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BetaPlans, dates and identifications are still being reviewed. Where scholars disagree — the date of the southern pool, whether the eastern basins were Jewish ritual baths or a healing shrine, how much of a pagan cult existed before AD 70, the exact plan of the Byzantine church — the model follows the reading most excavators have accepted and the essay says so.
Nine building phases in one hollow of rock, from the Iron Age dam of about 800 BC to the excavated garden you can walk through today. Each phase is a reconstructed model of what actually stood on the ground, drawn in a common set of coordinates so that the phases sit on top of one another exactly as the archaeology does — and each is paired with an essay of roughly a thousand words written to be read straight through rather than consulted.
The point of building it this way is that no photograph of Bethesda can show what the site is. Standing on the walkway above the pools you are looking at nine sites at once, stacked. A model you can turn, fade, ghost against another age, and lay over the present-day aerial can show that; a picture cannot.
The plan is redrawn from published excavation reports: Mauss's clearance from 1863, published 1888; the École Biblique campaigns of 1957–62 under de Vaux, Rousée and Duprez; and later re-examinations of the excavation records. Horizontal positions are approximate, and heights, roofing and vaulting are reconstruction throughout — there is no separate class of "certain" elevation here, so nothing is marked as such. The only dashed lines you will see are the ghosted comparison phase and the ring that marks a feature the essay has just sent you to. The northern pool is still largely unexcavated, so its later phases are the most conjectural thing here. The five porticoes of John 5 are not a guess — the foundations of four around the basins and a fifth on the dam were found — but their elevation is.
Overlay the site today draws the present compound from this atlas's own line-drawn plan, not from a photograph — there is no aerial or satellite imagery in this product.
A reconstruction, not a survey. Footprints follow published excavation plans — Mauss's clearance from 1863, published 1888; the École Biblique campaigns of 1957–62 under de Vaux, Rousée and Duprez; and later re-examinations; elevations above ground are informed estimates.
One site, nine phases, always drawn in the same frame and seen from the same angle unless you move it. Everything else here is a way of asking a question about that model — what changed, what survived, what is underneath, and where it all sits on the ground today.
Escape closes any panel. On a narrow screen the three columns scroll sideways rather than stacking, so the model keeps its proportions.
The timeline is spaced evenly by phase, not by elapsed years. Left and right arrow keys move through time; press P for presenter mode, T to start the tour.
The model can ghost the previous or next building phase behind the current one, or overlay the site as it looks today or in the age of the Gospel — a faint second layer for seeing what changed. This is a background rendering option rather than a control most readers need, so it isn't exposed on the main screen.
Taylor Halverson is a scholar of scripture and a teacher of learners — an entrepreneurship professor in the BYU Marriott School of Business who spends his working life helping people find and act on the best ideas and tools available to them.
He is the author and editor of more than fifty books and nearly a thousand articles and blog posts, and a builder of scripture study resources: the ScripturePlus app with Scripture Central, whose scripture YouTube channel he co-hosted to more than fifty million views, and BYU's Virtual Scripture Group, whose team spent more than five years reconstructing New Testament Jerusalem in three dimensions. This atlas of Bethesda belongs to that same body of work — tools made so that ordinary readers can see what specialists see.
He leads tours to Israel and the Middle East, China, India, Central America, Europe, and the national parks of the American West, where he unfolds how geology, geography, civilization, and scriptural texts created our beautiful present day.
Two doctorates in two separate fields — the ancient world, and the design of learning. Both of them are in this tool.
The 1901 American Standard Version is in the public domain in the United States and is used throughout this edition. Verse 4 is printed only in the margin, not the main text; read the note on verse 4 above for why.
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Sources, texts, illustrations and typefaces used in this atlas.
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This product is a Beta: an interactive model of nine building phases of the Pool of Bethesda site, with accompanying essays, a self-check quiz, and reference material, published by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D. ("Publisher"). It is a teaching aid and reconstruction, not a survey document — see The site tab's Accuracy & limits section for what that means.
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