Exploring the Bible

  If you close your eyes and imagine the ancient Galilee region during the first century, what comes to mind? For generations, the popular narrative—often repeated in historical textbooks, documentaries, and Sunday school classrooms—painted a very specific picture. It was supposedly a dusty, isolated, and impoverished backwater. The people who lived there were thought to be uneducated peasants and dirt-poor subsistence fishermen, cut off from the bustling intellectual, economic, and religious hub of Jerusalem to the south. It makes for a compelling underdog story. But there is a massive problem with this narrative: the dirt simply doesn't back it up. Recent archaeological discoveries on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee are completely rewriting our understanding of this region. At a site called el-Araj, which is now widely believed to be the true location of the biblical fishing village of Bethsaida, excavators are finding hard evidence that the Galileans were highly con...

When you picture the biblical story of David and Goliath, what comes to mind? For most of us, the imagery was set during childhood Sunday school lessons or from vivid illustrations in storybooks. We imagine a young boy armed with a simple sling facing off against a monstrous, towering behemoth—a literal giant scraping the sky at nearly ten feet tall. It is the ultimate underdog story, a narrative that has transcended its religious origins to become a universal metaphor for overcoming insurmountable odds. But what if the towering height of Goliath is actually a historical misunderstanding? What if the Philistine champion wasn’t a ten-foot mythological monster, but rather a very real, incredibly large human warrior? To understand the true height of Goliath, we have to put away our storybooks and dive into the fascinating world of ancient manuscripts, biblical translation, and historical archaeology. When we do, we discover that the truth about Goliath’s height doesn't diminish th...

It’s Passover week. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, is standing before a chaotic crowd in Jerusalem. In a desperate bid to keep the peace and avoid executing Jesus of Nazareth, Pilate invokes a customary holiday pardon. He offers the crowd a choice between two prisoners: Jesus, or a man named Barabbas. The crowd shouts for Barabbas. He is unchained, he walks away into the crowded streets of Jerusalem, and he completely vanishes from the historical record. Who exactly was this man? Did he ever realize the magnitude of what happened that day? And has archaeology turned up a single shred of evidence about his life? Let's separate the hard facts from the legends. The Surprising Truth About His Name To understand the profound irony of this story, you have to look at the man’s name. "Barabbas" isn't actually a first name; it’s an Aramaic patronymic (a name derived from a father). Bar means "son of," and Abba means "father". Literally tran...

  If you read through the Gospels, Jesus heals a lot of people. Usually, it happens instantly. He speaks a word, touches a hand, or someone just touches the hem of His garment, and boom—immediate, total restoration. But in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 8, something highly unusual happens. Jesus heals a blind man, but it seems to take Him two tries to get it right. Did Jesus run out of power? Was the man’s blindness just too stubborn for a quick fix? The short answer is no. Jesus wasn't struggling. Instead, He was using a physical miracle to teach a profoundly spiritual lesson. To understand what this story actually means, we have to look at the context—what happens right before it, and what happens right after. Let’s dive into Mark 8:22-26. The Miracle at Bethsaida The story takes place in Bethsaida, a fishing village on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Friends bring a blind man to Jesus and beg Him to touch him. Jesus takes the man by the hand, leads him outside th...

We often think of biblical archaeology as unearthing things from thousands of years before Christ, or discovering the foundations of first-century synagogues. But sometimes, the most startling discoveries come from the decades immediately following the biblical era—shedding light on the devastating historical fallout of the events we read about in the New Testament. In late 2023, the Judean Desert delivered one of those jaw-dropping moments. Hidden in a nearly inaccessible cave overlooking the Dead Sea, archaeologists found a cache of 1,900-year-old Roman swords so perfectly preserved that they looked like they could have been dropped yesterday. Let’s explore this incredible find, how it was discovered, and what it tells us about the tumultuous years following the time of Jesus. An Accidental Masterpiece of a Discovery The story of how these swords were found sounds like something straight out of an adventure novel. It happened in the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, a rugged, cliff-heavy land...

While the Gospels detail the grisly end of John the Baptist at the hands of Herod Antipas, they leave us with a lingering question: what happened to his body? The Gospel of Mark simply tells us that "when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse and laid it in a tomb" (Mark 6:29). But where is that tomb, and what has archaeology actually revealed about it? The answer takes us away from the Galilee and deep into the ancient region of Samaria, to a multi-layered archaeological marvel known as Sebastia. Let's dig in. Where Did He Die vs. Where Was He Buried? According to the ancient historian Josephus, John the Baptist was imprisoned and executed at Machaerus, a fortified hilltop palace overlooking the Dead Sea in modern-day Jordan. However, ancient tradition places his burial site roughly 70 miles away, in the city of Sebaste (modern Sebastia in the West Bank). Why Sebastia? It wasn't just a random village. It was a major regional capital rebu...