One of the most surprising verses in the New Testament is Luke 6:15, where we read that one of the twelve disciples of Jesus was a Zealot. His name was Simon, and Luke refers to him as “Simon who was called the Zealot.” The passage in Luke has two parallel passages in Mark 3:18 and Matthew 10:4. Newer translations of these passages typically also call this disciple “Simon the Zealot.” Older translations usually call him “Simon the Cananaean.” (“Cananaean” is just the Aramaic word “qanay” transliterated into the Greek word “kananiten” and then transliterated into the English word “Cananaean.” …
City of God
The Amazing Herod Family
If you’ve read through the New Testament, you might be rather surprised at how often “King Herod” keeps popping up in the story. The book of Matthew tells a story of how the evil King Herod killed all the babies in Bethlehem in an attempt to get rid of the infant Jesus. In the story, Joseph and Mary escape with their son to Egypt, and only return a few years later when they learn that Herod is dead. Thirty years later, Jesus is an adult preaching in Galilee, but then he gets in trouble with … King Herod again! …
The Gethsemane Cave
In the first scene of my novel Transgression, my heroine Rivka finds herself at the back of a mysterious cave in Jerusalem. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s traveled back in time through a wormhole to the year AD 57. When she comes out of the cave, she looks up and sees the Temple Mount rising in front of her. But it’s not the Temple Mount she remembers from the tour she took in Jerusalem on a hot summer day in the twenty-first century. The Temple Mount she’s looking at is clean. Spotless. New. And she begins to realize …