between Luke's and Josephus' Emmaus, 60 vs. 30 stadia, is still much smaller than the one to Nicopolis, which lays fully 176 stadia down the Roman road from Jerusalem. Thiede recalculated the actual distance between Jerusalem's western city gate at the time, and his excavation site at Motza which unearthed the Jewish village that predated the Roman veterans colony, and came up with a figure of 46 stadia. That would put it squarely in the middle between Luke's and Josephus' stated distances, which Thiede considers a good approximation for the time. Thiede's excavation produced Jewish artifacts of the time preceding the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, giving substance to his claim to have found Luke's Emmaus, which had necessarily to be settled by Jews. With no other Emmaus in the vicinity of Jerusalem, Motza was thus the only credible candidate. Possible symbolic identification One of the oldest extant versions of the Gospel of Luke, preserved in the Codex Bezae, reads "Oulammaus" instead of Emmaus. In Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures, Oulammaus was the place where Jacob was visited by God in his dream, while sleeping on a rock. However, Oulammaus was not a real place name but a translation mistake. The original name in Hebrew was "Luz". This mistake was later corrected, but was still there at the time when the Gospel was written around AD 100. Thus, a theory has been put forward, that the story in the Gospel was merely symbolic, drawing a parallel between Jacob being visited by God and the disciples being visited by Jesus. Richard Carrier (a prominent Jesus "Mythicist"), in his book On the Historicity of Jesus, cites this story as one of two examples of the "Vanishing Hitchhiker" urban legend from antiquity, the other being a legend concerning Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome. The story, found in Livy and Plutarch, tells of Proculus (meaning "Proclaimer" in archaic Latin) journeying by road from Alba Longa to Rome and meeting a stranger who is the resurrected Romulus. Rome is in turmoil because Romulus was recently killed and his body vanished. On their journey, Romulus explains the secrets of the kingdom, in other words how to conquer and rule the world, before ascending into heaven. Proculus then recognises the stranger and goes on to proclaim what he was told. The story recounted in Luke's gospel (Luke 24) parallels the earlier