Places Touched by Jesus
It’s always a very special feeling when you receive the first copy of a newly published book, and that’s certainly the case with my “In the Footsteps of Jesus,” the softcover edition of the 2011 original. When it was first released in 2011, it rapidly became a bestseller — which convinced me (as well as my editors at National Geographic) that there is an appetite for books about the historical Jesus — as a fully realized human being, based on the latest insights in biblical science and archaeology.
One critic at the time wrote that he was astonished to find that the figure of Jesus doesn’t even appear in the first 100 pages. But that was exactly my aim: to show that the success of Jesus’ ministry was due in part to an unusual convergence of historical developments. The birth of the Augustan Empire was certainly one, but so was the exceptional situation of Judea being governed by an upstart autocrat, King Herod, without any ties to the Hasmonean royal house, and without any Jewish blood in his veins. This created a dystopian society by which Galilee was ruthlessly exploited to finance Herod’s vainglorious monuments in Judea and Samaria. The result: the thousands of poor, disenfranchised and hungry Galileans who populate the pages of the Gospels.
To support the “Footsteps” marketing campaign, I have been posting a number of images from the book as “Places Touched by Jesus” on Facebook and Instagram, based on pictures that I shot over the last few years during several visits to Israel and Jordan. Here is a sampling of images from the first chapters of Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood.
Places Touched by Jesus: The Beit Netofa. This is the first thing that Jesus would have seen as a young child, after running out of his parents’ house. Amazingly, this valley has changed very little since those days, though it is possible that there would have been more trees — mostly terebinth, evergreen and olive. Many of these were cut down during Ottoman rule. The Beit Netofa is the key to the great fecundity of Galilee in Jesus’ time. Modern archaeologists have discovered large underground watertables under this valley, which are fed by some 44 inches of annual rainfall from the mountains in the Upper Galilee. That is why Galilee is the breadbasket of Israel, even to this day.
Places Touched by Jesus: The House of Jesus’ Parents. Of course, we don’t know what Nazareth looked like in the 1st century, but excavations suggest that it was a very small hamlet of some 20 families. A reconstruction from Qasrin, in Upper Galilee, gives us a good idea of such a small village. Simple homes, made of stacked stone and mud, were clustered as multi-family dwellings around a common courtyard, which sheltered the animals. My post tomorrow will go inside to show the interior of such a home. In March of 2015, archaeologist Ken Dark published news of his excavation of a first-century “courtyard house” underneath the Sisters of Nazareth Convent in Nazareth, very close to the Annunciation Church. He speculated that this may have been the home of Mary and Joseph.
Places Touched by Jesus: Mary’s Home. This simple 1st century dwelling from Qasrin gives a great impression of what Mary’s home would have looked like. For Mary, breaking bread was a daily ritual. First, she would take a measure of grain from the lidded jar and pour it into the grain mill at left — consisting of two round slabs of stone, anchored on a central wooden spike, which could be rotated across the bottom by way of a wooden handle. The motion crushed the kernels and ground them into fine flour that sifted down to the bottom. She would knead the flour into dough, and roll out into thin round cakes, since these rose more quickly and thus saved time and fuel. Next, the oven at right would be fired with kindling. Once the clay chamber was sufficiently hot, the dough patties were inserted and baked until the bread rose.
Places Touched by Jesus: Mary’s Loom. One of the many tasks of a mother in Jesus’ time was the weaving of clothes for her family. As a young girl, Mary would have been introduced to the loom as soon as her fingers were sufficiently developed. First, she would learn to roll coarse fibers of wool or flax, wrapped around a distaff, into a length of yarn on a spindle. This thread would then be used to weave straight strips of wool, using a simple upright loom of vertical threads. These threads, known as the warp, could be suspended from a beam, or the branch of a tree, with small wooden or clay weights so as to keep them taut, allowing the weaver to move the woof thread in and out. The reconstruction of a loom from Qasrin in this picture illustrates this perfectly. Such a loom yielded two strips of cloth, about three feet long. These could then be joined to create a sleeveless garment. Mary’s mantle would have fringes on the bottom and be tightened around her waist with a ribbon. A man’s mantle was very similar, but shorter, and girded with a leather belt, or one made of cloth.
Places Touched by Jesus: The Fields of Nazareth. Was Joseph a carpenter, as the Gospel of Mark tells us, or a farmer? (Mark 6:3). The Greek word tektōn, which traditionally has been translated as “carpenter,” actually means something else: a (skilled) worker in either stone, wood, or metal. Good, workable wood was rare in Lower Galilee. In fact, the parables that Jesus uses throughout his ministry do not refer to carpentry at all. Instead, he uses the vocabulary of the fields. Time and again, we hear him talk about seeds and sowing, about the joys of a full orchard, or the frantic urgency of harvest time, which Jesus must have observed as a child. The conclusion is therefore that Joseph was undoubtedly skilled in wood and masonry, but that he complemented his income by tending to the ancestral fields of his family, as almost everyone else in Galilee did.
Places Touched by Jesus: The Threshing Floor. We hear this a lot in the Gospels: the threshing floor. What is this place? During the harvest, the sheaves of wheat were taken to an elevated place that could catch the prevailing winds. Here, the sheaves were beaten or trod upon with a threshing board, to separate the kernels of grain from the stalks. As the picture shows, a threshing board was a wooden slab studded with jagged stones or iron bits on the bottom. The wheat was then winnowed — thrown up into the air by a fork so that the lighter chaff separated from the grain in the wind. Such a “threshing floor” was a very important place in the life of a village. The spot in Jerusalem that King David chose for the Tabernacle (which later became the Temple) was the threshing floor of the Jesubites. The place is also the setting for one of John the Baptist’s most dramatic prophesies: “The winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary,” the Baptist says, “but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:17).
Places Touched by Jesus: The School. Believe it or not, but this small chamber with benches created a sensation when first discovered in 2009. You see, for a long time, biblical scholars believed that few, if any, Galilean schools existed in Jesus’ time. The consensus was that synagogue schools only emerged after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., when the cardinal role of the sanctuary was wiped from Jewish life. Instead, in an age when illiteracy was near-universal, most schooling was done at home, focused on religious observance. Deuteronomy urges parents to “impress [the commandments] on your children” (Deuteronomy 6:7). But this idea was thrown out the window when in 2009, Dina Avshalom-Gorni discovered an ancient synagogue in Magdala, the town of Mary Magdalene, dated to 27 A.D. What caused the most excitement was the discovery of a bet midrash or “study room,” shown in this photo, which was clearly meant as a place of schooling. This proves that there were schools in Jesus’ time, which could explain how Jesus, the son of a poor couple, became a rabbi, a “Teacher” deeply versed in the Torah.
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