Word: jesus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Next would have come a hike along the hill's crest, which would have led him to a place now occupied by a hotel called the Seven Arches. The view here is stunning. Directly below is an ancient necropolis--an immense graveyard dating back long before Jesus that could cause anyone, not just a religious rebel with a price on his head, to consider his mortality. The ground falls off sharply, dotted with stands of pine and, yes, silvery green olive trees. Jesus--or his donkey--would have picked his way from here down into the Kidron Valley...
...cosmopolitan. And it was also, unknowingly, the cradle for something else, a way of believing, of seeing, that would change the West and the rest of history. It is worth revisiting Jerusalem during this period not so much in celebration as in curiosity--to know the metropolis that shaped Jesus' last ministry and so wove itself into his great story, and to note, cautiously, the ways in which its vexations foreshadow those of Jerusalem today...
...Gospel of Luke that describes Jesus' childhood visit to Jerusalem. Though he had been there before--Luke says his family was visiting "as usual" for Passover--the 12-year-old from Nazareth, 60 miles to the north, must still have been agog walking south down the grand new Roman street toward the Temple's lower entrance. A stretch of that road is visible today, just below the Western Wall, majestically wide but piled high on one side with huge blocks of stone that rained from above during one of the city's many destructions...
There is a debate regarding exactly how citified the young Jesus would have been. Excavations of the city of Sepphoris, near Nazareth, reveal a bustling town, suggesting that he may have been less of a country lad than previous scholarship posited. But his native Galilee certainly had nothing to compare with this. Jerusalem was one of the biggest cities between Alexandria and Damascus, with a permanent population of some 80,000. During Passover, Succoth and Shavuoth, the great festivals during which Jews were obligated to make sacrifices at the Temple, between 100,000 and 250,000 visitors (historians differ) would...
...road with ox teams hauling huge slabs of limestone. Jerusalem, like today's Chicago, New York City or London, was a huge, ongoing building project. The sounds of construction would have mixed with the bleats and bellows of sacrificial animals for sale in streetside shops. The view to Jesus' left would have been taken up by a wall up to 150 ft. high--a wall not of the Temple itself but of a gargantuan platform atop which it perched. To his right would have been Jerusalem's Upper City, its Gold Coast, where the families of the priests who tended...