It is 40 years since the first man put his feet on the moon.

I watched it on our black-and-white-TV and as such was one out of an estimated 450 million people around the world who actually followed the event through TV or radio. My mother was very exited about “how far mankind had come”, but I was a simple child at the time and what fascinated me the most was that the astronauts were jumping around being weight less. I would have loved to bump around in a place like that.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to put his feet on the moon. Upon doing so he said these words; “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
He walked on the moon on July 21, 1969.

Armstrong became a believer in God out in space. At one point in his life he came to Israel to “walk in the footsteps of Jesus”. Meir Ben Dov, one of Israel’s great archaeologists, was the one to show him around.
Meir Ben Dov is a Jew and not in particular a religious man. So he took Armstrong around to the different churches in Jerusalem and told him both the “Christian traditions” claims concerning the sites and his own reflections based on his knowledge of history and archaeology. As Jerusalem was destroyed and rebuilt completely after the time of Jesus it is hard to claim with certainty that Jesus actually “had his feet” on any specific spot in present days churches.
At the end of the tour Mr. Ben Dov wanted to show Armstrong the area close to the southern wall surrounding the Temple Mount. He was actually digging in that area at the time. On this particular part of the wall the two main entrances to the Temple from the south are still visible. The gates are closed today, but in front of them there are huge original stone slabs.
While standing on the one in front of the middle gate Armstrong asked the archaeologist if there were any place at all where one could say for sure that Jesus must have stood. “Right where you are standing now”, was the answer.
(I know this story from Meir Ben Dov. I was fortunate to be taken around by him myself when I was studying to become a tourist guide in the early nineties.)

It took many years for Christians to understand that the closest they could get to “walk in the footsteps of Jesus” was to enter into the area of the Archaeological Park south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Jesus spent most of his time in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount teaching the crowds. In order to get up there he must have entered through this middle gate as did other rabbis at the time.

It is almost too Jewish to be true…..

Elin Elkouby.