Archaeologist and devout Muslim Mohammed Al Waheeb carries three volumes of the New Testament in the back of his car, two in Arabic and one in English, and spends hours pondering the ancient texts in his quest to better understand the story of Jesus’ baptism.
Here, just east of the Jordan River, Waheeb and his team of archaeologists believe they have identified the site where John the Baptist lived and preached and where Jesus’ baptism probably took place: along a little-more-than-a-mile stretch of a spring-fed stream running to the River Jordan.
So important is this site becoming in the Christian world that Pope John Paul II plans to visit it at the outset of his Holy Land trip March 21.
Standing atop a hill where late Roman-era baptismal pools have recently been found, the pope is expected to bless thousands of pilgrims with water drawn from the nearby spring, known today as Wadi el-Kharrar.
Evidence mounts
The papal visit will undoubtedly catapult this once obscure site onto the international stage as the archaeological evidence mounts that John baptized Jesus on the eastern side of the Jordan River. Until now, modern-day pilgrims have commonly visited sites on the river’s western shore within Israel or the Israeli-occupied West Bank to mark the baptismal event.
“The evidence, I think, is compelling when you put together the archaeological findings, the biblical text and early Byzantine records. I’m personally convinced that Jesus was baptized while John was on the east bank of the Jordan River,” says Rami Khoury, a prominent Jordanian writer who is completing a book on Jordan and Bible history. He is a member of a Jordanian Royal Commission overseeing the new site’s development.
“It was here in Jordan that Christianity was born,” declares Jordan’s minister of tourism, Akel Biltaji, who has made the promotion of the proposed baptismal site one of the key aims of his office. “It was in this place, at Jesus’ baptism, that the heavens opened up to the presence of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
On the other side of the river, Israel’s Yizhar Hirschfeld, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert in Byzantine archaeology who visited the site a year ago, is almost as enthusiastic as the Jordanians about the new finds that have been unearthed.
“The excavations at Wadi el-Kharrar are a wonderful discovery,” Hirschfeld says. “It is a moving site that integrates the historical literature of the pilgrims’ accounts with the geographical evidence and archaeological finds. I, too, would prefer to locate the site where John himself lived and baptized on the eastern part of the Jordan River.”
The extensive excavations along the stream bed have uncovered a string of ancient churches and baptismal pools with some remains dating back 1,800 to 2,000 years to the Roman era during or just after Jesus’ lifetime. The churches date back to the Byzantine period, beginning in the fourth century when Christianity first took hold in the region.
Khoury and Waheed tie the earliest settlement remains to John 1:28, which describes an ancient settlement known as “Bethany Beyond the Jordan” as the home of John the Baptist.
More than half a dozen pilgrims’ accounts from later periods, as well as a famous sixth century mosaic map of the Holy Land uncovered a century ago point to the same area as the focus of John’s activities.
The pilgrim records, together with the archaeological evidence of immersion pools and water systems, also suggest John, like the early Christians, generally preferred to baptize in Wadi el-Kharrar spring or nearby pools.
Despite their historic link to the New Testament story, the East Bank baptismal sites gradually fell into oblivion. Western pilgrims who made the difficult journey to Jerusalem in antiquity probably preferred the easier access to the Jordan River the West Bank offered, said Hirschfeld, and thus came to celebrate the baptism at a newer site across the river.
Typical pilgrimages
That baptismal site on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the river is surrounded by minefields and military outposts and is typically visited by Christian Orthodox pilgrims who are permitted entry by military authorities to re-enact the baptism ritual on annual church holidays.
The site is marked by a sizable medieval-era monastery built on Byzantine ruins and clearly visible from the Jordanian excavation site.
For most of the past century, the political conflict between Israel and the Arab world kept the East Jordan side of the river shrouded in obscurity at a time when most of the Holy Land was being thoroughly explored by biblical archaeologists.
But the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty opened the way for the sites to be explored, as Jordanian troops deployed away from the edge of the river, which had long marked the de facto border. Eventually, Jordan hopes to make a name for itself on the Holy Land tourism map with a site rivaling those of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth in importance to the Christian world.
Generally speaking, people think of the Holy Land as being west of the River Jordan. But that’s not true; this is also the Holy Land,” said Ruston Mikhijian, supervisor of the archaeological preservation and restoration work at the Jordan site and a devout Armenian Christian.
“That’s why the pope is visiting here, following in the footsteps of the patriarchs and prophets from east to west.”
(RNS)
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