"The Real Adventure of Archeology"
      by President Dean O. Wenthe

Imagine digging just 18 inches into the earth and having those 18 inches transport your touch across 2,000 years.

Imagine picking up a piece of pottery from about 20 A.D. As you finger the pottery, your mind visualizes the hands that last held this fashioned clay.

And you wonder: What tales of daily life could this pottery relate if it could speak? Who may have held it? What were their lives like? What were their hopes and aspirations?

Such reflection is adventure of the highest order. To enter the world of Jesus of Nazareth is to journey back some 19 centuries from one culture to another.

The Holy Land, the land of Jesus and of Israel, is the location for hundreds of such real adventures. Particularly for the Christian, the experience of the land - its geography, its topography, its climate - reflects and recalls the setting of Jesus' life. Capernaum, literally "village of Nahum," was a flourishing Galilean town in first-century Palestine. As one comes over the hill and views the site today, nothing remains save the later buildings erected by the Franciscans and the Orthodox Patriarch of the area.

One recalls Jesus' stern warning: "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You shall descend to Hades, for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day" (Matt. 11:23).

I have had the opportunity to participate in university "digs" that have brought to light additional aspects of Jesus' hometown.

As the work of our team slowly unearthed its walls, plazas and streets, two facets of the city stand out.

The still rural setting and modest proportions of Capernaum's houses strike one as exceedingly ordinary.

Those who lived in first-century Capernaum probably deemed it just another Galilean fishing village.

Yet a collage of sights and smells tickles one's imagination: the scent of a eucalyptus tree, the sound of a mournful dove, the chance sighting of a scampering lizard, the inviting beauty of a desert flower, the frightful stare of a disturbed scorpion, the incredibly cool breeze of the midday sun.

No doubt those eyes that noted the "lilies of the field" and the "birds of the air" (Matt. 6:25-30) would have been sensitive to the Creator's handiwork at Capernaum!

Like the ordinary residents at Capernaum, we also welcome the Incarnate Son of God, for He has chosen not to remain aloof but to dwell at your address and mine.

Other sites - Nazareth, Bethlehem, Caesarea-Philippi, Jerusalem - were, at a point in time, spaces sanctified by the presence of the very Son of God, true God and true man.

If there is a temptation to turn Jesus into an abstraction, romanticize His life or form Him in the image of our own culture, the places of His life call us back to the reality of His incarnation.

Then, as now, the Holy Land was marked by the hatreds and violence of fallen humanity. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is that great reversal that the prophets had promised.

The concrete context of these events - Christ's life, death and resurrection - has become increasingly available.

In this beautiful, ancient land, the earth holds treasures and artifacts that span time from several millenia before Christ to the present.

Those who engage in field archeology soon discover that the stuff of everyday life - the streets, the houses, the pottery - is as revealing as any spectacular treasure.

View archived dig pictures taken in May and June of 2000.