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Welcome to Times will Tell, the newly rebranded weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week we go onsite to Qasr Al-Yahud on the banks of the Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptized. We attended the first mass in 54 years at a Franciscan church called the St. John the Baptist Chapel.
Along with another dozen or so churches on both sides of the Jordan near Jericho, the chapel commemorates Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist. This January 10 was the date on which the Catholic church marks the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord or Theophany. Meaning, the priests were commemorating the day of Jesus’s baptism at the place where he was meant to have been baptized some 2,000 years ago.
Amanda Borschel-Dan is The Times of Israel s Jewish World and Archaeology editor.
Father Francesco Patton, the Custos of the Holy Land, leads mass on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, at St John the Baptist Chapel on the banks of the Jordan River, January 10, 2021. (COGAT Spokeperson s Office)
Franciscan St John the Baptist Chapel on the banks of the Jordan River, January 10, 2021. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)
IDF officers escort Father Francesco Patton, the Custos of the Holy Land (center) and Vatican Ambassador to Israel Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli (to his right) to the St John the Baptist Chapel to the banks of the Jordan River, January 10, 2021. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel)