City
Capernaum
kuh-PER-nay-um · Modern Kfar Nahum, Israel · Also called Kfar Nahum
Capernaum is a city of the biblical world, known today as Kfar Nahum, Israel.
What is known
- Became Jesus's ministry base, called "his own city" in Matthew 9:1, after he left Nazareth
- Site of a synagogue where Jesus taught; the visible ruins today are a later (4th-century) building likely built on the foundation of the 1st-century one
- Archaeologists have identified a house beneath an octagonal Byzantine church as the traditional home of the Apostle Peter
History
- Founded
- Existed from the Hellenistic period (2nd century BC) as a fishing village on the Sea of Galilee's north shore
- Population
- A modest fishing town, estimated 600–1,500 residents
- Industry
- Fishing on the Sea of Galilee, plus trade — the town hosted a Roman customs post and had a garrisoned centurion
- Coordinates
- 32.8806° N, 35.5750° E
Rulers and powers
- Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee — 4 BC – AD 39
Archaeology
A German expedition worked here in 1905, and the Franciscan Custody resumed in 1968 under V. Corbo and S. Loffreda, who between them directed nineteen seasons to 1986. Two things came out of it. The first is the white limestone synagogue standing today, a fourth- or fifth-century building raised directly on the basalt foundations of an earlier and much plainer one — plausibly, though not provably, the synagogue where the Gospels place Jesus teaching and healing. The second is a modest first-century basalt house a short walk away, in the block the excavators called the insula sacra. Its history is what makes it interesting. It was built as an ordinary courtyard house, and around the middle of the first century AD one room stopped behaving like a house: the domestic cooking pottery gives out and is replaced by storage jars and oil lamps, and the room was plastered from floor to ceiling, which private houses of that time and place were not. Over the following centuries it was rebuilt as a hall, then enclosed by a fifth-century octagonal church built concentrically over that room, and it is covered today by a modern church on pillars. The pilgrim Egeria, writing in the fourth century, reports being shown the house of Peter at Capernaum. More than a hundred graffiti were scratched on the later walls, invoking Jesus as Lord and Christ in Greek, Syriac and Aramaic. It is worth holding the line here exactly where the evidence puts it, because this site is regularly overclaimed in both directions. What is established, and it is a strong result: this is a first-century house that was singled out for communal religious use within living memory of the first century, and was venerated continuously thereafter. What is not established is whose house it was. The excavators read the name of Peter in several of the graffiti, and many scholars now dispute those readings; J. E. Taylor has challenged the wider reconstruction of an early Jewish-Christian congregation here. The Biblical Archaeology Society, which has promoted the site for decades, states the position plainly: there is no definitive proof that the house is Peter's, only layer upon layer of circumstantial evidence. Very early veneration is a real and unusual fact. It is not the same fact as an identification, and treating it as one gives away something a reader will eventually notice was given.
Scripture references
- Matthew 4:13
- Matthew 8:5 — The centurion's servant
- Matthew 9:1
- Mark 1:21
- Mark 2:1
- Luke 4:31
- John 2:12
- John 6:59
On a modern map
Further reading
Reflect
Capernaum's ordinary streets became Jesus's home base — what would it look like to welcome him into your everyday routines?
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