My Internet friend Karen said she wanted to know how she researched Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I’m almost embarrassed to say how little research I did relative to the length of the book. Oh, I researched, but probably less than you’d think.

My wife asked “How can you write a book that takes place in Israel without going to Israel?” Alas, in our years living in the Middle East we never got to Israel. We still hope to someday, but for now whatever I know about that country has to come from books and other sources. My research, therefore, was a combination of what I call active research and passive research. By passive research I mean such things as…

…sermons. And Sunday School lessons. Having sat through almost 28 years of evangelical sermons at the time I started DLA, and that many years of adult Sunday school lessons, I learned a lot. You can’t listen to a sermon that includes the story of the Good Samaritan (which, by the way, is only in Luke) without hearing about the dangers of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. You can’t go a year of sermons without hearing how Jerusalem is at the top of a hill. All roads to Jerusalem are uphill climbs.

You can’t attend decades of adults Sunday school classes, especially when you’re teaching a lot of them, and not learn the geography of Israel and surrounding nations. Pull out any study Bible and, in the maps in back, you get a decent idea of time and space considerations. Study Jesus’ return to his home town of Nazareth and you learn it is a tiny village next to Sepphoris, a substantial Roman colonial town.

Most of the years in church and studying because I wanted to, long before ever thinking of writing DLA, served me well when it came time. The other type of passive research I used was our five years living in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). We lived among the Arabs and learned something of their ways. As part of cross cultural training before we moved to Saudi in 1981 we took some classes and did a bit of studying.

One of the things I wanted to do was work cultural references into the book. I realize, of course, that Luke and Augustus were in a pre-Islamic era, and Islam certainly changed the Arab culture. Yet some characteristics of the people today no doubt applied back then. The camel market in the book, for example, is very close to our visit to the camel market at Al Jahra, Kuwait, complete with the man frothing goat’s milk with bloody fingers. I substituted donkey carts for Toyota pick-ups, but otherwise it’s what I remember for our 1988 visit there. Hopefully I haven’t made any major mistakes with these cultural references.

The active research I did was mainly through Internet sources via Google Books and in our local library. I made a little use of inter-library loan, but usually what I wanted from another library was a reference book, something that couldn’t be loaned out. I also have a fairly good library of books that describe New Testament times, and relied heavily on these. I found a scholarly paper about book writing in the first century, including scrolls vs codex, types of “paper,” and found some good references on ink.

I was unable to confirm a few key items, such as the existence of a prison beneath the Antonia Fortress. I suspect there was one, but that may be a historical inaccuracy. Similarly I found no evidence of copper deposits in the Mount Tabor/Nain area. I remember reading a reference, or maybe hearing this years ago, about that being a transhipment area for copper ore from Cyrus, but I couldn’t confirm that in my research for this volume.

The Jewish temple in Jerusalem is well documented in several histories, and easy to research in many sources, as are Roman practices in their colonies including the Syria-Israel region. I also researched ancient saddles, since someone in my critique group questioned if they had saddles back then. I learned that the owners of the colt Jesus borrowed would indeed be using a saddle.

I don’t know if this fully describes the research or not. There’s probably lots more I could have done, but I think I did enough to present an accurate picture of the country, customs, and practices. Hopefully readers will agree, and not chew me out about the non-existent copper deposits.