I need a holiday — a very long holiday — and I don’t expect I shall return. In fact, I mean not to! Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring I like to compare a good vacation to restarting a computer. When encountering problems on a computer, one of the easiest possible solutions is to restart it. That little trick can fix a large portion of common issues. A good vacation is like that, flushing out the rhythms of everyday life and providing a fresh outlook. However, there are times that a restart isn’t good […]
Author Archive: Brian Johnson
An Early Spring
I began this blog 6.5 years ago because I was attending Jerusalem University College (JUC). It’s a small American Christian school situated on Mount Zion just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Ever since I attended a short-term program at JUC in 2005, I fell in love with the land and the school. A short-term trip was no longer good enough. Thus I took a leave of absence from work and spent the fall semester of 2011 studying the ancient world of the Bible at JUC. That should be enough, right? Not quite. I heard how the spring semester is […]
Rome
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble. Augustus We romped around Rome for the last few days of our tour. We had reached the heart of the Roman empire, a city of eminent emperors and striking structures, where the arteries of imperial roads joined. The city has layers of occupation from numerous eras from before the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire to the Renaissance to modern times. Caesar Augustus transformed the Republic into the Empire. After years of civil wars in Rome, he ended the squabbles and ushered in an era devoid […]
Pompeii
Broad sheets of flame were lighting up many parts of Vesuvius; their light and brightness were the more vivid for the darkness of the night… it was daylight now elsewhere in the world, but there the darkness was darker and thicker than any night. Pliny the Younger, Epistulae VI. 16 & VI.20 Not far from Puteoli is the ancient city of Pompeii. In AD 79 Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying Pompeii. The city disappeared and was never rebuilt. Then in the 19th century archaeologists started digging. They have since uncovered vast portions of the city. While it is never mentioned in […]
The Journey to Rome
After three months we put out to sea in a ship that had wintered in the island—it was an Alexandrian ship with the figurehead of the twin gods Castor and Pollux. We put in at Syracuse and stayed there three days. From there we set sail and arrived at Rhegium. The next day the south wind came up, and on the following day we reached Puteoli. There we found some brothers and sisters who invited us to spend a week with them. And so we came to Rome. The brothers and sisters there had heard that we were coming, and […]
Sailing By Sicily
My intent to document my trip to Italy has not turned out how I imagined. With the bustle of the trip, I didn’t take the time while I was there to sketch out what to write, which has made writing after the fact difficult. I’m going to write a few more brief posts of trip highlights, but then I will be moving on because I have another trip coming up that you won’t want to miss! The ancient Greeks founded the ancient city of Syracuse on the eastern shore of Sicily. We spent a day wandering around. The city has […]
Roman Villa
Maneuvering eastward in Sicily, we came to Villa Roman del Casale. It’s a large Roman Villa dating to the fourth century AD with thousands of square feet of mosaics. It’s basically a floor art gallery. That said, pictures serve better to explain. These are a small sampling of what’s in this palatial home.
The “Valley” of Temples
We crossed over from Malta to Sicily, moving from a small island to the largest in the Mediterranean. Now we’re in Roman territory! Actually, not quite. Yes, the Romans were here. They conquered the island during the First Punic War (a series of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage). However, before the Romans arrived, the Greeks were here, as we would see at other locales around the island. Our first stop was at Agrigento on the southern coast. There are a series of Greek temples built on a ridge, called the Valley of Temples today. (Whoever came up with […]
Sailing from Malta
After three months we put out to sea in a ship that had wintered in the island—it was an Alexandrian ship with the figurehead of the twin gods Castor and Pollux. Acts 28:11 Paul and his companions set sail from Malta, continuing their journey to Rome. After two days on Malta, we set sail on a ferry to Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean. The harbor has been a harbor for thousands of years. This is likely from where Paul sailed, too. Who else has sailed in and out of this harbor over the millennia? The Romans aren’t the […]
The Maltese Romans
Last time I talked about the earliest evidence of human activity on Malta. Over time, other groups would come. The Phoenicians arrived around the 8th century BC. Phoenicia was the coastal lands north of ancient Israel roughly compromising modern-day Lebanon. They were a sea-faring people, venturing across the Mediterranean. Solomon got cedars from them to build the Temple in Jerusalem (1 Kings 5). He also sailed with them, bringing in exotic items from afar (1 Kings 10:22). Phoenicia established a city in northern Africa called Carthage. After Phoenicia was taken out by Assyria, Carthage rose up to dominate the western […]