Traveling to the Judeo-Christian past

Today, a dozen Boston-area people leave on a trip back in time.

Of course, this is not the H.G. Wells, flashing-lights-and-high-tech-wizardry time trip traversing the continuum of years as if it were a stretch of interstate highway. Yet in a real way, today's travelers will commune with ancients, following the footsteps, real or mythical, of the fathers of Judaism and Christianity. The Boston Dialogue Foundation -- a Revere nonprofit working for religious understanding, particularly to help integrate Muslims into local communities -- arranged the trip for parishioners of Trinity Church, the Back Bay Episcopal parish.

Charles Medler, a retired engineer and Trinity parishioner who helped organize the two-week tour, anticipates 14 days reviving both the mind and soul.

"I tend to take a kind of intellectual approach to my Christianity; I'm a scientist," Medler said. "But it does add to the spirituality of the trip to be able to be there."

Seeing with one's own eyes the delivery room of so many infant Christian communities is far different from sitting week after week in your own church back home.

He conceptualizes the itinerary as covering three interests. One is to visit places that figure prominently in Judeo-Christian history. The tourists will visit eastern Turkey near Haran, where Abraham received his call from God in Genesis to migrate to Canaan with the promise, "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you."

A second focus will be to trace the travels of St. Paul as he evangelized the new Jesus movement in the first century. The trip will include stops near the ancient city of Antioch, where, according to the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament, Paul and his friend Barnabas taught for a year and where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians.

Another stop even more important in Paul's work will be Ephesus, the fourth-largest city in the Roman Empire. Paul stopped there on the third and final of his missionary journeys and was a hit, converting many pagans to Christianity.

But in an early case of being too good for one's own good, Acts records that silversmiths who made their living making shrines for pagan worship rose up against the missionaries. Paul left Ephesus, but it was there that he wrote his first Letter to the Corinthians. Medler says he and his companions will also visit Tarsus, Paul's birthplace.

The third focus of the trip will be sites of importance to early Christianity, such as Cappadocia, where early Christians clustered in underground cities to elude Roman persecution.

This trip through time is actually an example of suspended animation: It was planned several years ago, after groups from Trinity had journeyed to Israel and Greece, but the plans were frozen after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "Everybody got cold feet," Medler said.

The trip stayed on hold until he got a call last year from the foundation, which was trying to arrange cultural exchanges with Turkey. Trinity was known for several interfaith activities it had collaborated on involving Muslim groups.

For all the immersion in events millennia ago, the foundation planned the trip to help with two very contemporary missions, said Ibrahim Sayar, its director of religious activities and a native Turk. "One of them is to give participants a firsthand experience of a Muslim country." While this Muslim country happens to be his own, Sayar says he'll only be able to break away from the group for a day or two to visit family.

The Trinity folks will have opportunities to dine with Turks while visiting, Sayar said. And while the sightseeing focus is Judeo-Christian, one stop will be the ancient Iconium (modern-day Konya), which is not only a place Paul visited but also the home of an important Sufi poet, Medler said.

Though the foundation is run by Muslims, "in no way are they trying to convert anyone to Islam," Medler said. "That's not their purpose. Their interest in this is strictly intercultural and educational."

While Americans need exposure to Muslims, the reverse is also true; exchanges such as this "would help the American image over there," Sayar said.

That's the foundation's second aim. Because of the Iraq war, reports of torture of Muslim terrorist suspects, and the longstanding US support for Israel, America's reputation throughout the Muslim world tanked in recent years, US aid for Muslims in such places notwithstanding. Turkish Muslims "really need to see American people," Sayar said.

A region burdened by political and religious tension, then and now. You don't have to go far to travel in time.

Questions, comments, or story ideas can be sent to spiritual@globe.com.