When the Gospels say that Jesus crossed to “the other side of the Jordan,” they do not point to an abstract space. They gesture toward a concrete, layered geography: Transjordan, a belt of land between river and desert where cities shaped by Greco-Roman culture grew alongside local communities.

Among them stood the Decapolis, a confederation of ten self-governing cities under Roman rule, marked by Greek language, classical urban planning, and cultural hybridity. Pella was one of these cities.

Although Pella is not named explicitly in the New Testament, its membership in the Decapolis suggests it belonged to the broader landscape of Jesus’s activity. The Gospel of Mark (7:31) notes that Jesus “left the region of Tyre, went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, through the region of the Decapolis.”

The Gospels also describe teaching in Perea, east of the Jordan (Matthew 19:1; Mark 10:1), a territory that includes areas near Pella. This steady movement to the river’s far bank portrays an itinerant figure who did not remain within Judea and Galilee alone, but crossed the cultural and geographic boundaries of his era.

Within this frame, Pella emerges as a plausible—though undocumented—setting for that wider mission. It was a Greek-speaking city with orderly Roman-style planning: forums, baths, temples, and colonnaded streets. Its inhabitants included diverse residents, Hellenized communities, and, later, Christians. Given the routes across the region, it is reasonable to imagine that Jesus may have passed near, or even through, the city.

Beyond the question of literal presence, Pella helps illustrate the crossings that defined this movement: between different cultural groups, local life and imperial order, inherited forms and emerging ideas.

The Decapolis also appears in several Gospel episodes. In Gadara, another city of the confederation, the narratives describe an exorcism in which a herd of pigs plunges down a steep bank (Mark 5:1–20). Set within a distinctly non-local milieu, this account signals how the message depicted in the Gospels extended into culturally diverse territories such as Transjordan.

In this sense, Pella’s inclusion in the Decapolis places it within the “evangelical horizon,” even if the text does not name it. It belongs to the world the evangelists assume their readers know: nearby urban centers, accessible and in contact with the activity of a Galilean teacher. The figure presented by the Gospels thus appears with a broader profile—active among villages and cities embedded in a plural Mediterranean landscape.

Today, walking the quiet ruins of Pella—fallen columns and fragmentary walls threaded with scrub—it can be hard to recover the noise and order of a living city in the 1st century CE. Yet the site invites a measured kind of historical imagination: another likely station along an undocumented but telling itinerary, a place where empires, languages, and cultures intersected—and where new social hopes were tested in the everyday exchanges of a borderland.