Jennifer Knust: Where Did John Baptize? A Tale in Two Maps

Living in exile in Caesarea, Origen was certain that the evangelist John intended to identify Bethabara as the place where John was baptizing. Defending an emendation of “Bethany” to “Bethabara” in the Gospel of John, he connected place to name and map to etymology. In Byzantine contexts, this recommendation became the dominant view; by the sixth century imperial cartography and institutional entrenchment had transformed the banks of the Jordan, including the village of Bethabara, into a Christian sacred landscape. In eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, however, the Bethabara reading was overturned: no longer persuaded by church traditions and extant Byzantine texts, editors and scholars came to regard Bethabara as an unreliable conjecture and the reading “Bethany” was restored. Such shifts in the understanding of where John was baptizing are not innocent of political and social consequences; these debates expressed not only the critical judgments of scholars but also fantasies of belonging that mirrored broader colonial schemes. Once added to Christian maps, Bethabara became capable of proving, as John Chrysostom put it, that Gospel truth can be proven “by the very names of the places,” a claim with significant implications for the non-Christian residents of Palestine. Similarly, the eighteenth-century quest to locate “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” among other sites, worked to produce the topographical surveys of Palestine that facilitated colonial occupation. In both late antiquity and Protestant modernity, textual emendation and territorial ambition have resonated with the ideas, institutions, and activities that justify emplacement for some and displacement for others.