Study Chapter · I

"The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail"

and We've Been Reading It Backwards

The standard pulpit reading goes: "no matter how hard Satan attacks, the Church will hold out." Comforting. Defensive. Survival theology. It is also the exact opposite of what the sentence is doing — and the exact opposite of where Jesus was standing when He said it.

The standard pulpit reading goes: "no matter how hard Satan attacks, the Church will hold out." Comforting. Defensive. Survival theology. It is also the exact opposite of what the sentence is doing — and the exact opposite of where Jesus was standing when He said it.

Jesus didn't pick this geography by accident. Mark 8:27 and Matthew 16:13 are careful to tell us where: "in the region of Caesarea Philippi." He walked his disciples a hard 25-mile journey north of Galilee, past the safe Jewish heartland, all the way to the base of Mount Hermon — to a town built around a cliff face that was, by any honest description, the densest single concentration of organized paganism in the Levant.

The site is called Banias today (the Arabic preserves the older Greek Paneion / Paneas, since Arabic has no "p"). At the foot of a 100-foot red limestone cliff there is a cave. From the cave a spring rushes out — one of the three headwaters of the Jordan River. The Greeks had built a sanctuary to Pan there since at least c. 200 BCE (the first dated inscription is from this period). By the time Jesus arrived, the cliff face held at least five carved niches for cult statues — to Pan, Echo, Hermes, Nemesis, and the goat-god "Lord of the Dancing Goats" (the Greek inscriptions naming these are still legible on site). Herod the Great had added a gleaming white marble temple to Augustus Caesar right next to the cave, planted directly between the gods of the underworld and the god-emperor of Rome. His son Philip the Tetrarch refounded the town as Caesarea Philippi — "Caesar's town, the Philip one."