Has the ‘Lost City’ of the Gospels Finally Been Found
Two sites are competing for the title of the real Bethsaida. Only one can be right, one would think, and el-Araj does have a layer from the time of Jesus and the apostles – but there’s a twist to this Galilean tale. Sometime between from the first century B.C.E. to the early first century, a fishing village arose where the Jordan River enters the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The name Bethsaida literally stems from that description: “house of hunting,” i.e., fishing. In the year 30 or 31 C.E., tetrarch Herod Philip upgraded the village to a polis named Julias, according to the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus Flavius. Then, in the third century, the historical record goes silent on Bethsaida-Julias until the fifth century. Archaeology shows that is when the Byzantines built a church in the town over the putative home of the apostles Andrew and Peter. And then the city’s location was lost. “Bethsaida is the last missing city of the gospels,” Steven Notley of Nyack College told Haaretz dur...