Bethany (Bible)

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Bethanien around 1865.
Photo by J. Graham on behalf of the Christian Knowledge Society , London

Bethany , also Bethany ( Hebrew בית עניה, German  Armenhausen ), is the name of two different Palestinian places in the New Testament .

Biblical tradition

Hometown of Lazarus

Bethany southeast of Jerusalem , on the east side of the Mount of Olives , about 15 stadiums (about 2.7 km) from Jerusalem ( Joh 11.18  EU ), is the hometown of the siblings Mary , Martha and Lazarus ( Joh 11.1  EU ). The place plays a role in the Bible several times, for example the donkey on which Jesus entered Jerusalem came from a village near Betfage and Bethanien, and Jesus stayed in the place ( Mk 11.1  EU ). The house of Simon the Leper was also in Bethany ( Mt 26.6  EU ). According to Lk 24.50  EU , the ascension of Christ took place near Bethany .

According to Jerome , a church was built here over the grave of Lazarus in ancient times. In the Middle Ages, the Bethanien Abbey, founded by Queen Melisende and her sister Ioveta , was located here . The place corresponds to today's Al-Eizariya (Al-Izzariya / العيزرية) in the West Bank (Palestine), about 2.4 km east of Jerusalem . The current name Al-Eizariya is a corruption of the Greek "Lazarion" ("place of Lazarus"). World icon

Place of the baptism of John

Another place of the same name was according to Joh 1,28  EU east of the Jordan . It is there that John the Baptist is said to have baptized and testified of Jesus Christ . According to Jn 10.40  EU , Jesus stayed there for a long time later. Since Origen , Bethany has been identified with Bethabara , a Jordan ford near the baptismal site of Jesus . Modern Bible atlases mark this place east of the Jordan with question marks in the maps.

Rudolf Bultmann sums up the situation: "The attempts to identify a Bethanien ... east of the Jordan have not led to a reliable result". Siegfried Schulz stated succinctly: "A Bethanien east of the Jordan is unknown". Nonetheless, in 2015 the site of al-Maghta on the east bank of the Jordan was included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites because the site is “scenically and culturally significant”.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Görg: Art. Bethany. In: New Bible Lexicon. Volume I. Zurich, Düsseldorf 1991, Sp. 280-281
  2. ↑ Shimon Gibson: The Seven Last Days of Jesus: The Archaeological Facts. Page 37, Verlag CH Beck, Munich, 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60502-4
  3. ↑ Origen in his commentary on the Gospel of John: "We are convinced that one should read Betabara rather than Bethany" (Günther Schwarz: Das Jesus-Evangelium. Munich 1993, p. 353.)
  4. ↑ z. B. Stuttgart Bible Atlas - Historical Maps of the Biblical World, ed. by John Strange, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-438-06020-5 , p. 47.
  5. ↑ Rudolf Bultmann: The Gospel of John (= critical-exegetical commentary on the New Testament, Vol. 2). Göttingen 1985, ISBN 3-525-51514-6 , p. 65, note 5
  6. ^ Siegfried Schulz: The Gospel according to Johannes (= The New Testament German (NTD), Vol. 4). Göttingen 1987, ISBN 3-525-51312-7 , p. 38
  7. ↑ ideaSpektrum No. 28, July 8, 2015, p. 5