The Yardenit baptismal site on the Jordan River, Israel.

PICTURE: Courtesy of the www.yardenit.com

James Bigbee was only a young Christian when, while fasting at his home in Wichita Falls, Texas (about 100 miles north of Dallas) in 1974, he found himself asking God if he could be baptised in the same place Jesus had been.
Thirty years old and with only a few hundred dollars to his name, he began to make his way to Israel, hitch-hiking to New York from where he flew to Europe before once again hitch-hiking his way eastward to Israel.
“I’d never been out of Texas, and all at once, I was on the other side of the earth, I was in Israel and I was looking for the place where our lord was baptised,” he recalls.
Once in Israel, Bigbee obtained a tourist map which positioned the site of Jesus’ baptism down in Jericho. So, leaving from Tiberias, he started following the Jordan River with the intention of walking 160 kilometres to Jericho.
On the way, he passed an archaeological site.
“About half a mile or so out...there was an ancient tel and it had a sign which said ‘Do not disturb: Department of Antiquities’. I said ‘Oh, I really wish this was the place where Jesus was baptised’ but the map said it was down there so I kept walking.”
Reaching Jericho after a week of walking (and spending some time in Israeli detention for accidentally walking into a minefield), Bigbee soon found that security forces weren’t going to let him get near the site where his map suggested that the baptism site was located.
Dejected, he returned to Tiberias.
“I was questioning why God had led me all that way if I couldn’t be baptised there. So I was just going to be baptised in the Sea of Galilee,” he says.
Turning to the Bible, he began to read from the Book of John and on reading of Jesus’ movements in chapter one, realised that Jesus could not have been baptised in Jericho.
“It was physically impossible for them to be there...” he says. “My mind just came alive them.”
Referring to the King James Version of the Book of John which describes Jesus as meeting John the Baptist at Bethabara (or Beit ‘Abara), he then began to seek where this place might be located.
Bigbee spoke to an old archaeologist who told him the site was located between the Sea of Galilee and Beit She’an.
“My mind immediately flashed back to that tel that I’d seen that was 2,500 years old - it hadn’t been excavated or anything - and I said that must be Beit ‘Abara.”
On June 9, 1976, Bigbee was himself baptised in the Jordan, on the site he says is the spot where Christ himself was baptised.
“This is June, it’s hot and summertime there, but this little cloud appeared over the horizon and up over us and it rained upon top of us right at that very moment,” he says.
“Needless to say, I was praising God and it was a sign for me...”
A plaque on the site now records Bigbee’s thoughts on the matter.
“It doesn’t matter where we are baptised, but the exhortation of being baptised close to where our Lord was baptised is indescribable,” he writes.
“If you are being baptised here today have faith in the operation of God that the Holy Spirit will perform within you, be buried with him in baptised. Wherein also you are risen with him in the newness of life. May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you.”