There is really virtually nothing to see in Konya of direct relevance to the study of the NT, though nearby you can go to a caravanserai and see the whirling dervishes, which is fascinating.  Instead of doing that on this trip we went and visited perhaps the oldest church in all of Turkey, and one founded by Queen Helena, on her way from Constantinople to build churches in Jerusalem and Bethlehem…. The church is in the charming little village of... Read more

The little museum in Yalvac (aka Pisidian Antioch) is well worth seeing.  It has a room dedicated to Paul and the remains of his period, though sadly they’ve misidentified the Sergius Paulus inscription stone as about Paul of Tarsus.  More on this below.  It’s a stone Mark Wilson and I found out in the courtyard beside the museum and asked them to put inside, which they did and then somebody from Ankara involved in antiquities decided it was a Byzantine... Read more

Pisidian Antioch. If you check your map of western Turkey you will find today the town is called Yalvac. And in order to get there from Perga near the south coast, one has to climb huge mountains, risk groups of bandits and various other dangers.  So the question is why in the world, having started in Perga didn’t Paul and Barnabas continue along the coast towards Tarsus and then through the Cilician gates back to Antioch?   Why Pisidian Antioch.  And... Read more

The new museum in Antioch is beautiful and unlike the old one, climate-controlled. The two major reasons to go to the new Antioch museum is to see the Alexander the Great exhibit, featuring his victory at nearby Issos (less than 4 miles up the coast from Antioch. The place is now called Iskenderun).  The second good reason is the large amount of Hittite and related holdings.  November 5th, 333 B.C. was a big day for Alexander, for Issos was where... Read more

Most of what there is to see in the museum under the hotel itself involves the villas and their mosaics, which are still in situ, in the place where they were found but this is not entirely so.  So pottery and other objects were found and are displayed like at a normal museum… for instance…   But the real focus is not what you find in the few glass cases but what you see when you walk on the elevated... Read more

Antioch on the Orontes is a nice smaller town where we fill find excellent Kunefe— a delicious dessert which is a sort of shredded wheat and honey and nuts concoction.  This word just in, the people who invented baklava (yes the Turks not the Greeks did that) are really good at pastry sorts of desserts. But of course there are other things to see and check out… for instance the mosaic art shop which makes beautiful things like this… You... Read more

On the way to Antioch on the Orontes where the followers of Christ were first called Christianoi, or partisans of Christ,  we stopped at a remarkable Hittite site, where statues were made.  The Hittites are perhaps one of the least well known ethnic groups when it comes to Bible readers, though they may remember Uriah was a Hittite, the first husband of Bathsheba.  In fact the Hittites carved out a considerable Empire which at one point in fact covered much... Read more

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum is perhaps the most amazing mosaic museum in all the Lands of the Bible. The museum has a brief picture exhibit of pictures of what happened at Zeugma when all the mosaics had to be removed… Most of the exhibit is just mosaics, but some reconstruction of some sample rooms where the mosaics were is also undertaken… The one mosaic which has been give its very own. room and exhibit is the gypsy girl, sometimes also... Read more

Gaziantep is a city on the spice route, which has an incredible bazaar, and an even more incredible mosaic museum with mosaics that were moved lock, stock, and barrel from nearby Zeugma, a Roman frontier city on a lake with many impressive villas.  The archaeologists had to work at warp speed to get the job done, because the new dam was about to let water cover the whole site.  We’ll look at the latter in subsequent posts, but let’s start... Read more

Gobeckli Tepe (which means pot-bellied hill in Turkish) is a religious site, a high place in the OT sense, in southeastern Turkey which has rightly created a sensation. The German scholar who helped excavate it wrote a book about it entitled Der Ersten Tempel— the first temple. By various means of reckoning, this site dates to somewhere between 8-10,000 B.C. And it has mightily confounded secular anthropologists who had assumed that religion only shows up after agriculture and village life. ... Read more