The Pool of Bethesda

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Photos by Ian Finnin, 2018. 

The large Byzantine church, outlined in red (far right) was built over a pagan temple site (in yellow and green). The two big pools, separated by a dam wall (middle far left) are outlined in black. The central blue area is a Crusader Chapel. The church of St Anne, the Virgin’s mother, is right of screen. 

The sheep pool was nearby, not here. There is a rather strange story in the Gospel of John Chapter 5 about a crippled man who lay near the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem believing that somehow the water would be disturbed and that the first person into the pool would then be healed. Jesus asked him if he really wanted healing.



 He didn’t rebuke the man for being gullible or pagan but just said, “Stand up, take up your bed and walk” – and he did! Quite early in Christianity this event was illustrated by a man carrying a wooden or iron bedstead, for example in the baptistery of Dura-Europos before 256/7 CE, but it would have been a mat or, at best, a straw-filled palliasse. Bethesda is usually translated ‘house of mercy’, which obviously was needed by the blind, lame and paralysed who gathered there. 

The reason behind their gathering was that a cult centre for the Greek god Asclepius, called an asclepion, had existed at this site long before ‘the Jesus period’. Its remains have been found but it had been filled in when the first church on the site was built at a higher level: the Byzantine Church of the Lame Man.

 Traditionally the sick slept in the asclepion, expecting to be healed during the night. It is possible that the man had lived there, permanently, for 38 years before Jesus saw him one Sabbath day, after which they were both in trouble with the Jewish authorities: one for carrying his bedding and one for healing on the Sabbath.

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