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Into Turkey— Part Thirty-Five

Into Turkey— Part Thirty-Five

Last updated on: December 21, 2022 at 1:56 am by Ben Witherington

Into Turkey— Part Thirty-Five 2022-09-14T14:02:26-04:00 Ben Witherington

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To paraphrase a famous phrase, human beings can’t live by archaeology alone. So, having reached the vicinity of Ephesus, we stopped at a fabulous Turkish country restaurant…. this sure beats American fast food in every way…..

The Church of St. John the Divine is well worth seeing, though many cruise boat tourists only go to the ancient Ephesus site and miss it. But which John exactly are we talking about. In my view it is the man who identified himself in Rev. 1 as John the seer (notice he does not call himself an apostle or one of the 12), who was in exile on Patmos until Domitian died, and then came back to Ephesus to help the church there, and he died and was buried there, originally on the spot where in due course a church’s high altar would be found. This is not John son of Zebedee, despite the later church historical blending together of several Johns by Irenaeus and others. As Jesus said, that John like his brother James was baptized through death, martyred, just as Jesus was. And we now have an Oxyrhynchus papyrus that makes this clear (see my John’s Wisdom commentary). He may be, and probably is the same person who calls himself ‘the elder’ in 2 and 3 John. Who he is not is the Beloved Disciple, but this John did collect the written memoirs of the Beloved Disciple and edited them, which is why that Gospel came to have the name John on it. He produced the published document. As for who the BD was, in my view he was certainly a Judaean disciple, not one of the Twelve, and probably was Lazarus, since he is the one explicitly said to be ‘the one whom Jesus loved’ in John 11, and only thereafter in John do we have the phrase Beloved Disciple. But that’s a story for another time. Let’s look at John’s church… just down the street from the entrance are storks in nests up on telephone poles…

The church is up on a promontory where you can see far and wide… for instance here is the single standing column of the Temple of Artemis off in the distance…

There is a prickly pear cactus at the door to the stairway up to the church, reminding us that this environment is semi-tropical near the coast line.

And everything grows including especially the beautiful bouganvillia and other exotic plants and vines…

Once you are up on the platform there is much to see…

Here’s the high altar on the original burial spot of the saint, and notice the apse….. the construction was brick with marble facade or facing…

Notice the Byzantine columns everywhere…

There is an adjoining baptistry complex

One of my poor travelers was tired and needed to cool off… but alas, no water showed up where he lay down…

There are typical geometric floor tiles, and there are even columns with crosses and Christian graffiti in Byzantine Greek carved into them…

Things move slowly up here on this overlook beside the church due to the very hot conditions…

But the view is impressive…

Not far away in the distance is a remarkably intact Roman aqueduct….

It was so hot this afternoon that we decided to go to Kircular the leather factory… and let my wife and others model some pretty swanky leather goods on a catwalk with appropriate music…. such fun.

How to make a leather jacket using only lambskin which is flexible, will not wrinkle, and waterproof…. not to mention lightweight and smooth as a baby’s bottom…..

Tomorrow we will begin exploring the ancient site itself….

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