I live in a small town. The population is about 20,000. I don’t feel terribly isolated, because we’re half an hour from a much larger town of about 200,000. And we’re right across the river from a good sized city of over 600,000. It’s worth noting that my small town is about twice the size of the largest cities in Galilee at the time of Jesus. At the time he began preaching the news of the kingdom of God, the capital of Galilee was Tiberias, with a population of about 10,000. Tiberias was a day’s walk from Nazareth, so Jesus …
Crown of Thorns
A Good Friday Meditation
Who told Jesus he had to die? Who told Jesus about the crown of thorns? Was he born knowing he was doomed to the cross? Did his parents tell him his destiny? Did he read it in the prophets? Maybe so. But then again, maybe not. We can’t know for sure how he learned it. Could it be that he discovered his destiny gradually? The same way you and I do, step by step, working it out? We read. We talk. We think. We pray. We listen. Bit by bit, we find our way in the world. The ancient creeds …
The Incident at Nazareth
Three of the gospels report a very strange incident at Nazareth. Jesus had spent some months making a name for himself all around Galilee. Then he came back to his hometown. And the villagers gave him a very cold shoulder. You can read all about it in Mark, in Matthew, and in Luke. Each of these gives us unique information. What Mark Tells Us Mark is our earliest gospel, and it tells the story in Mark 6:1-6. Jesus came to Nazareth with some of his disciples and was asked to teach in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Mark reports that …
On the Road to Jerusalem With Jesus
According to the gospels, Jesus routinely took the road to Jerusalem for the annual feasts. The main feasts were Passover (in early spring), Pentecost (in late spring), and Tabernacles (in early fall). But we know Jesus also spent at least one Hanukkah (early winter) in Jerusalem. For most of his life, Jesus lived in Nazareth, a village in Galilee about 60 miles north of Jerusalem. And for the last few years, he made his headquarters in Capernaum, another 20 miles or so east of Nazareth. Today, you can drive from Jerusalem to Galilee in less than two hours. But …
The Mysterious Brothers of Jesus
The mysterious “brothers of Jesus” are mentioned several times in the New Testament. Were they really his brothers? Or something else? That’s a much more complicated question than it looks. I think a good starting point is with the gospel of Mark. Most New Testament scholars believe that the gospel of Mark was the first of the four gospels to be written, sometime around the year AD 70. There’s an interesting story in Mark chapter 6, verses 1 to 6, about Jesus going to his hometown after he’d gotten somewhat famous in the rest of Galilee. You can read it …
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 …