The Holy Land Adventure

By Chris Wright

Last night you dreamt you were falling down a hole. Down and down. Now you’ve woken up with a jump, and the room seems strange. Very strange. It’s not only bright daylight, but you can hear people shouting and talking outside the window. And it’s not even your window. Your window has curtains, not the wooden shutters that are now wide open. You don’t know where you are, but you’re definitely not in your own house! Ahead of you are pages and pages of adventure and puzzles. You don’t have to do the puzzles. You can just turn the page and carry on with your adventure. However, the puzzles will help you feel part of what’s happening, so try and solve them if you can.. You are invited to enter the time tunnel and wake up in a land over 2,000 years ago!

• Language: English
• Publisher: White Tree Publishing
• Release date: May 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912529360

Chris Wright

Chris Wright is a young author who enjoys reading and is keen to share this joy with others. He lives in England, but he grew up in a small village in Hampshire. He wants to inspire young readers with his tales of a simpler time, outside among nature.

Book preview

About the Book

Last night you dreamt you were falling down a hole. Down and down. Now you’ve woken up with a jump, and the room seems strange. Very strange. It’s not only bright daylight, but you can hear people shouting and talking outside the window. And it’s not even your window. Your window has curtains, not the wooden shutters that are now wide open. You don’t know where you are, but you’re definitely not in your own house!

Ahead of you are 140 pages of adventure and puzzles. You don’t have to do the puzzles. You can just turn the page and carry on with your adventure. However, the puzzles will help you feel part of what’s happening, so try and solve them if you can.. You are invited to enter the time tunnel and wake up in a land over 2,000 years ago!

The Holy Land

Adventure

by

Chris Wright

© Chris Wright 2019

This eBook ISBN: 978-1-912529-36-0

Also available as a paperback ISBN: 978-1-912529-34-6

Website: www.whitetreepublishing.com

Email: [e-mail]

(Gold Medal awarded 2019 by Collins Productions)

The Holy Land Adventure is a work of fiction drawing on the Gospel accounts of the life and words of Jesus in the New Testament. Not all the dialogue uses the exact words recorded in the Gospels, but the author and publisher acknowledge the inspiration and authority of recorded Scripture.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this abridged edition.

Published by

White Tree Publishing

Bristol

UNITED KINGDOM

[e-mail]

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Book

The Adventure Begins

More Books

About White Tree Publishing

Chris Wright

Books for Younger Readers

Ahead of you are 140 pages of adventure and puzzles. You don’t have to do the puzzles. You can just turn the page and carry on with your adventure. However, the puzzles will help you feel part of what’s happening, so try and solve them if you can.

The amazing painted illustrations (in colour if you have a colour screen) are from Unfolding Word (http://sweetpublishing.com). The black-and-white line drawings are from two old books, and make great pictures for some of the puzzles. At the back of this book are details of two more adventure books with puzzles, and 14 straightforward modern-day adventure stories without puzzles.

You are invited to enter the time tunnel and wake up in a land over 2,000 years ago!

You can contact me if you like, through the publisher’s email address, but please get your parents’ permission first.

Chris Wright

The Adventure Begins!

Last night you dreamt you were falling down a hole. Down and down. Now you’ve woken up with a jump, and the room seems strange. Very strange. It’s not only bright daylight, but you can hear people shouting and talking outside the window. And it’s not even your window. Your window has curtains, not the wooden shutters that are now wide open. You don’t know where you are, but you’re definitely not in your own house!

Cautiously, you pull back the rough woollen blanket that’s covering you, and step onto the bare wooden floor. You quickly feel wide awake as you make your way to the window and look down into a busy marketplace. You want to go outside and investigate, but your clothes aren’t on the chair where you left them last night.

Instead of your clothes, you see a long tunic with dark red and fawn stripes, made of wool like your bed covering, folded neatly on a stool. With it is a smaller cotton tunic that is probably for underwear. Each piece has a hole for the head and two holes for arms. And there’s a long leather cord which must be for tying round your waist. How can you possibly be seen wearing all that!

You go to the window for another look, and notice that men and women, children, and young people of all ages are wearing a similar outfit. Well, if you’ve turned up here by surprise, and it certainly is a surprise, a big surprise, you might as well look as though you belong — while you try to discover what’s going on. So you slip everything over your head and look for your shoes. There’s nothing to put on your feet.

You can hear people talking downstairs. There’s no staircase, just a wooden ladder. You peep over and see a family sitting round a low table eating bread and what might be honey in a pot. What are they going to do when they see you? You decide it’s not your fault that you’ve turned up in their house like this, and maybe they can explain what’s happened.

You stop for a moment to listen to what they’re saying. The parents and the children are speaking a language that certainly isn’t English. Yet strangely you can understand it, and somehow you know it’s called ...

THE ANSWER IS ON THE NEXT PAGE

(BECAUSE IT MAY NOT BE OBVIOUS IN AN eBOOK WHEN THE NEXT PAGE WITH THE ANSWER IS, YOU WILL ALWAYS FIND THIS WARNING, SO YOU DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT FINDING THE ANSWER BY ACCIDENT. THIS BOOK IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PAPERBACK, WHERE IT IS OBVIOUS WHERE THE NEXT PAGE IS!)

... Aramaic.

Yes, you can understand it, but will you be able to speak it? Perhaps you ought to keep your mouth closed for now. Nobody in the family takes any notice as you climb down to where they’re eating, and perhaps it’s better that way. They might be angry if they knew you were sleeping upstairs in their house. So you decide to hurry outside into the market in bare feet before they say anything.

Not everyone is speaking Aramaic. Some people are speaking a language that in some strange way you know is Greek, and even more amazingly you can understand it. This is certainly a weird day. The weirdest of weirdest days ever!

You hear angry voices and notice a young teenage girl has come into the marketplace, with a woman who might be her mother. The girl is obviously expecting a baby, and from the look of her she is expecting it very soon. People start shouting at her, and you turn to a man selling bread and ask what the problem is. You don’t know if you’ve spoken in Aramaic or Greek, but whatever language it is, the man understands you.

Keep away from her, he warns you. That’s Mary. She’s engaged to Joseph our local carpenter.

You ask him why you have to keep away.

You don’t want to be seen talking to her. She’s bad news, the man tells you. She’s expecting a baby, and Joseph says the baby isn’t his. Mary has been telling some story about an angel coming to her and saying that God is the father. He gives an unpleasant laugh. Yeah, right! he adds sarcastically.

The girl and her mother buy some food and hurry away before the crowd can surround them. The smell of bread is making you hungry. There’s a pocket in the front of the tunic you’re wearing, and you pull out a couple of small copper coins. One of the coins has what could be a palm tree on it, and it looks rather handmade. You wonder if the man will accept it.

You show him the two tiny coins and he shakes his head. You hunt for more coins and find a larger copper one and hold it out hopefully. The man hands you a bread roll, but doesn’t give you any change. You ask him the name of the town where you are. He looked surprised, and says it’s ...

THE ANSWER IS ON THE NEXT PAGE

"It’s Nazareth, of course, the stallholder says. Where do you think you are?"

Maybe you still feel a bit muddled, like the letters in the name. Will you ever get used to what’s happening? And will you ever get back to the present day, to your own home, or are you stuck in some time warp for the rest of your life?

You don’t like to tell the man that a few minutes ago you thought you were in your own home, safely tucked up in bed. So you thank him, but he’s already serving an older woman, and talking to her angrily about someone called Mary.

You gather this Mary has just come back from staying with her cousin Elizabeth, somewhere in Judea. You guess it’s the same Mary you saw a few minutes ago with her mother.

Just as you move aside to let a camel with a large load come past, someone catches you by the shoulder. You turn round in surprise. It’s the man from the house where you woke up. Come on, he says, we’ve been looking for you. We’re leaving in a few minutes.

He notices the bread in your hand, and nods. I’m glad you’ve managed to get yourself something to eat. There’s a large group of us leaving now, so we’ll make sure you’re safe on the journey.

Just as you’re wondering whether to trust the man, the woman and two children come out of the house. The children run up to the man and call him Abba, which you somehow know means Daddy. The woman is carrying a small baby. They must all be one family, and although you don’t know them, you decide you will be safer going somewhere with a family with children than staying here in this place on your own ‒ especially when you notice the way a Roman soldier is looking at you!

It’s a new law, the father explains. I’ve got to pay taxes to Caesar Augustus — nasty man — and we have to go back to where we were born to register our names.

Did he say going back? Then maybe the name of the place where you’re going is also backwards. Yes, it’s ...

THE ANSWER IS ON THE NEXT PAGE

The father turns to you, and says, "We need to get moving. It’s