“At Nazareth,” wrote Mark Twain, “we camped in an olive grove near the Virgin Mary’s fountain…. This ‘Fountain of the Virgin’ is the one which tradition says Mary used to get water from twenty times a day, when she was a girl, and bear it away in a jar upon her head. The water streams through faucets in the face of a wall of ancient masonry which stands removed from the houses of the village.” Mark Twain observed that the Arab girls in Nazareth still collected water from the fountain in 1867, but he felt compelled to dissent from his companions’ effusive praise of their “Madonna-like beauty” and to inform his readers (with some disappointment, I gather) that in fact “the Nazarene girls are homely” and “sadly lack comeliness.” Well, they are not as pretty as girls from Tel Aviv -- or Moscow -- but Mark Twain's judgment seems a little harsh to me; I would rate Nazarene girls about average.
At Nazareth, Mark Twain also visited “the great Latin convent which is built over the traditional dwelling place of the Holy Family” and the “scene of the Annunciation” (where the archangel Gabriel is said have announced the future birth of Jesus to Mary). Below are pictures of the Basilica of the Annunciation today, though I should note that there is apparently some controversy about whether it really marks the correct location; the Greek Orthodox Church claims that the annunciation occurred at nearby St. Gabriel's Church. (Perhaps Gabriel made the announcement twice?) In any case, the church didn't look like this when Mark Twain visited; the current church was constructed in 1967 (a century after his visit) on the site of an older Byzantine-era and then Crusader-era church. The lower level inside the church contains the Grotto of the Annunciation, which is said to be the site of Mary's childhood home. It was “curious” and “exceedingly strange,” Mark Twain marveled, that “personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes” and that the most “tremendous events” of their lives “all happened in grottoes” – “and exceedingly fortunate likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever.” “The world owes the Catholics its goodwill … for the happy rascality of hewing out these bogus grottoes in the rock,” he added. “If it had been left to the Protestants to do this most worthy work, we would not even know where Jerusalem is today.”
The second floor of the Basilica of the Annunciation.
Mark Twain also “visited the places where Jesus worked for fifteen years as a carpenter and where he attempted to teach in the synagogue, and was driven out by a mob. Catholic chapels stand upon these sites and protect the little fragments of the ancient walls which remain.” We visited both of these chapels as well. Here is the interior of the Synagogue Church, where the synagogue in which Jesus is said to have preached once stood.
There is one place we visited in Nazareth that Mark Twain was unable to see. Fittingly, A. found Nazareth's Moskubiyeh, built in 1904 as a hostel for Russian pilgrims. Since 1948, it has housed the city's courthouse, post office, and police station.
After our visit in Nazareth, we drove to Kfar Nahum (Capernaum), but unfortunately we arrived too late to see most of the sites. If Mark Twain is to be believed, we didn’t miss much. “It was only a shapeless ruin,” he wrote. “It bore no resemblance to a town and had nothing about it to suggest that it ever had been a town.”
The one place in Kfar Nahum that we did manage to see was a beautiful Greek Orthodox church on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. We spent about an hour there looking around and talking to the monk who tends the church. I discovered that he had a rather critical view of Protestants, which was an interesting counterpoint to the Protestant and generally unfavorable view of the Catholic Church that sometimes appears in Mark Twain's writings.
As we were leaving the church, a random cow spotting made me wonder if I was back in Wisconsin.
After we left Kfar Nahum, we found a nearby beach on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee and took a swim there – “a blessed privilege,” as Mark Twain says, “in this roasting climate.”
In the evening, we arrived in Tiberias and spent a few hours walking around the old city and enjoying a leisurely fish dinner at a restaurant on the water. Since I already wrote about Tiberias in a previous post, I won’t describe it again here.
In the evening, we drove north from Tiberias to Kibbutz Menara, located in the Golan Heights close to the Lebanese border, where we stayed overnight. We arrived very late, after the reception office was closed, but we were greeted at the entrance to the kibbutz by a friendly dog (named Efi, we later learned) who followed us around and helped us find our guest house, and we had a very pleasant conversation with two warm and friendly kibbutz members who were up late chatting outside at a picnic table.
Here is our kibbutz friend Efi lounging in front of our room...
... and the view from the balcony of our room at Kibbutz Menara.
Reflecting on the places we visited, I must confess to sharing Mark Twain’s astonishment at the “exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.” The longest journey that Jesus ever performed, he points out, was from Capernaum to Jerusalem, a distance of “about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles” (it’s about 200 kilometers by our count, which is roughly 125 miles). “Leaving out two or three short journeys,” he concludes, Jesus “spent his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States.”
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