Christ during two days, and on the third day Jesus was minded to go into Galilee and was present at Cana at the marriage feast. Hostile critics of the fourth Gospel, taking the traditional scene of John's baptizing near Jericho—where Bethabara has usually been placed on the maps—asserted that Jesus would have a journey of 80 miles to accomplish in a single day to reach Cana of Galilee, and that the feat is of course impossible. But there is really no assertion that it was done or attempted. It is only a tradition of the fourth century which fixes Bethabara so far south, or says that Jesus was baptized at Bethabara. A position near Upper Galilee would suit the narrative better as the site of Bethabara. Now the surveyors in the course of their work marked all the fords of the Jordan, and collected all the names. The following winter, when Major Conder was looking through the list in order to prepare an index, he was struck with the presence of the word Abara. He saw at once that the house or station at this place would be Beth-Abara, which had thus been discovered unwittingly. He looked it out upon the map, and found it to be one of the principal fords of the Jordan, just above the place where the Jalud river, flowing down the Valley of Jezreel and by Beisan, debouches into Jordan. The distance thence to Cana would only be 22 miles. The fourth Gospel does not say that Jesus was baptized at Bethabara, and so this new discovery does not disturb that part of the tradition which fixes the baptism near Jericho. Jesus, after being baptized, retired into the wilderness, and when he returned to the world he found that John had removed to the more northerly station, and thither he followed him. As Jesus began to make disciples at Bethabara, the events of John i. must have occurred after the Temptation, and so indeed they are placed in the Gospel Harmonies (see Smith's "Dictionary of Bible," p. 721).
The Revised Version reads "Bethany beyond Jordan,"
