Capernaum

Where it is

the country around it

Coordinates: 32.8806° N, 35.5752° Efind it on the Atlas →
Region: Galilee
Kind of place: Town

Every movement the Gospels record here is short, except the 32 km down from Nazareth

1Jesus leaves Nazareth and settles hereMatthew 4:13 · 32 kmLeaving Nazareth, He went and lived in Capernaum, which is by the sea in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali,
2The disciples sent on ahead by boatMark 6:45 · 6 kmImmediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to Bethsaida, while He dismissed the crowd.
3The crossing to the country of the GerasenesMark 5:1 · 9 kmOn the other side of the sea, they arrived in the region of the Gerasenes.

Located: the gazetteer fixes one site
A dashed line ends at a place the gazetteer does not fix

Not located: The Temple. The gazetteer records no location for it, so it is not marked.

Chorazin, marked inland, is the third town of the woe of Matthew 11:21. Nazareth stands about 350 m above sea level and this shore about 210 m below it, which is why Luke and John both write that Jesus went down to Capernaum. The dashed line is The Way of the Sea, the lakeside road Matthew names from Isaiah. Sea of Galilee and the Jordan are drawn from Natural Earth's public-domain outlines. Every mark sits at the coordinates the gazetteer records for it.

Reference map of ancient Palestine: the coast, the hill country, the Jordan rift and the Dead Sea, with the towns of the biblical narrative marked. — Reference map of ancient Palestine: the land from Dan to Beersheba: most of the historical books happen on this one sheet.Rand McNally reference map (1926), public domain.Open this plate full size in The Atlas →

What has been found

the evidence, and where it is disputed

Capernaum is Tell Hum, at the north end of the lake, and the name behind it is Kfar Nahum, the village of Nahum. Edward Robinson proposed Khirbet Minya for the site in 1838; Charles Wilson argued for Tell Hum in the 1860s, and Wilson’s is the identification the field uses. What the ground holds is agreed. The excavated town is a fishing village of houses built from basalt, the black volcanic stone of this shore. A customs post stood on the road along the lake. That is the road of Matthew 9:9, where Jesus “saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax booth.” A white limestone building stands near the shore. Under its floor lie basalt walls and a basalt cobble pavement. About thirty metres south of it stands an insula, a block of courtyard houses, and a fifth-century octagonal church stands over one room of that block. Estimates of the population run from several hundred to about fifteen hundred, drawn from the excavated area rather than from any record. The town was abandoned around the eleventh century AD. What is argued is set out below, each part with its excavators and their dates.

The white building, and whose synagogue it is

Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger excavated the white limestone building for the German Oriental Society in 1905. They dated it to the late second or early third century AD, on its architecture. Virgilio Corbo and Stanislao Loffreda excavated the site for the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum from 1968 into the 1980s and dated it to the late fourth or fifth century, on coins and pottery sealed under its floor and in its foundations. Corbo published Cafarnao I: Gli edifici della citta in 1975, and Loffreda the ceramic volume in the same series. The later date is the majority position now. Two named positions stand against it. Michael Avi-Yonah held to the second or third century on architectural grounds. Jodi Magness, of the University of North Carolina, has argued from the same sealed material for a date later still, the fifth or sixth century, in her chapter “The Question of the Synagogue: The Problem of Typology” (2001). On every one of these datings the building a visitor sees today is later than the one the elders of Luke 7:5 meant when they said of the centurion that “he loves our nation and has built our synagogue.”

The basalt beneath, and whether it is the synagogue of Mark 1:21

Corbo and Loffreda identified the basalt walls and pavement under the white floor as the foundation of the first-century synagogue. On their reading this is the room where Mark 1:21 says Jesus “entered the synagogue on the Sabbath and began to teach,” and where John 6:59 places the bread of life discourse. That identification rests on the walls’ position and their masonry. Nothing recovered from the basalt phase names the building a synagogue rather than another public hall. To say it must be the synagogue because the excavated areas have turned up no other candidate is an argument from silence, and it is called one here, on whichever side it falls. What is agreed is that the town had a synagogue in the first century, because Mark, Luke and John all say so. The excavators’ interest belongs beside the reading. The western site is owned by the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, a Catholic institution, which excavated and published both the synagogue and the house under the church. That is said plainly here rather than presented as neutral ground. The eastern part of the site, under Greek Orthodox ownership, was excavated separately by Vassilios Tzaferis between 1978 and 1982 and published as Excavations at Capernaum, Volume I in 1989, which widened the picture of the Roman and Byzantine town beyond the Franciscan area.

The house under the octagonal church

Corbo and Loffreda excavated the insula from 1968, and Corbo published La casa di S. Pietro a Cafarnao in 1969. The sequence they recorded runs in five stages. First a first-century courtyard house of basalt walls, like its neighbours. Then, in the second half of the first century AD, one room plastered, which is unusual for a room in a village house, its finds changing from cooking pots to storage jars and oil lamps. Then graffiti scratched on that plaster in Greek, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin, among which Emmanuele Testa read Christian invocations. Then a square hall built around the room in the fourth century. Then the octagonal church centred on it in the fifth. What the identification of that room as Peter’s house rests on can be stated exactly. It rests on the early singling out of one room, on the graffiti, and on pilgrim testimony, chiefly the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria, who reports that the house of the prince of the apostles at Capernaum had been made into a church with its walls still standing. One caution belongs with her. The Capernaum passage reaches us through Peter the Deacon’s twelfth-century compilation rather than through the surviving manuscript of her own text. Whether the name Peter appears in the graffiti is itself disputed and is not asserted here. No inscription names Peter, and no excavated object ties the house to him. What the evidence shows is that one room in this insula was treated as special from the first century and was held holy by Christians by the fourth century. That the room stood where Mark 1:29 puts Jesus, when “they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew,” rests on that continuous tradition, and it is offered here as tradition with its earliest witnesses named.

The boat from the lake bed

Peter, Andrew, James and John worked this lake from boats, and Mark 1:19 finds James and John “in a boat, mending their nets.” In 1986, after a drought dropped the level of the water, two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar found a wooden hull in the exposed mud a few kilometres down the shore. Shelley Wachsmann directed the excavation for the Israel Department of Antiquities. The hull measures about 8.2 metres long and 2.3 metres wide. Radiocarbon dating of the timbers gave about 40 BC, plus or minus eighty years, and the pottery and the hull construction place it between roughly 50 BC and AD 50. It is displayed at the Yigal Allon Museum at Ginosar. It was found down the shore, and it belongs to no recorded event and no named person. What it shows is the kind of boat a Galilean fishing family of that period worked from.

The paralytic through the roof

Mark 2:1 to 2:12, in the order it happens

Read Mark 2:1 to 2:12, in the order it happens

The roof was flat and low. A Galilean village house of that period had a roof of wooden beams packed with brush and mud, reached by stairs on the outside, so four men could carry a mat up it and dig through. Mark 2:4 has them uncover the roof and make an opening; Luke 5:19 has them lower the man “through the tiles.” The two describe the same opening in different materials, and the page leaves the difference standing.

His Authority: the full study of the claim to forgive

What happened here, in order

in the order the canon tells it

1He comes down and teaches on the Sabbath

2The house so full they come through the roof

3A Roman officer, and a tax question

4The teaching that emptied the crowd

Where it points

Matthew reads the move as prophecy landing. He quotes Isaiah over it: the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, Galilee of the nations. There, Isaiah says, “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.” That is the territory humbled first and carried into exile first, and it is where the light dawns. The scribes in the crowded house are right about the theology. Only God forgives sins, and Jesus does not correct them on the point. He heals the man on the mat so that they will know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive. The claim they called blasphemy is the claim he means them to hear. The healings here are told as things Jesus did in front of a whole town, and the people healed are named. Acts records the apostles healing in his name afterwards, and James tells the church to call the elders and pray over the sick. This site’s tradition is Wesleyan-Pentecostal: the gifts of the Spirit are in full operation today. The last word over the town is a warning. Jesus set Capernaum beside Sodom and said it would be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment. The measure is how much the town had seen. Privilege is counted as responsibility.

The voices

each quoted from the work named

On the move itself as the point: Isaiah’s prophecy lands when Jesus settles in this territory.

By Messiah's taking up His abode in those very regions of Galilee, and shedding His glorious light upon them, this prediction, He says, of the Evangelical prophet was now fulfilled; and if it was not thus fulfilled, we may confidently affirm it was not fulfilled in any age of the Jewish ceremony, and has received no fulfilment at all.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Matthew 4:16

On what the synagogue crowd noticed first, which was authority rather than the argument.

You will find the same narrative in Luke, at the fourth chapter, from the 31st to the 37th verse. It will be handy for you to be able to refer to the second passage, from which I shall quote one or two matters. These two Evangelists commence the narrative by telling us of the singular authority and power which there was about the Savior's teaching— authority so that no man dared question His doctrine—power, so that every man felt the force of the Truths of God which He delivered.

Charles Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1765: “An Astounding Miracle” (1884), on Mark 1:21 to 1:28

On what the woe measures: the town was raised high by privilege, and the warning is set against it.

And thou, Capernaum - See the notes at Mat 4:13. Which art exalted to heaven - This is an expression used to denote great privileges. He meant that they were especially favored with instruction. The city was prosperous. It was signally favored by its wealth. Most of all, it was signally favored by the presence, the preaching, and the miracles of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here he spent a large portion of his time in the early part of his ministry, and in Capernaum and its neighborhood he performed his chief miracles.

Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869), on Matthew 11:23

4 more teachers on these versesJ.C. Ryle · Matthew Henry

These verses begin the long list of miracles which Mark's Gospel contains. They tell us how our Lord cast out devils in Capernaum, and healed Peter's wife's mother of a fever. We learn, in the first place, from these verses, the uselessness of a mere intellectual knowledge of religion . Twice we are specially told that the unclean spirits know our Lord. In one place it says, "they knew Him." to another, the devil cries out, "I know you who you are, the Holy One of God."

J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Mark (1857), on Mark 1:21 to 1:34

These verses form a sorrowful conclusion to the famous discourse of Christ which occupies the greater part of the sixth chapter. They supply a melancholy proof of the hardness and corruption of man's heart. Even when the Son of God was the preacher, many seem to have heard in vain. Let us mark in this passage what an old sin apostasy is. We read that when our Lord had explained what He meant by "eating and drinking his flesh and blood,"—"After this, many of his disciples quit following him and did not accompany him any longer."

J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: John (1869), on John 6:66 to 6:71

Thy sins are forgiven thee. Sin is the procuring cause of all our pains and sicknesses. The word of Christ was to take his thoughts off from the disease, which was the effect, and to lead them to the sin, the cause, that he might be more concerned about that, to get that pardoned.

Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Mark 2:1 to 2:12

Note, Building places of meeting for religious worship is a very good work, is an instance of love to God and his people; and those who do good works of that kind are worthy of double honour. Jesus Christ was very ready to show kindness to the centurion.

Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Luke 7:5

Capernaum in Scripture

16 verses name it, in 4 books

Open a book to read its mentions here. Text: Berean Standard Bible.

First namedMatthew 4:13Leaving Nazareth, He went and lived in Capernaum, which is by the sea in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali,Last namedJohn 6:59Jesus said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

Old TestamentNew Testamentsegment width = share of mentions

New Testament4 books · 16 mentions

Matthew4 mentions

Mark3 mentions

Luke4 mentions

John5 mentions

The account

Read the account as one telling

The name behind the site is Kfar Nahum, the village of Nahum. It stood on the north shore of the lake that Scripture calls by several names: the Sea of Chinnereth in the Old Testament, the Lake of Gennesaret in Luke, and the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias in the Gospels. All four name the same water.
first century
first centuryIn the first century this was a village of black basalt houses, roofed with beams, brush and packed mud, reached by stairs on the outside. It had a fishing fleet, a synagogue and a customs post on the road along the lake. The tax booth where Matthew sat belongs to that road, and so do the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax who came to Peter. A Roman officer was stationed here, which Luke 7 takes for granted.
Jesus came down from Nazareth and made the town his base. John has him going down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers and his disciples early on, staying a few days. Matthew records the move as settled and reads it as the fulfilment of Isaiah 9:1 to 9:2, the great light dawning on Zebulun and Naphtali.
What follows is a dense run of recorded work. The synagogue teaching and the man with the unclean spirit. Peter's mother-in-law raised from a fever, and the whole town at the door after sunset. The paralytic lowered through the roof. The call of Matthew at the tax booth. The centurion's servant healed at a distance. The temple tax paid out of a fish's mouth.
The bread of life discourse ends the Galilean run. John places it in the synagogue at Capernaum and records what it cost: many of the disciples called it a difficult teaching, turned back, and no longer walked with him.
Then the woe. Matthew and Luke both record Jesus naming Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, the towns where most of his works were done, because they did not repent. The saying is about response, not about buildings.
The town outlived the Gospels by a long way. In the Byzantine period a white limestone synagogue was raised on the site of an older basalt building, and an octagonal church was built over one room of a courtyard house about thirty metres to the south. Pilgrims came to both.
eleventh century
eleventh century ADThe site was abandoned around the eleventh century AD and lay as a ruin until the nineteenth-century surveyors came looking for it.

Common questions

Why did Jesus leave Nazareth and settle in Capernaum?

Matthew records the move and reads it as the fulfilment of Isaiah 9:1 to 9:2, the great light dawning on Zebulun and Naphtali. Luke supplies the immediate cause: the people of Nazareth had tried to throw him off a cliff. Capernaum sat on the lake and on the road, with a synagogue, a customs post and a fishing fleet, and Matthew ends up calling it his own town.

Is the synagogue you can visit at Capernaum the one Jesus taught in?

Readers differ; the positions are named

No, on every dating that has been offered. Kohl and Watzinger dated the white limestone building in 1905 to the late second or early third century AD. Corbo and Loffreda dated it from 1968 onward to the late fourth or fifth century, on coins and pottery sealed in its foundations, and that is now the majority view. Underneath it lies a black basalt wall and pavement. The Franciscan excavators identify that basalt as the first-century synagogue, the one Luke 7:5 says the centurion built. Others hold that basalt masonry under a later public building shows an earlier public building and nothing more specific. What is not in question is that Capernaum had a synagogue then, because Mark 1:21, Luke 7:5 and John 6:59 all say so.

Is the house under the octagonal church really Peter's?

Readers differ; the positions are named

One room in a first-century courtyard house about thirty metres from the synagogue was plastered in the later first century, which is unusual for a village house, and its finds shift from cooking pots to storage jars and lamps. Christians scratched graffiti on that plaster. A square hall was built around the room in the fourth century, and an octagonal church over it in the fifth. The fourth-century pilgrim Egeria reports that the house of the prince of the apostles at Capernaum had been made into a church, though that passage reaches us through Peter the Deacon's twelfth-century compilation rather than her own surviving text.

No inscription names Peter, and no excavated object ties the house to him. The identification rests on the early singling out of that one room and on a continuous tradition of veneration, and it is offered here as tradition with its earliest witnesses named.

Why did Jesus pronounce a woe on Capernaum after doing so much good there?

Matthew gives the reason directly: these were the towns where most of his works were done, and they did not repent. The measure is opportunity rather than wickedness, which is why Capernaum is set against Sodom, and Chorazin and Bethsaida against Tyre and Sidon. Luke records the same saying in shorter form.

Are the healings at Capernaum something the church still prays for?

The Gospels report them as things Jesus did, in front of a whole town, and they name the people healed: a man with an unclean spirit, Peter's mother-in-law, a paralysed man carried by four friends, a centurion's servant, a synagogue leader's daughter. Acts then records the apostles healing in his name, and James tells the church to call the elders and pray over the sick with anointing oil. This site's tradition is that the gifts of the Spirit did not close with the apostles, and that the church still prays this way and still asks for the same mercy.

Is the raising of Jairus's daughter set at Capernaum?

Mark does not name the town. He writes that Jesus crossed back by boat, that a crowd met him beside the sea, and that a synagogue leader named Jairus came to him there. Matthew 9:1 puts that whole run of events in his own town, which is Capernaum. So the location comes from the sequence in Matthew rather than from any place name in Mark 5, and this page leaves the town unnamed where the chapter leaves it unnamed.

Sources cited

OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding: Capernaumread 2026-08-20The coordinates on this page. Used under CC-BY with attribution to OpenBible.info.
Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger, Antike Synagogen in Galilaea (Leipzig, 1916)The 1905 excavation of the white limestone synagogue and the early dating, cited for the position it argues.
Virgilio C. Corbo, La casa di S. Pietro a Cafarnao (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1969)The Franciscan excavation of the insula and the room under the octagonal church.
Vassilios Tzaferis, Excavations at Capernaum, Volume I (1989)The separate excavation of the eastern, Greek Orthodox part of the site. The imprint was not re-checked against the printed volume.
Egeria, Itinerarium, late fourth centuryThe pilgrim's report of the house at Capernaum, which survives through Peter the Deacon's twelfth-century compilation.
Shelley Wachsmann, The Sea of Galilee Boat (New York: Plenum Press, 1995)The excavator's account of the first-century boat found near Kibbutz Ginosar in 1986.
Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1765Public domain, CCEL edition, lightly modernized text.
J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Mark (1857) and John (1869)Public domain, Grace Gems edition, lightly modernized text.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)Public domain.
Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710)Public domain.
Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869)Public domain.
Jodi Magness, “The Question of the Synagogue: The Problem of Typology” (2001)The later dating of the white synagogue.

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