Bethsaida and Saybrook

Sometime between from the first century B.C.E. to the early first century, a fishing village [Bethsaida] arose where the Jordan River enters the shore of the Sea of Galilee. … In the year 30 or 31 C.E., tetrarch Herod Philip upgraded the village to a polis named Julias, according to the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus Flavius. Then, in the third century, the historical record goes silent on Bethsaida-Julias until the fifth century.

Ruth Schuster, “Has the ‘Lost City’ of the Gospels Finally Been Found?”

Bethsaida—a small fishing village renamed around the time of Jesus’ death—is mentioned in all four Gospels.

Many biblical scholars think that the Gospels were written not by their traditionally attributed authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but by other anonymous Christians in the late first or even early second century—several decades or more after Jesus’ death, and several decades or more after Bethsaida was renamed. Furthermore, many biblical scholars think that some or all of the Gospels were written not in Israel but in other faraway places like Ephesus or Antioch.

But now imagine that you are living in California and writing a book set long ago and far away in 1940s New England in which you mention the small town of Saybrook, Connecticut. As it so happens, there was a Saybrook in Connecticut in the 1940s. But Saybrook was renamed Deep River in 1947. How then can you—writing seventy-plus years later in California in 2021—have found out about the small town formerly known as Saybrook?

I found out about it because I Googled a list of renamed towns in the United States for this post. But suppose I could not Google such a list. Suppose we lived in a society in which there were no Google, no Internet, no computers, and few written records of any kind—and few people who could even read them to begin with. In such a society, it would be all but impossible for us to find out about Saybrook—unless, of course, we knew someone from Saybrook (or were ourselves from there).

In a world without computers, the Internet, and other modern sources of information, finding out about Saybrook in California in 2021 would be all but impossible unless one had some personal connection to the town. With such a personal connection, however, finding out about Saybrook would be trivially easy even in a pre-modern world with no computers, no Internet, and so on.

In a world without computers, the Internet, and other modern sources of information, finding out about Bethsaida in Ephesus or Antioch in the late first or early second century would be all but impossible unless one had some personal connection to the town. With such a personal connection, however, finding out about Bethsaida would be trivially easy even in a pre-modern world with no computers or Internet.

In other words: The (spatiotemporally and personally) closer the authors of the Gospels were to Jesus and the apostles, the easier it becomes to explain their knowledge of Bethsaida.

But Bethsaida is just one of countless examples of the Gospel authors’ intimate geographical, political, and other knowledge of early first-century Jerusalem, Judea, and Galilee.

Which raises the question: How did they get that right?