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I will tell you what somebody told me. He said that when he reads the Scriptures, it's like reading in black and white. But after a visit to Israel, it became colorful.

What is your interest in Jerusalem?

I have always been interested in Jerusalem at the time of Christ or the time of Herod. And then one day I discovered, to my greatest surprise, a Crusader church. When I tried to study to see what church it is, I found out that since the early 20th century, no one dealt with Crusader Jerusalem. No one found new facts about the city. So I decided this would be my Ph.D.

The old city of Jerusalem of today is essentially the Crusader city, although it was built by Emperor Hadrian in the second century. It was built then as a city in the block system with streets that are parallel and perpendicular to each other.

This is how the city is today. But it was the crusaders who changed the content of the city. They built the churches and the greater neighborhoods of various denominations and of various nationalities. They established the marketplaces of Jerusalem. When you walk today along the streets of the old city of Jerusalem and through those oriental markets, you should know that all of them were made for the first time under the Crusaders, mainly in the middle of the 12th century.

Another artifact that attracts a lot of attention is the Ark of the Covenant. What do you know, as an archaeologist, about it?

No one knows anything about the Ark of the Covenant. There are local primitive traditions but there is no way whatsoever to prove them.

The interest in the Ark of the Covenant started, in my opinion, with the Indiana Jones movie. And it's very serious, because even in that movie you see there are so many traditions regarding the Ark of the Covenant and its capacities.

We don't really know what it is. I always say that finding the Ark of the Covenant is very much in Judaism like looking for the Holy Grail in Christianity. All the knights and all the troubadours of the Medieval Era looked for the Holy Grail. They didn't know what to look for and they didn't know what it was like.

This shows us something very important: that every nation, every religion is yearning to find something that we don't know actually what it is.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Visit DickStaub.com for audio and video of his radio program (4-7 p.m. PST), media reviews, and news on "where belief meets real life."

Earlier Dick Staub Interviews include:

Eddie Gibbs Reconsiders Gen X Churches | The author of Church Next and Fuller's professor of church growth says his views on church leadership have grown. (Jan. 21, 2003)

Peter Jenkins Finds Jesus While Walking America | The author of A Walk Across America talks about why angels smiled down at him at a revival in Mobile, Alabama. (Jan. 7, 2003)

R.C. Sproul's Testimony | The theologian and author of Five Things Every Christian Needs to Grow talks about how he met Jesus and why playing the violin is like reading the Bible. (Dec. 31, 2002)

Calvin Miller on a Southern Baptist's View of Advent | The author of The Christ of Christmas celebrates the season around the one great miracle (Dec. 17, 2002)

Phillip Johnson | Asking the right questions is at the heart of the evolution debate. (Dec. 3, 2002)

Connie Neal | The author of The Gospel According to Harry Potter talks about leading a friend to Christ through the wizard hero. (Nov. 19, 2002)

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47