Capernaum:Peter's House

One of Capernaum's housing complexes may be glimpsed beneath the large modern church that today dominates the site. The Franciscan archaeologists Corbo and Loffreda have identified a room in this complex as the house of St. Peter mentioned in the Gospels. Several considerations led them to this conclusion:

First, textual evidence: Later Jewish sources preserve a tradition of "sects" (minim). (See also Kimelman.) Many scholars believe that the term refers to Jewish Christians. If so, we may posit a presence of Jewish Christians in the village from the time of Jesus until the establishment of the first church on this spot in the fourth century. They would have honored the house that the Gospels mention.

Second, archaeology: Alone among all the houses yet dug on the west side of Capernaum, this one received a plastered floor (partly visible on the site), which Corbo and Loffreda date to the first century AD. They claim, on this basis, that the room was then already marked out for Christian devotion. Yet Joan E. Taylor (Christians...) questions so early a dating. She also points out that such floors were found in houses from the early Roman period on the eastern side of the village (today in the Greek Orthodox section). The family living here may simply have been richer than others on the western side.

In the late fourth century, builders kept the house's walls while surrounding the whole insula with a further wall. They repaved the floor, erected a supporting arch down the middle, and put in a roof of strong mortar. Pieces of wall plaster with graffiti were found, 175 in number, of which at least 151 were in Greek. They include references to Jesus and Peter. The local language, however, was Aramaic. (The ten graffiti identified as Aramaic may also be Greek.) Most, if not all, of the graffiti were probably written by pilgrims from elsewhere in the Byzantine Empire.

This house-church was no doubt the one that the 4th-century nun Egeria saw during her pilgrimage: "The house of the prince of the Apostles in Capernaum was changed into a church; the walls, however, are still standing as they were." A century later a full-scale octagonal church supplanted it.

Was this then the house of Peter? Possibly.

It is certainly the most appropriate place we have at which to remember the healing of Peter's mother-in-law and later of the paralytic.

Capernaum (main page)

A visit to Capernaum

Peter's House

The synagogue at Capernaum

Logistics for a visit

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE(r),
(c) Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by
The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)