Day 1: Holy Sites, Holy Business...

After lunch, we visited several holy sites including the hill where Saint Helena (the mother of Emperor Constantine) determined 300 years after the fact that Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, the longest piece of teaching from Jesus in the New Testament. The first church built on this site was in the 4th century; the church you see above is Roman Catholic Franciscan built in 1938. It was a rather basic church surrounded by lushly landscaped grounds.

We wandered around the ruins of Capernaum, a city from the 2nd century BC that Jesus once lived in. Batya seemed a bit skeptical of some of the claims about the old synagogue as this site is run by Franciscans rather than as a national archaeological site. We also visited the Church of the Multiplication with its lovely restored 5th century mosaic floor in honor of the miracle of Jesus feeding the multitudes with loaves and fish.