Jesus: A Pilgrimage

I really enjoyed this book. It’s a travelogue by a Jesuit priest of a trip he took to the Holy Land with a friend. In it, he travels to different locations associated with Jesus’s ministry to follow in the footsteps of the Messiah.

He writes so well. It just flows very naturally, and he captured the tension between holy sites and commercialism. He and his friend get scammed a couple of times, and they fall into tourist traps, but they genuinely see some lively things.

One of the problems, it seems, with visiting the Holy Land, is figuring out where things happened. Lots of locations are disputed, and different people claim different things, depending on what can make them money. Additionally, there are places where Jesus might have actually visited, and then there are places that only became notable in the years since the Crucifixion – lots of sites from the early church and from the second millennium.

In each chapter, he details their visit to a site, and the reflects what that moment or story from the Gospels means in the context of Jesus and his ministry. He tries to put a very human spin on it – like, what would it be like for people who were actually there at the time.

I loved the book, and this surprised me because it’s very similar in subject and format to Walking the Bible, and I really didn’t enjoy that. I feel like maybe I should revisit it.

I may read this again in the near future. It feels like a book I should meditate on a little

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