hills from which he proclaimed the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Charta of his kingdom, and
to which he often retired for prayer; there on the western shore is the plain of Gennesaret, which
still exhibits its natural fertility by the luxuriant growth of briers and thistles and the bright red
magnolias overtopping them; there is the dirty city of Tiberias, built by Herod Antipas, where
Jewish rabbis still scrupulously search the letter of the Scriptures without finding Christ in them;
a few wretched Moslem huts called Mejdel still indicate the birth-place of Mary Magdalene, whose
penitential tears and resurrection joys are a precious legacy of Christendom. And although the cities
of Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazim, "where most of his mighty works were done" have utterly
disappeared from the face of the earth, and their very sites are disputed among scholars, thus
verifying to the letter the fearful prophecy of the Son of Man,^168 yet the ruins of Tell Hum and
Kerazeh bear their eloquent testimony to the judgment of God for neglected privileges, and the
broken columns and friezes with a pot of manna at Tell Hum are probably the remains of the very
synagogue which the good Roman centurion built for the people of Capernaum, and in which Christ
delivered his wonderful discourse on the bread of life from heaven.^169
Caesarea Philippi, formerly and now called Banias (or Paneas, Paneion, from the heathen
sanctuary of Pan), at the foot of Hermon, marks the northern termination of the Holy Land and of
the travels of the Lord, and the boundary-line between the Jews and the Gentiles; and that Swiss-like,
picturesque landscape, the most beautiful in Palestine, in full view of the fresh, gushing source of
the Jordan, and at the foot of the snow-crowned monarch of Syrian mountains seated on a throne
of rock, seems to give additional force to Peter’s fundamental confession and Christ’s prophecy of
his Church universal built upon the immovable rock of his eternal divinity.
The closing scenes of the earthly life of our Lord and the beginning of his heavenly life
took place in Jerusalem and the immediate neighborhood, where every spot calls to mind the most
important events that ever occurred or can occur in this world. Jerusalem, often besieged and
destroyed, and as often rebuilt "on her own heap," is indeed no more the Jerusalem of Herod, which
lies buried many feet beneath the rubbish and filth of centuries; even the site of Calvary is disputed,
and superstition has sadly disfigured and obscured the historic associations.^170 "Christ is not there,
He is risen."^171 There is no more melancholy sight in the world than the present Jerusalem as
contrasted with its former glory, and with the teeming life of Western cities; and yet so many are
the sacred memories clustering around it and perfuming the very air, that even Rome must yield
the palm of interest to the city which witnessed the crucifixion and the resurrection. The Herodian
temple on Mount Moriah, once the gathering place of pious Jews from all the earth, and enriched
with treasures of gold and silver which excited the avarice of the conquerors, has wholly disappeared,(^168) Matt. 11:20-24; Luke 10:13-15.
(^169) Comp. Fr. Delitzsch: Ein Tag in Capernaum, 2d ed. 1873; Furrer: Die Ortschaften am See Genezareth, in the "Zeitschrift
des deutschen Palaestina-Vereins," 1879, pp. 52 sqq.: my article on Capernaum, ibid. 1878, pp. 216 sqq. and in the "Quarterly
Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund" for July, 1879, pp. 131 sqq., with the observations thereon by Lieut. Kitchener,
who agrees with Dr. Robinson in locating Capernaum Khan Minyeh, although there are no ruins there at all to be compared with
those of Tell Hum.
(^170) The present mongrel population of Jerusalem—Moslems, Jews, and Christians of all denominations, though mostly
Greek—scarcely exceeds 30,000, while at the time of Christ it must have exceeded 100,000, even if we make a large deduction
from the figures of Josephus, who states that on a Passover under the governorship of Cestius Gallus 256,500 paschal lambs
were slain, and that at the destruction of the City, a.d. 70, 1,100,000 Jews perished and 97,000 were sold into slavery (including
600,000 strangers who had crowded into the doomed city). Bell. Jud. vi. 9, 3.
(^171) Matt. 28:6.
A.D. 1-100.