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Our Holy Land tour guide from the Ministry of Tourism had no interest in Nazareth Village. The site is billed as a "living museum" where tourists, mostly Christians, can see an ancient Middle Eastern farm, with locals decked out in beige robes working the land and herding livestock. The decade-old ministry had some of the trappings of Sunday school flannel boards and 1950s Jesus films, going more for the picturesque than the living past.

Our guide, Karl—a secular Jew with a master's degree in archaeology—was having none of it. He kept to the back of our group, waiting for the closing evangelistic message to end so we could attend to weightier sights, like Masada and the Qumran Caves.

A first-time visitor to the Holy Land, I was prepared to share Karl's distaste for quaint depictions of Jesus and his home. Even Karl, with seemingly no interest in getting to know the Man from Nazareth, at least recognized that man as a person who lived in time and space. He knew we were dealing in historical meat, not myth.

Yet something happened as we toured the Village that snuffed out my snobbery and mistrust of marketed experiences. The millennia-old olive trees, the dust in my nose, even the garbed employees—they all helped me to see Jesus as a man deeply acquainted with the essentials of human life. And they unearthed the fact that I was the one who had turned Jesus into a nice story.

As it turns out, I was not the first to think of Jesus more as a compelling concept than as a Jewish rabbi preaching throughout ancient Palestine. Not even 200 years after Jesus' birth, Gnosticism threatened to unmoor the budding church from its earthy roots. Disdaining physical reality in favor of esoteric, inner knowledge, Gnostics could not conceive of a Messiah who assumed human flesh yet maintained divinity. They believed the supernatural Christ must have escaped before the physical Jesus died on the cross. Marcion—an early heretic whose ideas overlapped with the Gnostics'—believed the Old Testament God was a demiurge, for only a lesser god could be responsible for creating the material world. Marcion thus opposed Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, preferring a mystic Christ divorced from historical messiness.

Early Christian apologists, particularly Irenaeus of Lyons, recognized that the true God had always been present with creation, as the Scriptures revealed. This God, wrote Irenaeus (to Gnostics' supreme offense), "mingled with his own creation," willingly inhabiting a human body and having that body die and rise again so as to "raise up all flesh." Irenaeus recognized that caro cardo salutis—"the flesh is the hinge of salvation." It was only through a real earthly ministry and a bodily death and resurrection that redemption was won.

Thanks to this and other theological defenses, today most Christians know we are to celebrate living in a material world. Surely we are not so spiritual as to disdain the kind of body Jesus had. Still, my snobbery reared its ugly head again, even after my Nazareth Village moment.

The next day, our group descended a lattice-lined hill to the Church of the Primacy, a Franciscan chapel on the Sea of Galilee's north shore. It houses the Mensa Christi, a rock slab on which it is believed the resurrected Jesus dined with his disciples. It also memorializes Peter becoming the petra of Christ's church. Twelve feet long, the slab dominates the chapel interior. Germans, Latinos, and Australians jostled alongside our group to touch the slab, to pray kneeling in front of it. In touching, they wanted to connect to this moment in Jesus' resurrected life.

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January 2010, Vol. 54, No. 1

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