Please make use of the map button as you go through this extremely fascinating subject. If you do this, you will find that, when reading the New Testament, the story will become very much more realistic and dramatic.

THE GREAT SEA

The thirty-year old Procurator, Pontius Pilate, with his wife sailed into the absolutely marvelous harbor built by Herod the Great at Caesarea on the coast of Palestine to take up residence in the Roman palace built on a rock in the middle of that harbor (the foundations still remain). This symbolized the significance of Palestine to the rest of the Mediterranean world. From Athens and Corinth, Rome and Alexandria and Ephesus, the rulers, merchants and scholars of the Mediterranean world entered into Palestine. The Jews themselves, sailing from all those ports and many others and returning for the Festival, infiltrated the Hebraic ways of Palestine with Hellenistic civilization and Roman order.

The absence of any great natural harbor on the coast is due to the constant flow of Nilotic silt from Egypt. If you stand today on the rocky coastal land that was Tyre, the capital of a mighty civilization at one time, you see that its southern harbor does not exist, though the northern harbor still protects ships. The rock which has held up the silt on the southern side has protected the other harbor. Also, the harbor that created the port city of Joppa (Jaffa) is now completely silted up and forms a little flat plain.

The booths in the market-places of Jerusalem, Capernaum and Sebaste (Herod's capital of Samaria) contained a very large percentage of foreign-made goods that had come in by sea. In fact everything came to Palestine by way of the Sea. The Roman rule and the procurator who condemned Jesus to death; as well as the Greek language, and that Greek view of life which not only created the ten cities of Decapolis but deeply influenced the more liberal Jews.

If, again, in reading the Gospels we make a note of all the times that Jesus meets with Roman centurions or soldiers and men like the publicans who were servants of Rome, we get a more incredible sense of the influence of the sea upon the life of Palestine.