ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
FOLLOWINGFAITH Dr. Elizabeth McNamer, Rocky Mountain College professor of religious thought, remembers the people who went to the place almost as much as she recalls the place.
The place is Bethsaida, an Israeli village that was lost for 2,000 years and is being painstakingly unearthed, revealing in each uncovered layer another artifact from the time of Jesus Christ. Some of his disciples lived there. He spent time there. This is where he stood in a boat offshore to preach and teach. This is where he was a welcome guest in the homes of the fishermen he called to serve him. The people Dr. McNamer remembers are those who went there to work on the Bethsaida Archaeological Excavation in Galilee. They include hundreds – many students, others fascinated with the project – who wanted to touch cobblestone streets where Jesus walked. Among them Dr. McNamer remembers the woman who worked as a check-out clerk at a Los Angeles grocery store. “She saved and saved to come on the dig,” McNamer said.
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Following Faith
She remembers a Lutheran minister who longed for banana ice cream the whole time he was at the dig. McNamer did find some cereal to try to relieve his sweet tooth, but it didn’t suffice. But those weren’t people she brought to the site. She remembers Courtney Mosher, now Agenten, who heard about Bethsaida when she was a prospective student. It convinced her to come to RMC. “I met Elizabeth during my tour of the school and she handed me an ancient coin from Israel and said, ‘Jesus could have touched this.”’ I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to go to Bethsaida my freshman year,” Agenten said. In 2004, Courtney made her own discovery while sifting a bucket of dirt her last day at Bethsaida. A small object caught her eye. Dr. Rami Arav, the dig director, exclaimed, “It’s a bead.” It was an Iron Age II bead – clay – no longer a part of what was likely a necklace. A graduate student took a photo of her holding up her
find. It wound up on the cover of Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR). “It caused a bit of a controversy because I was wearing a tank top and shorts, which some readers found immodest,” Agenten said. “But that’s what we wore when working.” McNamer remembers controversy, too.
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“It was all much ado about nothing,” she laughed. “A bunch of stodgy old scholars with nothing better to complain about.” From McNamer’s perspective it was a silly issue that threatened to obscure wonderful work. It was work that began in 1967 when Bargil Pixner, a Benedictine monk, first examined the area where he believed Bethsaida was located. The war with Syria, Jordan, and Egypt had barely ended when he followed cows over minefields to examine the area. In 1985 he wrote a book advancing his ideas that this was where the village was located that Jesus visited. McNamer teamed with Pixner to convince Israel – a Jewish state – that it would be in its interests to promote a Christian site. It took four years.