c. 2003 Religion News Service

NAZARETH, Galilee _ After a bumper season of winter rains, the streams and rivers of the Galilee are brimming with water for the first time in a decade. But there is one sacred and mysterious Galilee water source _ Mary’s Well in Nazareth _ whose waters today are a mere trickle of what they were in Jesus’ time.

Nazareth is the Galilee town where Jesus grew to manhood, and the place from which he set out across the nearby hills and valleys in his brief but revolutionary ministry. Mary’s Well marks the site in Nazareth where Orthodox Christians believe the Angel Gabriel announced the birth of Jesus. And it is undoubtedly a place Jesus visited often with his mother in his childhood.

While Jerusalem is the focus of the immediate drama of the Easter story, the Galilee is a good place to contemplate its meaning.

Nazareth is the place where Jesus grew to manhood. It is the Galilee, hills carpeted with a rainbow of springtime wildflowers and new wheat bursting with seed, that provided the backdrop for most of Jesus’ ministry and inspired his many parables and teachings.

And the Feast of the Annunciation, marking Gabriel’s announcement, is celebrated here by the local Christian community in the weeks just preceding Easter.

Today, as in antiquity, the Galilee remains a relatively remote province on Israel’s periphery. In this region, modern-day mystics and poets still withdraw to peaceful contemplation while battles rage and politicians argue in more strategically located areas like Jerusalem.

For centuries, Mary’s Well has been a central focus of pilgrim visits here. It is a place where ancient legends abound and modern speculation is rife about the fate of her waters, which are but a trickle of what they were in antiquity.

Fuad Farah is general secretary of the Orthodox Council, the lay organization of Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, and a Christian historian. He has explored the story of the well and its archaeology, and has written on the subject.

The actual water source for Mary’s Well, he said, is a spring located about 30 meters northeast of St. Gabriel’s Church.

“Until 1972, we didn’t know anything about the water source,” he said. “But then we rediscovered the spring head in a strikingly beautiful crystal white cave, nine meters below ground level.”

Water flows from the spring through a series of aqueducts and caves to the nearby church. Inside the church is a stairway descending below ground level to an ancient grotto. There lie the remains of the pool from which the people of Nazareth would draw water in biblical times.

The Gospel of Luke, which provides the most detail on the annunciation story, says, “God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in the Galilee, to a virgin, Mary.” But it does not mention the well as the site of the angel’s visit.

However, in sociological terms, water sources were places that women would frequent daily, and thus were familiar settings for biblical meetings and encounters. The apocryphal gospel of James says the encounter between Mary and Gabriel occurred at the well, providing a theological source for Orthodox belief. Either way, “Mary’s Well” became a point of veneration.

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In the 11th century, a new church was built over the well grotto by Nazareth Christians. It was destroyed by the Muslim Mameluke invasion of 1263.

In the 16th century, as Christian communities in the region began to undergo a renaissance, the well grotto was rebuilt by Franciscan Catholic monks. The monks had gained permission from the Ottoman Turkish rulers to establish the church, although it was taken over by the original Orthodox owners. In 1750 the present Orthodox Church, St. Gabriel’s Church of the Annunciation, was built on the site.

The Franciscan Catholics, meanwhile, established themselves at the other end of the town, building a second Church of the Annunciation on Nazareth’s New Testament-era settlement ruins _ the area where contemporary archaeologists believe Jesus and his family probably lived. Ruins of a Roman-era “synagogue-church” have also been found under the Catholic church, perhaps the place where the town’s first Judeo-Christians may have gathered for worship.

“The Latin (Catholic) church is built upon the house of Mary, while our church is built upon the well,” said Farah, describing the theological balance achieved between Orthodox and Catholic Christians in the Nazareth community.

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But in the centuries of veneration and destruction, Mary’s Well has undergone many undergone changes.

Beginning in the New Testament era, channels were built to carry the water from the site in the Orthodox church grotto to a new well house a few dozen meters outside the church. Here, donkeys could drink and women could draw water and chat about events of the day without disturbing the sanctity of the church standing on the original site at various times in history.

Meanwhile, the spring inside the church was sealed off to daily use. Pilgrims could draw small, symbolic quantities of water as souvenirs, but that was all.

During preparations for the new millennium, the city decided to renovate the area, making the well more attractive and accessible to pilgrims and pedestrians and, they hoped, restoring the water flow.

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Yardena Alexandre, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, supervised two seasons of excavations at the site, undertaken during the renovations.

“We found remains from the Mameluke, Crusader and Roman period,” she said. “The Roman finds were very minimal, remains of a few wall stubs and the remains of an ancient water channel. But from the Crusader period there was an impressive structure, a well house built over the water cistern. Among the finds were hundreds of broken glass bracelets and hundreds of coins, which were most likely thrown into the well house by pilgrims and visitors. The coins indicate a presence at the well house from the Roman, Crusader, Mameluke and Ottoman period.”

Meanwhile, not far away, a local shopkeeper, Elias Shama, dug through the dampness in his store celler and uncovered remains of an ancient bathhouse, which was undoubtedly linked to the area’s water system.

Shama found evidence of an elaborate water heating system for the bathhouse estimated to date back at least 1,000 years. Although no systematic excavations have yet been conducted at the site, some archaeologists have ventured to date the earliest remains of the bathhouse to Jesus’ time.

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Today, just three years after the famous March visit of Pope John Paul II to Nazareth to celebrate the Festival of the Annunciation, the renovations of Mary’s Well are complete.

And yet the rebuilt well house, just outside St. Gabriel’s Church, remains virtually dry even today. Water still flows into the ancient St. Gabriel’s Church grotto, where pilgrims visit and pray. But from there it disappears mysteriously underground.

Perhaps, in a water-parched land, this modest water supply that was the source of so much veneration and speculation has simply changed course or dried up amid a local explosion of construction and development.

To Farah’s mind, however, the water from Mary’s well is still flowing _ somewhere.

“Overflows from Mary’s Well are now flowing along a new underground course,” he said, “unknown and undiscovered so far.”

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