Why was Jesus baptised in the River Jordan?

There are more than 1,000 different places mentioned in the Bible, from Abana (2 Kings 5:12) to Zuph (1 Samuel 9:5). But we tend to skip over the places as if they’re incidental to the Bible’s story. We want to know what happened; precisely where it happened doesn’t seem that important. So apart from a few familiar places like Jerusalem and Bethlehem, most of us know very little about the places in our Bible.

That changed for me when I visited Israel and Jordan a few years ago. I began to...