Mark Twain makes perfect reading taken in small snatches. Thanks to the Gutenberg Project, I have some 21,000 beBook pages of his writings. First up was Innocents Abroad, 1st edition, 1869, complete with strange spelling and usage. I’ve been following his account of a bunch of tourists taking a grand European tour with nary a camera at hand – just Sam’s journal. Their caravan has worked there way on foot and horseback, with a camel train following down into the Levant. He might have taken this picture of Banias, which he describes here.

This spring is one of the sources of the Jordan River, which runs down into the Sea of Galilee, which Twain says is smaller than Lake Tahoe and not nearly as scenic, on down to the Dead Sea and finally emptying into the Red Sea.

The ruins here are not very interesting. There are the massive walls of a great square building that was once the citadel; there are many ponderous old arches that are so smothered with debris that they barely project above the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hill-side are the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built here–patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod’s time, may be;
scattered every where, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and up yonder in the precipice where the fountain gushes out, are well-worn Greek inscriptions over niches in the rock where in ancient times the Greeks, and after them the Romans, worshipped the sylvan god Pan. But trees and bushes grow above many of these ruins now; the miserable huts of a little crew of filthy Arabs are perched upon the broken masonry of antiquity, the whole place has a sleepy, stupid, rural look about it, and one can hardly bring himself to believe that a busy, substantially built city once existed here, even two thousand years ago. The place was nevertheless the scene of an event whose effects have added page after page and volume after volume to the world’s history. For in this place Christ stood when he said to Peter:

“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

On those little sentences have been built up the mighty edifice of the Church of Rome; in them lie the authority for the imperial power of the Popes over temporal affairs, and their godlike power to curse a soul or wash it white from sin. To sustain the position of “the only true Church,” which Rome claims was thus conferred upon her, she has fought and labored and struggled for many a century, and will continue to keep herself busy in the same work to the end of time. The memorable words I have quoted give to this ruined city about all the interest it possesses
to people of the present day.

Understand, now, that Clemens was at best agnostic and apparently had a few prejudices about the Roman Church.

I visited the exact place described above in 1997, and I doubt if it changed very much since Mark Twain made notes in his journal 125 years ago, give or take a few thousand pilgrims and tourists. In the First Century the village was called Caesarea Philippi.

Here are the remains of the temple to the god Pan.

Those 12 days spent tramping around Israel with my Bible in the spring of 1997 will never be forgotten.

Dave, remembering.