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CAESAREA PHILIPPI
City at the northern extremity of Palestine, on the southern slopes of Mt Hermon near the ancient city of Dan. Caesarea Philippi lies in a beautiful area on one of the three sources of the Jordan River, the Wadi Banias.
In the second century BC, the place was called Panion because the Greek god Pan was worshiped in a cave there. It is mentioned by Polybius, a Greek historian, as the place where Syrian king Antiochus III defeated the Ptolemies of Egypt in an important battle about 200 BC. The Jewish historian Josephus (Antiquities 15.10.3) wrote that “Panium” was governed by Zenodorus; its cultic site was “a very fine cave in a mountain, under which there is a great cavity in the earth, and the cavern is abrupt, and prodigiously deep, and full of a still water; over it hangs a vast mountain, and under the caverns arise the springs of the river Jordan.”
After the death of Zenodorus, Augustus Caesar gave the city to Herod the Great, who, according to Josephus, “adorned this place, which was already a very remarkable one” with a “most beautiful temple of the whitest stone.” When Herod died in 4 BC, his son Philip was given the territory surrounding Panion, an area known as Paneas. Josephus (War 2.9.1) reported that “Philip built the city Caesarea, at the fountains of Jordan, and in the region of Paneas.” Philip made it his capital and named it Caesarea Philippi after the Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar and himself, thus distinguishing it from the larger Caesarea Maritima on the Mediterranean coast. Josephus (War 3.9.7) wrote that emperors Vespasian and Titus both “marched from that Caesarea which lay by the seaside, and came to that which is named Caesarea Philippi.”
It was in Caesarea Philippi that the apostle Peter confessed Jesus to be “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:13-16; Mk 8:27-29).
About AD 50, Agrippa II enlarged Caesarea Philippi and named it Neronias in honor of the emperor Nero. The modern name, Banias, derives from the Arabic difficulty in pronouncing Paneas.