{"id":279,"date":"2008-06-19T15:11:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-19T15:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bibleandculture\/2008\/06\/exploring-erythrai.html"},"modified":"2008-06-19T15:11:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-19T15:11:00","slug":"exploring-erythrai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2008\/06\/exploring-erythrai.html","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Erythrai"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a>Set on a hill overlooking the beautiful Aegean is the ancient city of Erythrai. It is not on anybody’s tour itinerary, because it has hardly been excavated. Some of it simply sticks out of a farmer’s plot of eggplants. The theater still has various steps intact and a tremendous view from the top (see the picture of me and my good friend Levent sitting on the top row of theater seats. Yes that’s me wearing a Turkish football jersey, for Levent’s favorite soccer team Fenerbache. The colors are the same however for the Carolina Panthers :).<\/p>\n

As the Turkish sign tells us, this city was an important Greek city at one juncture, and the famous traveler Pausanias (see his famous work Descriptions of Greece etc.) visited it and commented on its splendor overlooking the sea. To judge by the size of the theater, the population of this town was probably about 15,000 or so at one juncture in antiquity. Like so many other Classical and Biblical sites in Turkey, the sheer cost of excavating all such promising sites and maintaining them has made it impossible for all such sites to be dug. Notice the beautiful keystone arch from the theater just lying on the ground untouched. Notice also the purple thistle and the poppies– the former being the bane of the archaeologist’s existence with its serious prickers.<\/p>\n

In my estimation, having now traversed from the eastern to the western end of Turkey, I would reckon there are perhaps 100 times as many important unexcavated sites of Biblical and classical importance in Turkey in comparison to Israel. In part the fault lies with NT scholars who have done nowhere near the amount of spade work as OT scholars in unearthing our past. NT archaeology continues to be the step child of OT archaeology unfortunately, and it is a pity since there are so many more NT sites of interest that we have yet to assess. Here is a city from the Ionian League just sticking out of the ground and begging to be unearthed. But alas, while the harvest is vast and plentiful the workers and funds are few.
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Set on a hill overlooking the beautiful Aegean is the ancient city of Erythrai. It is not on anybody’s tour itinerary, because it has hardly been excavated. Some of it simply sticks out of a farmer’s plot of eggplants. The theater still has various steps intact and a tremendous view from the top (see the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nExploring Erythrai - The Bible and Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2008\/06\/exploring-erythrai.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Exploring Erythrai - The Bible and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Set on a hill overlooking the beautiful Aegean is the ancient city of Erythrai. 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A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has also taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell. A popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings not only in the United States but also in England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has also led tours to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Witherington has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Beliefnet website. Along with many interviews on radio networks across the country, Witherington has been seen on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/author\/bwitherington"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}