Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. Take a walk with Dr. Bruce Cresson in this June 1986 Classic article as he recounts his first of several trips to the Holy Land, a tour of biblical sites. This article is republished as originally written, with the geopolitical context of Israel in 1986.
Excitement and a touch of trepidation had kept me awake all night. The experience was brand new. On Saturday morning in Waco I had boarded a commuter plane for Love Field (D-FW was almost two years from opening). New York’s Kennedy Airport was the next stop. Then a 747 to Frankfurt.
I was amazed at the shortness of the night as we raced at more than six hundred miles per hour to meet the rising sun. In the gray dawn we disembarked. I still remember how cold it was in contrast to the July heat of Texas. A short wait and then I was aboard a flight to Tel Aviv. Midday passed as we rushed on eastward: and in mid-afternoon, approaching the Mediterranean coast of Israel, the excitement aboard the plane became so real that anyone could sense it.
A sizeable portion of the passengers aboard were Jewish pilgrims visiting the land that to them was so very dear and sacred. Prayer shawls and prayer books appeared dotted up and down the aisle; and as anticipation rose, prayers were chanted and heads bobbed rhythmically with the tones of the prayer chants. The humming grew to a resounding roar as land came in sight. I still remember seeing from the air the urban footprint of Tel Aviv and the orderly rows of citrus groves as we descended to the runway of Ben Gurion Airport.
The wonder and excitement faded as we faced the stringent security measures at the airport. This was 1972, and only a few weeks after a terrorist attack in the airport there. (That was the first and remains the only successful terrorist attack at the Ben Gurion Airport.) But quickly we were through the arrival protocol and directed out to face the land I had so long studied and taught about.
This was the first of my eighteen (and still counting) trips to the “Holy Land.” I was teaching biblical archaeology at Baylor. I had been well trained in theory, discoveries, interpretation, etc., but I decided that a summer of actual digging would enhance my teaching considerably. And it certainly did!
‘We can know approximately where things happened in most cases. Always what happened transcends where it happened, but even being approximately at the place seems to clothe the event in a more dynamic reality.’
Some lectures had to be corrected, but many more were refurbished with relevant and experiential materials, as well as occasional illustrations. My slide collection now exceeds twenty thousand, ranging from the grandeur of Mount Sinai at sunrise to technical details of archaeological sites to an ant struggling to carry a small shard of ancient pottery.
This first trip was the only one on which I was alone (except for a much later one on a research and writing assignment at Tel Aviv University). Many of the biblical sites I first visited alone, but I learned that the sharing of seeing, understanding, and feeling gives a broadened dimension to the experience. Many marvelous days have been spent in this land–sometimes in solitary meditation but more often in the joys of shared experiences.
“Holy Land” needs some explanation. It is no more holy than is any other part of God’s creation. It is biblically appropriate to say that any place where God’s presence comes alive and real to one is indeed “holy ground.” Since so many have come to feel at least with a renewed sense of reality the presence of God through the experience of visiting there, “Holy Land” is an apt designation.
Identifying the Holy Land gets caught up in the thorny issue of what we often call “The Middle East Problem.” Both Israel and Jordan must share the designation of Holy Land. But Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and some of the Mediterranean islands must also be included in the world of biblical events. Of course, the primary areas of biblical action, most would agree, are Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.
As I visit and contemplate various places in the Holy Land, I cannot help but wonder what it was like back “then.” As an archaeologist I know full well that surfaces exposed in ancient times are often covered later by many feet of accumulated material. There may be some truth in the quip by a tourist: “We didn’t walk today where Jesus walked–we ran ten feet above where he walked.”
Of course, in many places excavators have taken us down to appropriate and identifiable surfaces associated with biblical periods. Serious study and informed imagination can combine to help the mind’s eye see what it must have been like back then. Seldom can I find convincing evidence to identify a particular and exact place with an event or statement from the Bible. We can know approximately where things happened in most cases. Always what happened transcends where it happened, but even being approximately at the place seems to clothe the event in a more dynamic reality.
One of my favorite places to visit is the beautiful Mount of Beatitudes and the nearby Church of the Beatitudes. There is no way we can recover today the precise location of the place where Christ delivered the Sermon on the Mount. But if it were not on this sloping hillside, it was on one very similar and not far distant. For me this uncertainty does not detract from the experience of seeing the broad panorama of the hills, the Jordan Valley emptying into the Sea of Galilee, the birds, the flowers–and here reading that incomparable message from the Master Teacher, I almost become, in my mind’s eye, one of those Galileans sitting at the feet of the Teacher long ago.
Next year in Jerusalem” has fallen from the lips of Jews for many ages, affirming the significance of that place in their religious longings and experience. Jerusalem is a city with similar religious significance for both Christianity and Islam. That strange, multifaceted city is center stage for any Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Temple Mount, Gethsemane, Calvary, the Tomb, the Mount of Olives–these and many more sites underscore earth-changing, or more correctly people-changing, events that transpired in or near this city.
A visit to Jerusalem confirms for Christians the inseparability of the Old Testament and the New. The newly exposed remains of Old Testament Jerusalem (in the excavations led by Yigal Shiloh), along with the fortification walls from various ages of Jerusalem, even some from a thousand or more years before David, give their silent testimony to the vibrant city of ages past.
A visit to the Spring of Gihon makes very real the strategy of David’s army in capturing the Jebusite fortress. The water tunnel built by order of Hezekiah evokes both wonder at the engineering ability of the eighth century B.C. and the stark reality of the people’s fear of the invading Assyrians–the awesome “military machine” of that age.
The “wailing wall” is impressive for the massive stones laid in the time of Herod the Great, but it is more than a stone wall. It has become a huge open-air synagogue, reflecting the wedding of nationalism and religious devotion present among the “religiously observant” Israelis. Physically, it is no more than a portion of a retaining wall built by Herod to enlarge the area for the Temple and its complex which he rebuilt in the decades before the birth of Christ; but it has become a symbol of that Temple and its magnificence in the first centuries B.C. and A.D.
A trip—of necessity on foot—through the narrow lanes of the “Old City” is an unforgettable experience. It is a multisensory experience. Sight, sound, feel, smell–all combine in the crowded lanes with jostling crowds.
The cries of vendors and delivery men pushing their carts with more concern for speed then for the people in the way, the call to prayer from the minarets–all assault the ear drums.
The smell is constantly changing–from the musty smell of leather workers to the aroma of resin from the woodworking shops; from the pungent odors of the fish markets to the aroma of roasting coffee.
‘To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow Christians from all over the world before an empty tomb is an experience difficult to equal in Christian worship.’
The sight varies from the strange mixture of people of many races, cultures, lands, crowded together, to the shops displaying their wares along the crowded alleys–here a recently butchered lamb hanging at the open front of a shop, there colorful garments hanging over the street; elsewhere colorful pastries carefully arranged in artful displays. Always the invitation, “allo, I have good bargains–it doesn’t cost to look.”
Unusual to Americans is the feel–pushing, pressing to get through the crowd. One literally feels the teeming crowds of the old city.
In and around the “Old City” are places of significance for the Christian. The Church of All Nations commemorates the Garden of Gethsemane and, indeed, may be at that place. The gnarled old olive trees create an authentic atmosphere. It is a place appropriate for quiet meditation upon Jesus’ experience in the Garden.
To the south and west across the Kidron Valley, rising just above the Pool of Siloam, are steps climbing the slope of Mount Zion. All indications are that these were laid in Roman times, and it is well within reason that Jesus was led up these very steps on his way from his arrest in the Garden to the house of Caiaphas. At the top of these steps is the Church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu (cock’s crow), which is probably on the site of Caiaphas’s house. Descent into a prison hewn into the limestone below takes one into what are claimed to be the holding cells used for prisoners in the time of Christ.
Another authentic site is in what is now the basement of the Sisters of Zion Convent, just north of the Temple Mount. The present basement surface was street or floor level of the Roman Fortress, Antonio. On this pavement Jesus likely stood before Pilate and received the sentence of death. From this spot the Via Dolorosa–the Way of Sorrows–marks the traditional route to Calvary along which Jesus carried his cross to the “hill of the skull.”
Christian visitors to Jerusalem are often confused by the conflicting identifications of Calvary and the place of Jesus’ burial. Often the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is called the “Catholic Calvary”; and the Garden Tomb, or “Gordon’s Calvary,” is called the “Protestant Calvary.” Here I admit that I’m torn between the two. My mind and my research tell me that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the probable place of Jesus’ death and burial, while my heart is drawn to Gordon’s Calvary and the Garden Tomb.
I conclude that Calvary in Jesus’ day must have appeared much like Gordon’s Calvary but was located where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today. The English-language worship service at the Garden Tomb each Sunday is at 9 A.M. To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow Christians from all over the world and sing “He Lives” before an open and empty tomb is an experience difficult to equal in Christian worship.
There is so much more in Jerusalem, but volumes would be required to tell it all.
One other memorable place stands out in my mind, with some bias admitted: my dissertation research centered on the Edomites and Obadiah. We must travel across the Jordan River with all of the tensions associated with crossing this rigidly guarded international boundary. Photographs are forbidden. Here the famous Jordan River is barely a good-sized creek, judged by American standards. In Jordan there are marvelous sites to see–Jerash, Amman, Mount Nebo, and the city of Petra.
Petra, famous for the Nabatean structures carved from the cliffs of sandstone that ring the valley where it is situated, can be entered only across forbidding mountain cliffs of through the narrow “siq” or winding, mile-long pass. Inside this valley rises a steep-sided mountain, nearly inaccessible, where the Edomites built their city, Sela. It is as secure a place as could be imagined–before modern aerial capabilities.
Hear Obadiah condemn the securely self-satisfied of Sela:
The Pride of your heart has deceived you,
You who life in the cliff of Sela (The rock),
Whose dwelling is high,
Who say in your heart,
‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’
Though you soar aloft like the eagle,
Though your nest is set among the stars,
There I will bring you down, says Yahweh.” (Obad. 3:4)
The ruins excavated on the top testify to this truth. What more vivid comprehension of Obadiah’s message is possible than to stand before Sela and remember?
That, you see, is what my pilgrimage is all about–not for the emotional experience, although that is present, and not for the thrill of faraway places, but for understanding more fully the Book I’m called to teach; being able to enhance the understanding of young minds and to kindle the fires of excitement about its reality and the relevance of its message. I wish that all could experience it as I have.
