the Thames and the Oxford Canal, take tea with the spires of Oxford as a backdrop and discuss the latest in Biblical scholarship with your fellow participants and seminar speakers Ronald Hendel, of Southern Methodist University, and Kyle McCarter, of Johns Hopkins. Lectures include “The Exodus in Biblical Memory,” “Wisdom: The Tree of Life,” “The ‘Temple of Yahweh’ Ostracon,” and “Dramatic New Light on the Earliest History of the Alphabet.”

For more information call 800–221-4644.

014

What Is It?

A. Bowling pins

B. Stalagmites

C. Curling irons

D. History books

021

What It Is, Is …

D. History books.

The cuneiform inscriptions on these cone-shaped terracottas, dating to 2350 B.C.E., recount the exploits of Uruinimgina, a reforming king of Lagash, Mesopotamia. Palace bureaucrats, the reader is told, extorted goods from the king’s subjects and asserted royal ownership of much of the land. Uruinimgina claims to have put an end to these abuses, thereby fulfilling the gods’ wishes and re-establishing what later Sumerian tradition would imagine as a golden age.

Site of Jesus’ Baptism Found—Again

Is It the Bible’s “Bethany Beyond the Jordan”?