“Ahhh!” my friend Gayle Erwin gasped with delight. Ducking through the stony arch of the ancient building we froze wide-eyed and jaw-dropped. It was dusk in Jerusalem when we squeezed into a nearly two thousand years old, medium-sized lamp-lit room. Filling the room were three massive stone triclinium tables—each low to the floor with thick polished tops. Stout stools and padded benches surrounded the tables; at the back of the room a rough wooden ladder ascended to a clever loft built of raw branches and rope—an indoor treehouse quickly besieged the children of our group. The walls flickered in the lamplight and small clay bowls full of food cluttered the tabletops. We couldn’t believe our eyes. It was perfect. It looked like the real Last Supper.
The place was called Tantur—a rocky hill situated in a disputed area between Bethlehem and Jerusalem—and it was a historian’s dream. Tantur was old—really old—and unearthed on its rugged slopes were relics and ruins from a remote Biblical past: a wide, flat threshing floor, a walled sheepfold, a stone watchtower, a quarry and more—all restored and very ancient. Tantur was also the home of a research facility called Biblical Resources—a group of history detectives led by Dr. Jim Fleming, who personally restored the old building.
Long before we led groups to Israel, I heard Gayle Erwin, author of the Christian classic The Jesus Style, speak at a pastor’s conference about the original Last Supper. His talk re-wrote everything I thought I knew about that event, and now we were standing in it—a living, three-dimensional, accurate recreation of the Upper Room.
“Gayle—it looks just like your talk!” I gasped.
“It does!” he answered. “Now, let’s see what they do with it…”
Our group squeezed into the snug seats around the stone tables as the giggling children ascended into the loft—soon our group was served a hearty Biblical feast. A young German researcher walked us through the events of Jesus’ last, greatest night with His disciples. It was amazing, and soon became a recurring highlight of our future tours. Dr. Fleming had really done his homework.
After several subsequent visits to Biblical Resources I realized this amazing hands-on presentation was too important to leave in Jerusalem. My church needed to see this—to participate in it—but most of my people didn’t have the funds to visit the Holy Land. I had to find a way to bring the Biblical Resources experience home with me—and with their gracious permission, I did. They levied just one stipulation: do your homework.
It would have been easy to parrot Dr. Fleming’s and Gayle’s insights to the folks back home, but I needed to confirm the accuracy of their data before trying to teach it. So I dug in. It was then that I made another startling discovery—languishing on dusty shelves in second-hand bookshops was a significant number of out-of-print books on the subject of ancient Levantine meal traditions, including the Last Supper. People had written about these things for a long time, but over the time they got neglected and all but forgotten.
I was now on a quest. The Tantur dinner was much more than a revelation of old customs or the seating arrangements around an ancient table—it was like Dorothy landing in Oz—a black-and-white world that suddenly exploded into Technicolor. It kicked open a door leading to a world that never occurred to me—how the people of the Bible thought about and related to their ordinary lives—how they were from an alien world I never knew existed, much less understood. My modern westernized brain swam in a sea of Greek philosophers, Renaissance art and modern trends—and all my sermons reflected it. But the people of the Bible had a radically different way of looking at God, life and relationships. Their thinking was Eastern and ancient, concrete and earthy—it was poles apart from my own. And it launched me on another quest.
Digging through books and research papers, I discovered it was possible and necessary to crawl inside the mind of a person who lived thousands of years ago in an alien world and see life as they saw it. I needed to learn a different language—more than that, a different life—family and relationships, what made them afraid, their superstitions and quirky customs—and most important of all, their semantics. When I began to look at the Bible through a different mind—their mind—its miraculously simple content flew open like a pop-up book.
Every page became an artist’s canvas painted with the great acts of the Bible—living pictures that captured the why as much as the what. And (most reassuring of all) none of it altered Biblical doctrine (otherwise it would be heresy) as it brought that ancient world into sharper focus. When I understood the possibilities—especially as a Bible teacher—I now knew what I would be doing with the rest of my life.
That was the birth of The Biblical Dinner—a vivid, edible sermon—a movable feast that I’ve had the privilege of sharing around the world—an event that sprang from Jim Fleming’s brilliant outline and Gayle Erwin’s breathtaking insights into the nature of Jesus. Dr. Fleming and Gayle are on virtually every page of this book, as are many other excellent Bible detectives. To these folks I offer my heartfelt thanks—you have blessed me—and uncounted thousands—more than you will ever know this side of heaven.
—Jay McCarl
Jay McCarl 