Palestine 

In 7 BCE, when Jesus was born, the world was experiencing a period of spiritual thinking and religious living as it had not known in all previous history or any era since. This was especially true in Palestine. The prosperity and relative peace that prevailed when Jesus lived there was due largely to its location at the crossroads of the global trade routes and the unified and dominant rule of the Mediterranean world by the Romans.

Because of its central location, connecting three continents, Africa to the south, Asia to the east, and what is now Europe to the west, Palestine was a hub of trade, travel, and education. Many camel caravan routes from the Orient passed through some part of this region on the way to ports at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. From those harbors, ships carried passengers and cargo to all other ports on the sea. More than half of this caravan traffic passed through or near the town where Jesus was raised. This location provided an excellent environment for Jesus’ upbringing, and later, his God-revealing mission.

Jesus was born in Judea, a region of central Palestine, in the little village of Bethlehem, not far from Jerusalem. But he grew up in Galilee, a province north of Judea. His home was in a small town west of the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, where his mother’s family lived. Nazareth had a diverse population, many of whom were Jews. It was widely known as a center of liberal interpretation of Jewish traditional law.

From the four directions, young Jesus could observe the caravan trains as they passed in and out of Nazareth. In midsummer of 3 BCE, his father, Joseph, built a small workshop close to the village spring and near a caravan lot. As Jesus grew up, when not at school, he spent his time helping with home duties or watching his father work at the shop. At this shop, he could listen to the conversations and gossip of caravan conductors and passengers from lands near and far. From these encounters and his schooling, Jesus became fluent in the three languages common in Palestine: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

After attaining manhood, Jesus traveled around the Mediterranean Sea, finally settling in Palestine. It was there that he began his public ministry. But prior to beginning his public ministry, he was baptized in the Jordan river by another famous Palestinian, John the Baptist. Jesus then retreated to the hills of Perea for forty days to formulate his life’s plan. With his plan set, he and his apostles traveled to most of Palestine’s cities and villages carrying the gospel message: the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

For four years, from 26 CE, until his death in 30 CE, Jesus never stopped teaching while traveling up and down Palestine, even going as far north as Tyre in Phoenicia (Lebanon). Jesus’ teachings clashed with the Jewish authorities, and this led to his arrest on the night of April 6, 30 CE. After his trial and execution in Jerusalem, Jesus’ body was put in a tomb belonging to another well-known Jew and Palestine resident, Joseph of Arimathea. From that tomb, Jesus resurrected and appeared to hundreds of people in nineteen places over the following seven weeks, all in the Palestine region.

From Jesus’ life and teachings, the Christian religion sprang into being and spread around the world. Because Jesus was born, raised, taught, and died in Palestine, and because so much religious history unfolded there, Palestine is often referred to as “the Holy Land.”

The region that came to be called Palestine was inhabited thousands of years before Jesus was born. That word, Palestine, is derived from the Hebrew name for one time inhabitants, the Philistines, who lived and ruled there from about 1200 to 400 BCE. Palestine continued as a semi-independent state thanks to the foreign policy of the Roman government that seized control in the first century BCE. The Romans wanted to maintain jurisdiction over Palestine and the roadways between Lebanon-Syria and Egypt. The stability and unity of this region ensured Roman dominance at the western end of the east-west caravan routes and the flow of goods across Rome’s vast domain.

Because of its trade and spiritual importance, Palestine has been the location of many political, religious, and military struggles, right up to the 21st century. Most of the Bible’s Old Testament stories involve characters, places, and events based in Palestine. Abraham, Moses, David, Sodom, the Dead Sea, and army battles at Megiddo are all part of Palestine’s rich history. After Jesus died, more wars occurred in Palestine, including the Siege of Masada. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries CE, there was a series of wars now referred to as the Crusades. Despite its recurring wars, Palestine was, and still is, a destination for many religious pilgrims. Jews, Christians, Islamists, and others, making up nearly half the world’s population, consider Palestine a holy place worthy of pilgrimage and veneration.

For centuries before Jesus was born, Hebrew prophets had proclaimed the coming of a deliverer. Many, including John the Baptist, thought these prophecies referred to a new Jewish ruler, one who would occupy the throne of David and free the Jewish people and Palestine from foreign domination. When Jesus declined to be this expected “Messiah,” the leaders of the Jewish nation rejected him and his teachings, finally killing him. Not long after Jesus died, a Jewish rebellion broke out and was crushed by the Romans. But Palestine survived and remained under Roman domination until Rome collapsed. Since then, Palestine has been unsettled and ruled by a variety of empires, ethnicities, and religious sects. Contemporary Jerusalem is a much-divided city, having citizens of several faith traditions that dispute each other’s claims of rightful ownership of land and buildings.

Muslims gained a foothold in Palestine after the emergence of Islam in Arabia, in the 7th century. Islam teaches that its prophet, Muhammad, came to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem during a “Night Journey” and from there ascended to heaven. The majority of Islamic scholars agree that the journey was both a physical and spiritual one. A brief mention of the story is found in the 17th surah (chapter) of Islam's holy book, the Quran, while details of the story are found in the hadith (a later collection of the reports, teachings, deeds, and sayings of Muhammad). The third holiest site in Islam is in Palestine, the Dome of the Rock, a shrine on Temple Mount in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem.

Two thousand years before Jesus’ arrival in what was to become Palestine, there came another celestial visitor, a man named Melchizedek, mentioned in the Bible’s first book as the “sage of Salem.” He established a school in the Salem colony, the forerunner of Jerusalem. He chose this place to incarnate for many of the same reasons as Jesus; it was spiritually fertile and centrally located with reference to trade, travel, and world civilization. Abraham, often referred to as “the father of the three great monotheistic religions,” traveled to Salem and was trained by Melchizedek. Abraham’s descendants and Melchizedek’s other students took monotheism – the teaching that there is one God over all – to the far reaches of the civilized world. Their preparatory ministry paved the way for Jesus’ presentation of a God of love.

Thanks to the tilling of the religious soil of Palestine by Melchizedek and his missionaries, Jesus’ message took root there and spread across the Eurasian continent and north Africa. After Jesus died, Peter, with the help of the other apostles and many disciples, planted the seeds of Christianity in Palestine and beyond. Paul, a Greek and a co-founder of Christianity, was traveling through Palestine on the road between Jerusalem and Damascus when he was suddenly converted to believe in Jesus and his message. Paul then sailed around the Mediterranean, establishing Christian churches along his route.

The advancement, growth, and refinement of the God concept in the minds of earth’s citizens is largely due to what occurred in Palestine over the previous four thousand years. From that ancient crossroads of humanity, the Melchizedek teachings of one God spread in every direction. Following Jesus’ life, the teachings that the one God is also a God of love spanned the whole planet.

It is unfortunate that love does not always rule the hearts and minds of humanity. Perhaps, someday, it will with the help of a new revelation of Jesus’ life that will illuminate and spiritually unite humankind in loving service to one another.