Emmaus

The dispute over Emmaus begins inside the manuscripts of Luke rather than in the ground. The great majority of Greek copies read sixty stadia at Luke 24:13, which is about 11.1 km, near seven miles, and which is what the Berean Standard Bible renders as “about seven miles.” Papyrus 75 and Codex Vaticanus carry that number. A minority reads one hundred sixty stadia, near 30 km, and the witnesses usually listed for it are Codex Sinaiticus, the Armenian version and the Palestinian Aramaic version. Both directions of change have been argued and both are reasonable. On the first reading, sixty is original and a scribe who knew Emmaus as the well-known town in the Ayalon valley raised the number so that the Gospel would agree with the map he had. That is the majority judgment among textual critics and the reading printed in modern critical editions. On the second, one hundred sixty is original and a scribe who found a thirty-kilometre round trip on foot at night implausible lowered it to something a reader could picture. Defenders of the Nicopolis identification have argued this, because it is the only reading that puts the Gospel village at the one Emmaus attested by that name in first-century sources. The strongest argument in the whole question is not a textual one. Luke 24:29 has the two saying the day is almost over, and Luke 24:33 has them getting up that very hour and going back. On sixty stadia the round trip is around 22 km, which is a long but ordinary day on foot. On one hundred sixty stadia it is near 60 km, which is not. Emmaus-Nicopolis, at Imwas, is the only place called Emmaus that first-century sources name as a town of Judea, and it is the Emmaus of 1 Maccabees. Eusebius identified it with the Gospel village in the early fourth century and Jerome followed him around AD 390. Vincent and Abel, Dominicans of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, dated the earliest phase of the church to the third century and read it as a very early Christian building at a remembered site. Most later scholars have dated the standing basilica to the fifth or sixth century on the architecture and the mosaics, with the twelfth-century Crusader chapel inside it. This page prints both datings and settles neither. What is not disputed is that a substantial Byzantine church stood here and that the Christians of that period believed this was the Emmaus of Luke 24. What the site cannot solve is the distance: on the majority reading of Luke 24:13 it is too far, and the identification needs the longer number. The Ecole Biblique is a Catholic institution and dug the site as one, which this page states because it states the same everywhere else, and which is no reflection on the work. El-Qubeibeh has the opposite problem. The village sits about 11 km from Jerusalem in a straight line, which is sixty stadia almost exactly, on an old road running northwest toward Lydda. Its tradition is late. A fortified Castellum Emmaus appears in Crusader documents of the twelfth century, and nothing before that connects the place to the Gospel. Bagatti, of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, excavated in the 1940s and published his account in 1947. Whether any of the domestic remains under the church are first century has been argued in both directions, and no object recovered names Cleopas or Emmaus. The Studium Biblicum Franciscanum is a Catholic institution and holds the site, stated here for the same reason. Abu Ghosh, about 12 km west of Jerusalem on the main road toward Jaffa, was identified as Emmaus by the Crusaders, who built the church of the Resurrection there in the middle of the twelfth century. It is one of the best-preserved Crusader churches in the country. Roman military presence at the spot is attested by inscriptions of a detachment of the Tenth Legion Fretensis, and there is a spring, which explains why a road station stood here. The difficulty is that the Crusaders used the name Emmaus for more than one village west of Jerusalem at different periods, so the later tradition is tangled rather than a chain of witnesses. No source earlier than the Crusader period puts Emmaus here. Motza, called Qaloniyeh, rests on Josephus. He records Vespasian settling eight hundred discharged soldiers at a place he calls Ammaous, thirty stadia from Jerusalem, and the Arabic name preserves the Latin colonia, so the veterans' settlement is on the ground rather than a guess. Carsten Peter Thiede argued for this site in The Emmaus Mystery in 2005, reading Luke's sixty stadia as the round trip, thirty out and thirty back. That is a real proposal, and it is also not the plain sense of a village about seven miles from Jerusalem. The numeral in Josephus is itself unstable across the manuscript and printed traditions. Adam Clarke read sixty there in 1832 and used it to settle Luke's distance, while modern editions generally print thirty, so a case leaning on that number is leaning on a disputed one. Excavation at Tel Motza ahead of highway works uncovered a large Iron Age temple building, reported from 2012, directed for the Israel Antiquities Authority by Anna Eirikh, Hamoudi Khalaily and Shua Kisilevitz. It matters for the study of Judahite religion in the ninth century BC and it says nothing about Emmaus, which is a first-century AD question. The roads themselves are not in doubt. The main ancient route from Jerusalem to the coastal plain ran west down the Ayalon valley past the Emmaus of the Maccabees toward Lydda and Jaffa, and a second route ran northwest through the hills past el-Qubeibeh. Whichever village Luke meant, a walkable road ran to it. The site of Emmaus is not settled. A village called Emmaus existed, Luke's own manuscripts disagree on how far it was, and of the four candidates one has a first-century pedigree and the wrong distance, one has the right distance and a twelfth-century pedigree, one has a Crusader church and no earlier witness, and one has a Roman veterans' colony and a number that has to be read as a round trip. No object recovered at any of the four names Emmaus or Cleopas or ties a building to Luke 24. What no dispute touches is that the event is dated rather than located. Luke puts it on the day of the resurrection, and everything the passage teaches survives the loss of the map.