Saving 13th-century Emmaus Church, Leipzig, Germany

Colonia, between Abu Ghosh and Jerusalem on the Kiryat Yearim Ridge Route is another possibility. At a distance of 35 stadia (four miles) from Jerusalem, it was referred to as Motza in the Old Testament, the Talmud and the writings of Josephus Flavius. One mile to the north is a ruin called Beit Mizzeh, identified as the biblical Motza. Listed among the Benjamite cities of Joshua 18:26, it was referred to in the Talmud as a place where people would come to cut young willow-branches as a part of the celebration of Sukkot (Mishnah, Sukkah 4.5: 178). According to Josephus, Amassa (ancient Latin manuscripts) or Ammaous (medieval Greek manuscripts) was about 3.5 Roman miles (30 stadia) or 7 miles (60 stadia) from Jerusalem. A group of 800 soldiers settled there after the First Jewish Revolt. It is believed that the Latin Amassa and the Greek Ammaous are derived from the Hebrew name Motza. Motza was identified as the biblical Emmaus by Birch, and later Savi.
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 at all, but created only by an unfortunate translation mistake. The original name in Hebrew was "Luz". This mistake has long been corrected, but it was still there at the time when the Gospel was written around 100 AD. Thus, a theory has been put forward, that the story in the Gospel was merely symbolic, wanting to draw a parallel between Jacob being visited by God and the disciples being visited by Jesus. This symbolic significance, however, would not preclude the account being historically accurate. To be noted also is that Jacob was sleeping on a rock and Jesus' main disciple Simon Peter was called by the name of rock (Petros).