Study Tour to Greece and Turkey

This Saturday I am off on a 12-day study tour to Greece and Turkey with 17 North Park students. The study tour is a course called the “Greco-Roman world of Paul and John”.  Dr. Justin Hardin from Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, one of my best friends, will be helping me teach it.

This will be my second time going to Greece and Turkey. The first time was exactly 10 years ago when I went with Dr. Bruce Winter, then the Warden of Tyndale House, and a small group of grads and post-grads. That tour was in conjunction with a summer course Tyndale House was offering on the backgrounds of the NT.  It was the summer before I began my studies at Cambridge. Incidentally it was on that course that I first met Justin Hardin so it is a reunion of sorts.

I’m so excited to go to the Bible lands. I am convinced that there are few things that will more dramatically change the way you read the New Testament than traveling to the locations where the documents of the NT emerged. It is seeing the land first hand that opens up the text. Such an experience gives you an informed imagination to interpret the Bible.

Here’s the itinerary:

16 May, Athens: Acropolis, Agora, Archaeological Museum

17 May, Athens/Corinth: Acropolis museum, Acro-Corinth, Corinth
18 May, Corinth: Corinth, Archaeological museum, Cenchreae, Corinth Canal
19 May, Corinth: Isthmia and Epidaurus

20 May, Corinth/Samos: travel day

21 May, Samos: Motor scooters around the island. Perhaps a Greek Orthodox monastery
22 May, Kusadasi, Ephesus
23 May Kusadasi/Pamukkale: Miletus, Priene, Dydima
24 May, Pamukkale: Hierapolis, Laodicea, and Colossae

25 May, Pamukkale/Izmir: Aphrodisias

I’ll be taking a little flip camcorder and a camera and plan on documenting our progress regularly on the blog. I might even post some of our teaching at the sites.

I should add that the post series I’ve been doing on Love Wins and Jesus and the Eucharist as well as the one on Writing will take a hiatus for the next couple of weeks while I’m in Greece and Turkey.