JOHN057 - Where Is Bethany Beyond the Jordan?

John 1:22-29

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hello, my friends. It's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And today we're working on a missing location mystery. We're in John chapter 1, and we're trying to make sense of where this Bethany Beyond the Jordan place would be. It's I mean it's kind of a big deal because Jesus got baptized there. I would like to go to where Jesus got baptized. I would like to picture the scene here in John chapter one. I mean, the the whole Trinity was on site. I would love to go stand in the place or put my feet in the water at the place where God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit were all present and visible together in front of a whole like that that would be very exciting to me. But like so many things from the ancient world that are only famous for one thing, and that fame was kind of short-lived, like it just the era didn't last that long. A lot of these places we lose track of where exactly that was. But when you do deep dive into how history affects locations and location memory, you start to realize pretty quickly, oh yeah, yeah, I see how we could lose a place here and there. And Bethany Beyond the Jordan, I would count as a lost place because we don't know for sure. Now it's possible that one of the handful of locations that people still speculate that is the correct location for Bethany Beyond the Jordan. It's possible we got the right place. I would bet that one of these places is correct. But today I'm going to take a little bit of time and think about what the case is for all of them and how we know. Here's the verse we're dealing with. John 1, 28. It says, This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan where John was baptizing. Okay. Well, we talked last time around about how pretty clearly that seems to be hinting at something east of the Jordan River, because John or any good Jewish author would write from the perspective of Jerusalem and God's holy hill and the location of the temple. That's the center of the world. So if he's saying beyond the Jordan, that would mean on the other side of the Jordan River from the temple. Most people in history agree with that just initial knee-jerk read as to how to read that phrase. But there are some people who argue that maybe John baptized on the Jerusalem side, that is the west bank of the Jordan River, or that he baptized in more than one place. I'm going to go from least likely to most likely candidates here. In recent years, there have been some arguments that Bethany beyond the Jordan describes some area in modern-day Jordan, way up north and way east of the Sea of Galilee, like kind of out in the wilderness area, where if you're familiar with the story of Jesus, this would be like the place where the herdsmen who had the pigs that Jesus cast demons into. And then they were like, ah, you cast demons into pigs, that makes us uncomfortable. You gotta leave now. It'd be like that kind of region, but even further east. The support for this is there's a few little wadies and streams out there, and a lot of Jesus' early life or early ministry stuff seems to have happened up around the Sea of Galilee. Maybe he would have been out in that direction. The weakness of this position is that there's not a lot of reason to think it. I don't, it's just um it's very, very speculative. There's nothing built out there. And you know, Christians don't go out to that part of the world to get baptized. You know, like you know, Mark Twain kind of made fun of us for this in the late 1800s. He wrote a book called Idiots Abroad. I think it's a book. Maybe it's like a short story or a caricature or something. But he was commenting on how gullible tourists from Europe and particularly America were when they started to go to the Holy Land and people there kind of take advantage of them and be like, oh, this is this. It's this very special thing from the Bible, but a lot of it was made up. Well, I think it's kind of mean to take advantage of those people, but yeah, also I understand people are far from home and they they want to believe that they're standing where something important happened about that they've studied their whole lives in church and Sunday school. And I think that is what gives rise to maybe the second possible location for the baptism of Jesus that I don't think is very credible at all. This place is called, how do you say, Yardanit? Yardanit. I don't know for sure how to say it. I've just I've been there once. I poked around this place, it's beautiful, it's interesting. It's just on the south side of the Sea of Galilee, very close to a McDonald's, so you can refresh yourself if you need to after getting baptized in the Jordan River. The water is still very pretty up north as it's coming out of the Sea of Galilee. It's kind of this nice aquamarine, it isn't moving too fast, whereas the water down by the Dead Sea is, I mean, at this point in history, it's just nasty. It's all pumped out and like it's almost like a slurry in places. I mean, I haven't touched it, but where the Jordan River gets really skinny, it looks like if you dipped your hand in there sometimes, it would have texture to it and not water texture. Up north, this is not the case at all. It's absolutely lovely. And there's this place that if you go and drive around Israel, you're gonna see it. It's right on the side of the road. It's like this uh just beautiful baptismal. It looks kind of like a a resort or like maybe hot springs in the American West. You know, if you go to the mountains, like sometimes they'll build into natural hot springs. You got like little step-down steps and stuff. It's like that, except it's a cold water baptismal site. But I don't think there's any actual historic support for this being Bethany beyond the Jordan, other than maybe if you look at only the baptismal accounts of Jesus in the synoptics, where they all kind of keep him up north. They don't tell the story of him dipping down into Jerusalem earlier in his life. They have him up north doing Sea of Galilee stuff until about the midpoint of each of the first three Gospels when he goes south to Jerusalem. So, in terms of you know, the limited scope, all four Gospels don't tell us everything. I mean, John says there'd be enough to fill all the pages in all the world if he told you everything about Jesus, but I mean they all had to make editorial choices. So it fits with the itinerary of Jesus, his temptation and his baptism and what happens right after that. Kind of fits with maybe a northern Jordan River possibility, but there's no historical precedent for this that I'm aware of. All of the earliest rememberers of the location of Bethany beyond the Jordan have it much further south. But if you if you go driving now, uh it's a beautiful place to stop. And I think particularly a lot of uh Protestant evangelical Christians go there for a Jordan River baptism in a part of the country that is environmentally safe and usually a lot more politically safe as well. So now we've started kind of up north and east in a place that I don't think is the site of Bethany beyond the Jordan at all. Now we've moved south a little ways to the Jordan River coming out of the Sea of Galilee. And there's definitely a lovely facility there for baptisms, but I don't think there's any kind of strong case to be made historically for that being where Jesus was baptized. I'm not the expert on this. I this is stuff I've studied over the years and I kind of brushed up on a little bit. If you know something different than I do about that location, by all means, I would want to know. I'm just trying to give you the uh 10,000-foot view here. But then as you go further down the Jordan to where the water gets a little less fortunate these days, as you get down to within five, six, seven miles of the Dead Sea, there are a few locations that historically people have thought maybe was the case. Right next to Jericho, there's a location on the west bank of the Jordan River that some people argue might be one of the places John baptized, but that the place where John baptized when Jesus was baptized was on the other side beyond the Jordan. Uh, could be, don't know, didn't have time to dig all the way into it. I just know there is some tradition for a baptismal site on the west side. And I wrote, I wrote down a note here. I can barely read my own handwriting. I think it's Kasar al-Yahoud, I think is the name of this location. Here at least, you do have some evidence of early Christian veneration shrines, church kind of stuff from Eastern Christianity. So this isn't like a come lately opinion that there was a baptismal site on the west side of the Jordan. Um, people have thought it for a very, very long time. But then on the east side of the Jordan, you've got a location called Al Maktas. I of course I'm not saying that right. We can just all laugh at me, or Wadi Al-Kharar. And this location is the strongest candidate. I think this recently got designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If so, I mean, if I'm remembering that right, then clearly those folks looked into it and were like, yeah, that's the best candidate right there. We can't go and have like five UNESCO World Heritage Sites that are all maybe where Jesus got baptized. And if that is official at this point, and if it's not, it's got to be close. But if that is official at this point, the reason it's official is because, in large part, the provenance, that is, the historical chain of custody of this location. But I love these kind of side jaunts and deep dives into some of the geographical and historical questions surrounding the Bible. You can let me know what you think. By the way, I totally forgot last week with the book coming out and everything, I forgot to do a Patreon discussion thread. So if some of you become disillusioned and you're like, what are we even going to do the discussion threads anymore around here? The answer is yes. My bad. That was dumb. I got distracted. Typically, we do a free for everybody. You just sign up, you don't have to pay anything or anything. It's open to non-paying and paying members over on the Patreon, patreon.com slash the TmbH podcast. And then we just have one discussion thread for each week. So there will be one this week. You can tell me which of these locations make the most sense to you. You can tell me things you know about this that I don't know about this. You can also tell me that that's just entirely too much history. At any rate, this most popular location, Al Magtas or Wadi Al-Kharar, is actually a little bit off of the Jordan River, and it's fed by these springs. So the water would have been fresh, it wouldn't have been rushing so hard. I mean, now the Jordan River, it gets irrigated off and everything. It's just like this mud flow by the time it gets to the Dead Sea. But back then it would have been moving fast, like maybe not a great place to do baptisms. I don't know. But this little cove, this little spring-fed area just off of the Jordan, there's good reason to think this is it. And one of the best reasons is there's tons of stuff from the early church that is built up around here, more than anywhere else by far, that indicates that this place was regarded by early Christians as being the place. Why does that matter? Well, because you don't have much else to go on. It looks like the place name here, Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, is a nickname, or it was just such an obscure place that wasn't famous for anything else that it would be easily forgotten if not for what happened here with the baptism. Obviously, there was a place called Bethany that comes up a lot. It's right by Jerusalem. It's nowhere near the realm of where this baptism stuff was happening. And obviously, John knew that most of his readers would be like, oh, Bethany, that's the place right there by Jerusalem. And so John had to clarify: no, no, no, this is Bethany on the other side of the Jordan. So this is the less famous Bethany. Some people even debate whether we're translating Bethany correctly and whether that might be translated better in other way. But no matter how you slice it, we just don't have good location name history on this place. But we do have good continuous reverence, worship, veneration, church building history here. And one of the most interesting expressions of that, and I am going to take time tomorrow to do it, is this ancient itinerary from the fourth century, where this guy went from France and he marked every leg of his journey for how to get all the way to the Holy Land. And then he gets there and he tells us what it looked like in the 300s AD, like what he saw and how long it took to get everywhere, and what remains were still present and what was gone and how he imagined it. And then he tells us about his trip back home. Well, he doesn't get all the way home, he goes back as far as Milan. So tomorrow we're gonna get a glimpse inside the ancient Holy Land and the Bethany beyond the Jordan, but also some other stuff as we take a look at that itinerary. And then the day after that, we're gonna get into Jesus getting baptized and the story of how that goes down here moving forward in John 1.29. Okay, ancient Holy Land Travel Itinerary, manyana. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.