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Two Excavations, Two Claims, Both Still Digging

The Search for Bethsaida

Peter, Andrew and Philip came from Bethsaida, and two teams two kilometres apart are each excavating what they believe is the town. This one is not settled, and anyone who tells you it is has picked a side.

Object
Two excavated mounds about 2 km apart, each claimed as the Gospel town: et-Tell, with an Iron Age gate complex and Hellenistic-Roman levels on a hill above the plain, and el-Araj, with a Roman bathhouse and a Byzantine basilica near the ancient shore
Found at
The north shore of the Sea of Galilee, at the mouth of the Jordan, in the Bethsaida valley
Found in
et-Tell probed in 1987 and excavated from 1990; el-Araj excavated from 2016. Both projects are ongoing
Found by
R. Arav, for the Bethsaida Excavations Consortium — formerly with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, now under the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology — at et-Tell; M. Aviam of Kinneret College and R. S. Notley, now of Pillar College, at el-Araj
Dates from
et-Tell: Iron Age gate complex, with Hellenistic and Early Roman occupation above it. el-Araj: Roman-period remains including a denarius of Nero of AD 65-66, and a Byzantine basilica with a mosaic inscription published in 2023 Disputed dating
Now held at
Both sites are in the Bethsaida valley at the north end of the Sea of Galilee; et-Tell lies within a national park and el-Araj is under continuing excavation. Finds are held under the Israel Antiquities Authority

The Mound on the Hill

R. Arav made a ten-day probe at et-Tell, north of the Sea of Galilee, in 1987, and the Bethsaida Excavations Consortium formed around the dig in 1990, coordinated for many years through the University of Nebraska at Omaha and now running under the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology. Nearly forty years of work have produced four peer-reviewed volumes of excavation reports, which is a serious body of published stratigraphy by any measure.

What came out of the ground is impressive and mostly not disputed. There is a monumental Iron Age gate complex, a four-room inner gatehouse about 35 by 17.5 metres with two projecting towers, built of basalt — Arav reads the town as the capital of the Aramean kingdom of Geshur and the seat of its kings. There is Hellenistic and early Roman occupation above it. There are quantities of fishing gear: lead net weights, iron anchors, needles and hooks. And there is a building about 20 by 6 metres with unusually thick walls, in which two decorated bronze incense shovels were found, which Arav identifies as a Roman temple — a reading worth flagging as a reading, since even a volume written by one of his own team members puts the word "temple" in quotation marks in its chapter title.

The objection to et-Tell is simple enough to state on a walk: it is not on the lake. The Gospels have Bethsaida as a fishing town, and et-Tell sits inland and above the plain — the project's own site says about 2 km from the north-eastern coast, and other figures in circulation run from about a mile to a mile and a half. The answer Arav relies on is geological, and it is a real body of work rather than a hand-wave: studies by J. F. Shroder, M. Inbar and colleagues published in the excavation's own volumes argue that earthquake landslides dammed the Jordan, that the resulting floods pushed silt out across the plain, and that a catastrophic fourth-century flood moved the shoreline south for good. Whether that mechanism has moved the water far enough, fast enough, is precisely what the other side disputes.

The Site by the Water

Since 2016 a second excavation has worked el-Araj, close to the ancient shore and about two kilometres from et-Tell, directed by M. Aviam of Kinneret College and R. S. Notley, now of Pillar College. Their case is that the Roman-period town is here, under later silt. They report a Roman bathhouse — identified from strong plaster and broken clay bricks including tubuli, the tubular vents of a hypocaust — a denarius of Nero dated to AD 65-66, and about twenty fishing net weights. Above that sits a Byzantine basilica about 27 by 16 metres, which they identify with the Church of the Apostles, and in 2023 they reported a first-century wall beneath its apse.

The church matters because of a text. An eighth-century pilgrim itinerary describes Willibald's journey through Galilee; it was written down by Huneberc of Heidenheim from his dictation, so Willibald is the traveller rather than the author, which is a distinction popular accounts routinely lose. The relevant chapter reads: "And they came to that village, Capharnaum, where our Lord raised to life the ruler's daughter; and there is a house and a thick wall. And the men there said that Zebedee, with his sons John and James, had been lodged therein. And thence they proceeded to Bethsaida, whence came Peter and Andrew. There is now a church where their house was formerly. They stayed there one night, and, in the morning, went on to Corozain, where our Lord cured the demoniacs, and sent the devil into the herd of swine." A church at Bethsaida, on the house of Peter and Andrew, on a route between Capernaum and Chorazin.

In 2022 the el-Araj team announced a mosaic medallion in the basilica carrying a two-line Greek inscription: a donor named Constantine, described as a servant of Christ, asking the intercession of Peter, "chief and commander of the heavenly apostles." It was read by L. Di Segni and J. Ashkenazi and published formally with the excavators in Liber Annuus in 2023. It is a genuine and important find, and it is worth being exact about what it shows: it establishes that this Byzantine church was dedicated to Peter. It does not establish that the church stands on his house, and it does not date the town beneath it.

Neither Side Has Conceded, and One Scholar Says Both Are Wrong

Both teams have published against the other, and a reader should have both. R. S. Notley published "Et-Tell Is Not Bethsaida" in Near Eastern Archaeology in 2007, and in 2011 the same journal ran a four-part exchange — Arav answering Notley, Shroder answering Notley on the geology, Notley replying, Arav replying again. That forum is the cleanest published statement of the disagreement in existence and it is worth reading whole rather than in summary. From the el-Araj side, the excavators note that this is not a new idea: G. Schumacher argued in 1888 that et-Tell was too far from the lake to be a fishing village and proposed el-Araj instead. They also state that el-Araj was settled from at least the end of the first century BC and was not, as had been suggested, submerged under two metres of water.

Arav's own position is more careful than it is usually reported, and misstating it would be exactly the kind of strawman this app treats as a factual error. He is not claiming et-Tell for every period. Writing in 2017 he dug at el-Araj himself in 1987 and found beach deposits under the Byzantine layer; he reads the el-Araj bathhouse as most probably belonging to a military camp of Agrippa II's mercenaries, on the ground that bathhouses of that date are known from Roman camps and Herodian palaces rather than from Jewish towns; and on the pilgrim text he answers, quoted whole: "However, the excavators of Capernaum, Fathers Virgilio Corbo and Stanislao Loffreda maintained that Willibald's description suits the discovery of Capernaum and that the monks who copied Willibald report the descriptions of Capernaum were confused with Bethsaida." And then the sentence usually quoted as his concession, which has to be given with the one that follows it or it misrepresents him: "If and when all these hurdles are overcome, the excavators will be able to reiterate my notion that the Byzantine Bethsaida was at el-Araj. Nonetheless, it is a well known fact that Byzantine period pilgrims cared very little about authenticities and identified place names as they saw fit." So he allows a Byzantine Bethsaida at el-Araj while doubting what a Byzantine identification is worth in the first place — which is a narrower concession than it looks, and still not the position an article that flattened him into "Arav says et-Tell" would have given him.

There is a third proposal, and it dissolves rather more of the problem than either dig would like. B. Pixner in 1985 and D. Urman the same year suggested not two towns but one town in two parts: a lakeside fishing village at the water — the "Bethsaida of Galilee" of John 12:21 — with the acropolis and the city Philip the tetrarch refounded as Julias up on the tell. That would make both excavations partly right, and it would ease a real tension in the sources, because Josephus places the Bethsaida that became Julias in the territory of Philip the tetrarch rather than in Galilee. Two points of precision there: Josephus says only that the village was "at the lake of Gennesareth," and the Gaulanitis placement is an inference from the boundaries of Philip the tetrarch's realm rather than something he states; and Bethsaida appears by that name exactly once in the whole of his Antiquities and not at all in the Jewish War. Meanwhile P. Kučera has published a book-length reassessment with Brill arguing a position that would put the Gospel town at neither mound, which is a reminder that a two-horse race is a frame and not a finding.

Where this stands as of the writing of this article. el-Araj has been in the field continuously since 2016 and reports its recent seasons on its own site; et-Tell's most recently published field report is for a short 2022 season, and its sponsorship has moved institutions. It would be easy to read that asymmetry as a verdict, and it is not one — it is publication history. et-Tell's case rests on four decades of peer-reviewed stratigraphy; el-Araj's on ten seasons and a handful of peer-reviewed articles; neither team has conceded and both are still working. The app takes no side here, and that is not fence-sitting: there is no evidence that would justify one, and this is a live excavation dispute that may well be settled by something dug up after this sentence was written. What is not in doubt is the thing a reader of the Gospels actually needs. There was a fishing town on this shore, Peter and Andrew and Philip came from it, Jesus healed a blind man just outside it and wept over its unbelief, and both candidate mounds are within sight of each other on the same stretch of water.

Scripture references

Sources

Further reading

Reflect

Two teams have spent decades within sight of each other, each certain. What are you certain about that would look different from two kilometres away?

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