In the Beginning
If you want to learn something new about the Bible, you have to dig it up. John Wilson, an archeologist and Scripture scholar, decided that much 20 years ago. That led him to excavate Caesarea Philippi, an abandoned city in northern Israel near the Syrian border. Romans built it in the 1st century; the Gospel writers include it among the places Jesus visited. It is probably best known as the city set in the foothills of Mt. Hermon, where Jesus revealed his divine nature to his apostles.
Wilson, a silver-haired man in his 60s whose saddle shoes and logo sweater give no hint of his Indiana Jones-style alter ego, is about to publish what he and his Israel-based partner, Vassilios Tzaferis, have discovered in Caesarea Philippi: It looks as if Jesus was more welcome in that Roman city than his hometown; Jerusalem was not the only hub of Christianity in ancient Palestine; and a J. Paul Getty Museum-like palace was once the showpiece of a town Jesus knew well.
The mountainous region that Wilson compares to Colorado for its climate and clear spring waters is one of the first areas to be studied at Pepperdine University’s new biblical archeological institute in Malibu. Wilson is the institute’s founding director.
His home office on the school campus is filled with books about the Bible and the archeological sites of northern Israel. A few artifacts he has kept from his digs line the glass shelves. There are oil lamps the size of half dollars, long-necked perfume bottles 3 inches tall and bronze coins minted in Caesarea Philippi.
The digs have changed Wilson’s impressions about life in 1st-century Palestine. He refers to the city he is exploring as Banias, the modern Arab name for what was originally Paneas, the Greek name for the site. In about the 4th century BC, they dedicated it to Pan, their god of the fields and flocks, and built a shrine that is still in place.
By 20 BC, what is now modern-day Israel was part of the Roman empire. Augustus Caesar awarded Paneas to Herod the Great, Rome’s appointed king in Judea at the time of Jesus’ birth. Herod preserved the Greek god’s shrine but built a temple to Augustus in front of it. This helped earn Paneas a reputation as the most pagan of all the Roman cities in ancient Palestine. After Herod’s death in about 4 BC, his son, Phillip, inherited Paneas. He built it into a modern Roman capital and renamed it to honor both Caesar (Caesarea) and himself (Philippi).
Many Christians Left Jerusalem
Devout Jews kept their distance, but the first Christians, who apparently got along better with the Romans, settled there. Toward mid-century, when tensions between Jews and Romans finally erupted in war, many Christians fled Jerusalem for this northern city.
“The cultural context of early Christianity is more complex than we have realized,” Wilson says. “We tend to think of Jerusalem as its center in those years, but most of the activity went on in the north. Jesus was only in Jerusalem for about one week of his life, but he was in [the northern region of] Galilee for 30 years.” Many of the early Christians came from the north, others moved there after Jesus was crucified, he says.
Wilson agrees with scholars who say the first Christians were Jews who still considered themselves to be Jewish when they followed Jesus. Their form of Judaism was one of several developing in the 1st century.
“Judaism was in an experimental period, and it was becoming a very diverse religion,” Wilson says. “The Jews in Jerusalem tended to be more traditional. They worried about the people in the north and sent missionaries there to keep them in line.”
Cultural diversity and a willingness to challenge the established system had a powerful effect on Jewish life.
“Older institutions tend to be reformed from the sides, not the center,” Wilson says. While Jerusalem was considered the center of the faith, the northern cities fostered changes that led the followers of Jesus to break away from their religious roots.
Most of the architectural finds that Wilson plans to write about date from the second half of the century. By then, Herod’s grandson, Agrippa II, ruled the region. Starting in 53 AD, he transformed Caesarea Philippi into a showplace among Roman cities in the Near East with a Roman bath, a theater, gardens, stone sculptures and a colonnaded main street lined with shops. The newest find is a palace the size of two football fields with stone arcades, frescoes on the walls, mosaic floors and a fountain that Wilson compares to the Italian villa reconstructed in Malibu as the J. Paul Getty Museum. He believes the palace he is excavating was the home of Agrippa II.
“Archeology is detective work,” he says. “You find little clues. So far we’re dating the building in the late 1st century. Who could have built it at that time? That question leads us to Agrippa.”
Site Was Off-Limits Under Syrian Control
While Sepphoris, another northern city built by the Romans, has been under excavation for most of the century, Caesarea Philippi had been off limits to foreign archeologists until after the 1967 war, when Israel captured the territory from Syria. Parts of the region are still unavailable. When Wilson looks out over grass-covered mounds in Caesarea Philippi, he imagines 1st-century houses underneath. The signs nearby read, “Danger, Mine Field.” The bombs have not been dismantled since the war.
If they don’t detonate, there is still a chance that all work will stop, depending on the outcome of the current “land for peace” negotiations under way in the region.
“Banias could go back under Syrian control,” Wilson says. “In the past, the leadership there did not approve of archeology. I try to be nonpolitical about it. Archeologists need to work with history, not modern politics.”
Sometimes, after a long day of digging in Banias, Wilson and his colleagues look out across the border to a place they cannot legally enter from Israel.
“We sit there and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have dinner in Damascus?’ It’s only 35 miles away, but it might as well be on the moon.”
Pepperdine is not alone in excavating Caesarea Philippi. Wilson and Tzaferis are part of a consortium of five U.S. colleges and seminaries working together. For a dozen or so Pepperdine students each summer, the site is a field school. They spend the day digging, and after dinner they attend lectures, as part of a yearly summer program.
“I always tell my students that archeology is vandalism,” Wilson says. “You’re always tearing things up.”
Before he was named director of Pepperdine’s Institute for the Study of Archeology and Religion, he spent 17 years as dean of the school of arts, letters and sciences. Intensive study of the archeological finds in northern Israel and a summer of excavation work there helped prepare him for Banias.
“I like to dig,” he says. “It’s a wonderful change to pick up a hoe and a wheelbarrow. It’s not much different than digging a ditch, but what you find in the end is a whole lot more interesting.”
Mary Rourke can be reached by e-mail at mary.rourke@latimes.com.
