Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And this week we have embarked on a three-day journey following in the footsteps of ancient pilgrims in the Roman Empire in the 300s AD who have decided to travel from Northwest France all the way to the place where the most important story they've ever heard happened: the Holy Land, Jerusalem. They want to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. And for us to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, we're going to walk in the footsteps of these pilgrims who made this perilous journey 1700 years ago. Now, in day one, we walked and rode with them across most of Europe. On day two of our journey, we entered the Holy Land. We explored Galilee and the area where so much of the gospel story of Jesus occurred. We made our way down to Jerusalem and we trekked down to Jericho and we made camp right by the Jordan River. Now, today we're breaking camp and we're getting up, and the next stop on our itinerary is the one we've been traveling for, we've been looking for this whole time. It's the location of Jesus' baptism. With that said, I'm going to have my friend Jeff play some music, then we're going to go find a shallow spot to cross the southern end of the Jordan River and see if there's anything left for us to look at at Bethany beyond the Jordan. Here we go. And if someone casts himself in so he might swim the very water, turns him over. That's true. I've been in there. That's what it does. It's so salty. Your buoyancy's all screwed up. You get in there and you're just bobbing around like an idiot. From there to the Jordan where the Lord was baptized by John. Aha! From there to the Jordan where the Lord was baptized by John, five miles. Now we can tell from context clues that the traveler has turned north going up the Jordan River from the top of the Dead Sea now. And it says there is a place above the river, a little hill in that shore where Elijah was seized up into heaven. Well, now that's interesting, isn't it? I happen to have looked into this a little bit. The the story goes that there's it's called Elijah's Hill. It's just on the Jordan side of the Jordan River. And this hill, which really isn't much, has long been said, I mean, at least 1700 years, right? I mean, according to this, has long been said to be the place where Elijah was taken up into heaven. Now you remember our Elijah conversations from you know, whatever, week or so ago when we're talking about John the Baptist being asked, you know, then who are you? Are you Elijah? And he says, I am not. No, I'm not the literal reincarnation of Elijah, but Jesus confirms that John the Baptist is the idea, the one who carries forward the prophetic mantle of Elijah that's predicted at the end of the Old Testament. Jesus confirms that later on. So isn't it interesting then that if these Bordeaux pilgrims account is to be believed, that right next to where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, who is the new Elijah, if you can accept it according to Jesus, that right literally in the background, like we're talking, I wouldn't look to pictures, we're talking like a hundred feet, uh a few hundred feet. It's just right there where the baptisms were occurring, the hill of Elijah would have been immediately visible to everybody. And if people knew, like that's where Elijah left, and now John the Baptist is baptizing people right there. And it's kind of like, well, this is where Elijah returned, not reincarnated. Remember, Elijah shows up again at the transfiguration. He doesn't look like John the Baptist, he's they're separate people, but we know Elijah handed forward his prophetic mantle of authority to Elisha in a way. It's kind of now it's been passed down to John the Baptist by the work of the Holy Spirit, by the work of God. So maybe for you and me, you we cruise through the gospels and we're like, well, you know, he's he's Elijah because he's in that role. But if the original audience knew that there was a thing called the Hill of Elijah right there, where Elijah left, and now John the Baptist is baptizing right there. And if the original audience was like, oh, that's it, Bethany beyond the Jordan, like Bethany beyond the Jordan is where Elijah left. Okay, well, John doesn't spell it out for readers 2,000 years later, but maybe the original audience would have been like, Oh. So he's not the reincarnation of Elijah, but I mean he's he's right. Uh the last time we saw Elijah, he was standing right there. So that's that's pretty interesting to me. There's a place above the river, a little hill in that shore where Elijah was seized up into heaven. From Jerusalem as you go to Bethlehem, four miles above the road on the right side is the tomb where Rachel, wife of Jacob, is buried. And then the journey, you know, seems to backtrack and just go north from there. So sort of the return point of this whole pilgrimage, the high point. Remember, I was talking about that chiastic structure. It's a it's an ascending action. Most important thing happens at the middle point and then descending action that mirrors the ascending action. That's how this is structured. Remember we're talking about that? Well, the middle point, the turnaround point, seems to be the site of Jesus' baptism at the hill of Elijah. Isn't that very, very interesting? Well, from here, it flips back around into travel itinerary. Okay, we go through again from Heracles through Macedonia. Travel, travel, travel, travel. There's a couple of fun little historical notes about the burial place of Euripides and the birthplace of Alexander the Great. That's all very interesting. Going back through Greece. Now we're back to Italy, now we're back to Rome, now we're north out of Rome, and now we are back to Milan. And the final sentence is end of itinerary. I just think that's absolutely fascinating. Because I don't know about you, but I read through this stuff and I yearn for adventure. I want to go to the places where this happened. I want to go without a guide. That is how I've done it when I've gone. I want to figure it out with my own access to ancient sources, my own access to the Bible. I want to go on a pilgrimage like this. I don't want to go on a super safe guided tour where everything's done by Google Maps and somebody, Skipper Dan style, repeats all of the exact same jokes and phrases and things that they wrote up one time for their talk. I'm not saying that's bad, and there are very good tours of the Holy Land with very competent people who know their stuff and they don't just recite things at you. I know this to be the case. But if you're like me and you've got a little bit of an adventurer's heart, I bet you're going through this itinerary with me the last couple of days and thinking, dang, that calls to me. That's pretty cool. Risk and all, going into the unknown, figuring out how to communicate with people, bumbling along, making it all work, breaking down along the way, having the adventures and the war stories of this unknown that you went and unpacked with a buddy or a couple of buddies. Man, that's cool. And then to have the culmination of all of it, to be you know, passing. I mean, you start in a place that's very familiar, home, in this case, Bordeaux. The further you get from home, the less familiar it feels. You know, Rome would have been a pretty cool stop, but probably all of that you just knew by legend and storytelling and secondhand stuff as well. But most of the places you're going as you get further from home are less and less familiar. Like, I don't know any stories about here. I don't know where we are. I just got to keep walking or riding this rental horse down this road. But then as you start to get closer to Jerusalem and you get into the orbit of the Bible story that you've studied so much, all of a sudden you're like, hey, I actually sort of know this geography. I actually know some people who used to live here. I know some stuff. I wonder, you know, if it's 300 AD. I wonder if I know any of the descendants of any of the people who I know from the Bible who are still here. I wonder if I can talk to anybody who's, you know, grandpa's grandpa passed down stories about the time Jesus passed through town and what that was like. So the arc of this pilgrimage that I find so enviable would be you're going from the very familiar to the less familiar, less familiar, less familiar. Whoa, now you're back into the much more familiar. And then you reach that turnaround point and things begin to get less biblically familiar. You get back into the wilds of things you don't know, and eventually you make your way all the way back home. Now, this energizes me. And the idea, you know, everybody says, like, oh, if I could travel back in time, I'd go do this. You know, I'd I'd go see Jesus and all of this stuff. Well, if that were eliminated, and they're like, no, you can't go within 300 years of Jesus, I'd be like, okay, then I want to go 300 years and one day after the time of Jesus to where all of this stuff happened to see what was still there. Around this same time, the Queen Mother, I don't know if that's what you call it in Imperial Rome, but Constantine's mother, Helena, had the same thought as these pilgrims. And she was like, I'm gonna go to Jerusalem. I'm gonna find everything that's still there that I can confirm. We're gonna document it, and I'm gonna bring some stuff back to Rome. So if you don't make it to the Holy Land, but you want a little dash of what these Bordeaux pilgrims experienced, you can find some of that, particularly in English, I think the church is called the Holy Cross of Jerusalem. San Croce in Jerusalem is the name of the church. It's barely inside the walls of Rome. Basically, if you come out of St. John's Lateran and you just keep walking straight down the road at that front door, it's a little bit of a hike. But you can get down there and there's relics that Helena, mother of Constantine, brought back from the Holy Land in like exactly this era that the Bordeaux pilgrims were there. And also, famously, I think it was Helena who brought back the stairs from Pilate's palace where Jesus beat up and injured and everything, where you know Jesus ascended those stairs. There's a shrine called Scala Santa, Sancta Scala, something like that. It's right next to St. John's Lateran. You have to go up the thing on your knees, but you can go in there as Martin Luther also did, and you can go up the stairs from Pilate's Palace where Jesus was, or I don't know. I think it's Pilate's Palace, like the the building right there adjacent to uh, you know, the temple complex where the trial of Jesus and everything happened. So the point is, yeah, we're a long time removed from this, but probably if you're still listening, this stirs your soul a little bit as well, and it's not totally gone. If you go to Rome, if you go to Jerusalem, you can still get some little fragment of this experience for yourself, even if you know Google Maps is going to make the whole trip overly safe and overly boring for you. Okay, this was fun because we talked about Bible stuff. We talked about deep in Christian history how other people who were long since dead, but Christians before us responded to Bible stuff. We got to talk about archaeology, we got to talk about how the history of where things are can get a little bit murky and how we can depend on people from the past and what they wrote down to kind of cobble it back together. And we also got a fun little nugget in here from this itinerary that might help us better understand a lot of these questions about Elijah and that might even point to the providence of God and fulfilling prophecy in having John the Baptist do these baptisms, if indeed the Bordeaux pilgrims had the right spot, and having John the Baptist do these baptisms right next to the hill where Elijah left. Very interesting. Thank you for indulging this week's Bethany Beyond the Jordan side quest. As promised, we'll be getting into the next part of the story in John chapter one, next time around, where Jesus actually gets baptized. And I think that as we do that, we should just imagine that I think the best guess for us as we visualize that story is to picture it where the Bordeaux pilgrims were told that it happened next to the Hill of Elijah at this Bethany beyond the Jordan place, about five miles north of where the Jordan enters into the Dead Sea. You can go and Google that, look at pictures of it for yourself. So as we encounter that story in the coming days, hey, like we've actually kind of put in the work and the effort to earn the right to visualize it in this context, which I think is fun. All right, I've had a lovely time. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.