In the beginning ...

It was 5:30 in the afternoon, and it was late September, 2010. as I stepped off of the air conditioned plane, I felt like I had just stepped into a sauna. It was 30 degrees centigrade outside, and I was in Israel, at Ben Gurion Airport.

The coach , thankfully was air conditioned, and I was going on a week long tour of the Holy land with my wife.  Mandy. She had been here before, but for me, a kid born in the North of England and raised in north London in a poor area, this was my first venture out of Europe. it was like going into another world. i was stepping back into a place that i was only familiar with via TV , maps and books. And now, here I was, about to visit the places where Abraham , Isaac and Jacob tended their sheep, where King Solomon reigned in splendour and Jesus had walked and talked with His disciples by the sea of Galilee.

Looking out of the coach window, I could see the flat land of the coastal plain. This would have been philistine territory, once, but was now part of the modern state of Israel, and we were on the road to Jerusalem, the capital city - a holy place to 3 of the great religions of the world. for not only was it ruled over by King David and visited by Jesus of Nazareth, but Mohammed, the founder of Islam also came here - and today, on the site of Solomon's temple, there stands the Dome of the Rock, the second most holy place in Islam outside of Mecca itself.

The Israelis had brought irrigation to their farms, and the are was surprisingly green, with olive groves and date palms growing in abundance. we had a guide with our party,  who explained that we were literally going ' up to Jerusalem', for the capital was built on a limestone ridge that formed the central massif of the country. Jerusalem was a few thousand feet above sea level. not only would it be cooler up there, our guide explained, but the high ground caught the warm  , moist winds that came in off the Mediterranean  and cooled them , so that seasonal rains fell on this side of the country. However, when we got to the top, we would see into the 'rain shadow' as it was called. i remembered my geography lessons, in decades previous, where this was explained. The green and pleasant landscape suddenly stopped, and we gasped in amazement at the vast , barren landscape on  the other side of the central ridge.  The bedrock itself was limestone, a relatively soft and permeable rock that easily forms caves as the water soaks in and forms underground streams - and this feature also affected the history of this ancient land, right up to modern times. This is the land where the Bible began.

"But wait",  some may say "didn't the Bible begin with the Garden of Eden, somewhere north of  modern day Iraq? Er, yes, that is where the story was set at first , and then we follow Abraham who left his home town , Ur of the Caldees and trekked down as far as Egypt before moving back up to Canaan, where his son Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob had 12 sons who eventually formed the 12 tribes of Israel. Well, that is the story. But is it true?

In actual fact, I was about to enter on a journey that was the greatest adventure of my life so far-  one that took me from my 21st century life in London  back through to the time of the Patriarchs, and then Jericho where Joshua is supposed to have fought the famous battle, then on to the age of David and Solomon, and eventually to the very places where Jesus spent his time on Earth before He met His death in Jerusalem. And as I went from place to place, a very different picture of Israel's past appeared.

For although the Bible sets out a chronology that takes us by way of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the time of Noah and on to Adam and Eve, there is nothing in the Archaeological record to show that most of these people ever existed. Solomon , the Bible tells us, had all the surrounding  kings and potentates paying him homage and sending him tribute - but not a single entry from any palace ledger from any other place ever mentions Solomon. We have no records of a foreign princess being married off to him, no entries in any archive concerning any items being given in tribute.

It is as though Solomon never existed, and the Hebrews simply made him up, creating a glorious past for themselves with Good King Solomon as a sort of King Arthur figure, presiding over a splendid court in a golden age. Later on , we get the later prophets like Isaiah talking about invading Assyrians laying siege to Jerusalem, and then the story moves on and the Hebrews get taken into exile in Babylon. here , historians and archaeologists are a bit more helpful - they can show us the tunnel that Hezekiah the king had built to supply Jerusalem with a safe supply of water in times of trouble, and we even have a tablet on the wall in the British Museum that Sennacherib, the Assyrian emperor had made that gives us his side of the story. here at last, we find that the Bible and Secular History  are both talking about the same people and the same events.

But earlier on , we see very little of the Bible's grand tale being confirmed by secular sources or archaeological discoveries in Israel. we find mention of peoples like the Hittites and the Philistines - but when we look for signs of the Exodus, or the conquest of Canaan, and even Solomon , we seldom see what the Bible tells us. instead  we see the general outline that John Romer, a prominent archaeologist sets out in his book. it would appear that one small tribe in Canaan split off from the surrounding kingdoms and went independent, they then wrote themselves a splendid history where Yahweh, their god, promised all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile, in return for their obedience to Him .Yahweh took them out of Egypt, sent them into Canaan on a genocidal campaign against the locals, but they merely subjugated most of them instead, and that was the trouble.

Archaeologists have no trouble in spotting a Jewish settlement when they are digging in the ruins. Jewish settlements may turn up pottery, old tools and such - but no pig bones I learned. up and down the land we went over the course of many days. And over and over, it was the same old story.If the Bible said that Joshua conquered the place, the archaeologists would point out that the place appeared to be in pagan hands right up to the time of the Israelite monarchy, and then the people suddenly started eating kosher.the Real story of the Bible begins not in distant Eden, but on that small hilltop that was Josiah's stronghold.

The Law of Moses clearly set Hebrew people apart from their surrounding neighbours. even though the Hebrew religion has strains of Canaanite influence running though it, it was pointing people in a different direction - away from the pantheistic nature worship of the pagans and towards the monotheism of the Priests who ran the Temple.And the biggest lurch in that direction occurred in the reign of  Josiah, when the Temple priests found a lost book and gave it to the king to read.  we will discuss this event in the next entry of this blog. I will attempt to explain why they did this, and what makes me so sure that they faked their own history.

Who do you say I am ?

For someone like me, sitting here on a computer terminal, it is very confusing sometimes.

I mean, I am reasonably educated. I never went to university, but I learned science at school, and know how the world works on a physical level. So, when I come up against stories of people parting th e red sea, or even walking on water, I tend to be something of a sceptic.

The Torah was written in the past tense and the third person.  Later on, people like Jeremiah and Joel write in the first person - they were big on morals and ethics, but light on miraculous deeds. I cannot help  noticing this, and want to bring this to your attention.

It is odd that we don't have any secular details on King Solomon. Ok, the Bible records him , but I know of no receipts, no entries in any ledger from another kingdom, no mention of any foreign princess who became one of his many wives. Nobody I know of has ever  found any mention of him in all the world outside the Bible. How about you? Isn't this a bit strange, if someone like Solomon can completely disappear - or did the Hebrew scribes just make him up?

Now, Jesus lived in obscurity, born in a small village under Roman occupation in a small cultural backwater in the Roman Empire. And although none of his contemporaries took any notice, there was a community of Christians living in Rome in 64 AD. Just 31 years after the crucifixion, Jesus has a following in the heart of the Roman Empire , hundreds of miles from where He was born. Again , I think this is extraordinary.

It is tempting to feel sometimes that it would have been wonderful to have been there when it all started, to have been someone who actually saw Jesus heal the sick and walk on water. But was it?

For when the disciples came back from a preaching tour, they said to him ' some say that you are John  the Baptist, while others say you are Elijah'. And Jesus asked them  "But who do you say I am?" And that is crucial. because the chief priests, the scribes and the  Pharisees saw the miracles too, and they were not impressed.

They could not deny that Christ did these things - but they accused him of doing it with the aid of Satanic powers. They were the the Establishment. the experts on the Law. And they said that if you believed in this lowly carpenter, then you were as damned as he was. Imagine how it must have been for humble Galileans like Peter, John and James to stand up against that sort of opposition.

Today, we know that Jesus was the man who changed History - if he wasn't the Messiah , then who else was? But back then , they only had Jesus. Sometimes, even John the Baptist had his doubts (see Matthew11:3), so it is no surprise if we are confronted with doubts today.

Wherever we stand in the stream of time we are faced with the same question  and the same problem when Christ asks us "Who do you say I am "? none of us can fully know all the facts - just what we are able to gather from our own standpoint.  like the Apostles of old, we must make our own leap of faith, going against public opinion and everything we learned in school if we want to say ' you are the Christ' - for that is not where logic, or the majority view, or the experts opinion will usually lead us.

Like me, Peter never saw the resurrection actually happen. Like most people would be perhaps , he was very sceptical when the women in the group came running back and said that the tomb was empty. But he still went there to make sure. And even when he found the tomb , i don't think he really understood what was going on. Like peter, I am still unsure on exactly how it all fits together. But , i am prepared to make the journey to the Empty tomb to see what all the fuss is about.

A few years ago, I went to Jerusalem , and took some photos. You can see my album on Facebook. as we approach Easter, I shall be posting and recounting my own experiences in the Holy Land. I  hope that you will join me on my journey, and share your own thoughts and feelings .about things as we go along.