Where was Jesus baptized?

Question

Accepted Answer

In the Jordan, but the exact place is disputed. John's Gospel names it “Bethany beyond Jordan” in most manuscripts, “Bethabara” in others; the traditional site is the ford opposite Jericho, about 11 km from the city and 31 km from Jerusalem in a straight line, where the map point stands at al-Maghtas on the Jordanian bank. Qasr al-Yahud on the Israeli bank faces it across the river. Mark says that “Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan”, and John adds: “These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing”. Origen, in the third century, found Bethany in almost all the copies but no Bethany by the Jordan, so he preferred Bethabara, which he took to mean “house of preparation”; the name is more often read as “place of the ford”. The pilgrim of Bordeaux in 333 was shown the place of the baptism five miles above the Dead Sea, and the Madaba map of the sixth century marks Bethabara there, on the western bank. Byzantine churches and a monastery of John the Baptist stood on both banks, and the eastern ones, excavated in the late 1990s at Wadi al-Kharrar, were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2015. Other readings put the baptism elsewhere. John also baptized “in Ænon near to Salim, because there was much water there”, in the Jordan valley south of Scythopolis, about 61 km north of the ford; and some scholars read “Bethany beyond Jordan” as Batanaea, the region north-east of the Sea of Galilee, where, in John's account, Jesus gathered his first disciples. Luke dates John's preaching to the fifteenth year of Tiberius, AD 28 or 29, which is the year the map uses.