Tracking Jesus to Capharnaum.

John 6.22-24.

Previously in John 6, Jesus and his students feed 5,000 people, then Jesus dismisses the crowd and they cross the lake. The other gospels describe Jesus curing people in Khinnerót, but John skips that and has them simply find Jesus in his new hometown of Capharnaum.

John 6.22-24 KWL

22In the morning,

the crowd who stayed on that side of the lake

saw the other boat isn’t there—

the one boat Jesus entered with his students—

but only his students went away.

23But boats came from Tiberias

near the place where they ate bread,

when the Lord gave thanks.

24So when the crowd see Jesus isn’t there,

nor his students,

they enter the boats

and go to Capharnaum,

seeking Jesus.

25Finding Jesus on the far side of the lake,

the crowd say, “Rabbi, when did you¹ get here?”

Jesus’s response is to start teaching them about the bread of life. Which I’ll get to.

As I said in my piece on the 5,000 trying to crown Jesus, the people they fed had recognized Jesus is the “Prophet Like Moses” who, according to Pharisees, was gonna show up in the End Times, and help point the way to Messiah. This is why they were so very, very eager to follow Jesus: They were entirely sure the End was near, and Jesus was gonna help bring it about.

Yeah, they got lots wrong. Turns out the Prophet is Messiah. Pharisees weren’t as knowledgeable about the End Times as they’d have you think. Lots of today’s prognosticators are much the same way.

Time I talked about Capharnaum.

The geography of the Galilean sea. (North’s about 20 degrees to the left, ’cause the map’s going for that 3D effect.) “Capernaum” is at the top of the lake, just below Korazin, which is about 5 kilometers away. Carl G. Rasmussen, Zondervan Atlas of the Bible, detail

We all know Jesus’s birthplace is Bethlehem, and that he was raised in Nazareth—which is why he’s called “Jesus of Nazareth” or “Jesus the Nazarene.” But once he quit being a handyman and became a rabbi, he relocated to Capharnaum, which is the Latin spelling for כָּפָר נַחוּם/kafár Nakhúm (Greek Καφαρναοὺμ/Kafarnaúm), “village of Nahum.” John Wycliffe spelled it “Capernaum,” so that’s what you’ll find in most English-language bibles. I’ve heard many a pastor pronounce the word kə'pɜr.ni.əm, pronouncing the “a” as i for no good reason. Sometimes American pronunciations get weird.

Nope, we have no idea which Nahum this town was named for. Maybe the founders were fans of the prophet Nahum of Elqoš. Na 1.1 Maybe it’s a whole other Nahum; Jesus had an ancestor named Nahum. Lk 3.25 Maybe even a guy named Nehemiah—the name is really just Nahum+YH (which is short for YHWH, and why lots of Old Testament names end in -iah or -jah). Maybe its founder named it for himself. Whatever.

Archeologists identified the ruins of Tel Hǔm as Capharnaum. It’s located on the north shore of “the Galilean Sea,” today’s Lake Tiberias. The Franciscans took possession of it in the 1890s, and sponsored excavations since. They’ve built a memorial over a site which local custom claims is Simon Peter’s house. It seems the town was occupied till the 900s, and populated by as many as 1,500 people.

Capharnaum’s ruins, dating from the Roman Empire. Now just imagine these were full houses instead of floor plans. David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons

Since Capharnaum is at the north of the lake, it’s not all that convenient or central a location. There are two reasons I figure Jesus chose it as his base of operations anyway. First of all, family: His uncle Zebedee and aunt Salomé (his mother’s sister), Mk 15.40, 16.1 and their kids, James and John, Mk 1.19 who became two of his students. If Jesus didn’t have the income to afford his own home, he most likely lived with them. They weren’t poor; fishermen made good money, and Zebedee even had employees. Mk 1.20 They’d have space for him. Possibly with a nice tile roof for vandals to break through and lower a paraplegic through.

Yeah, some Christians claim Jesus never had a house, never owned a home, never had any property; they like to point to where Jesus said the Son of Man had no place to lay his head. Lk 9.58 That just describes his life when he was traveling. When he went home to Capharnaum, he had to live somewhere. So that meant his own home, which was unlikely; or living with family, which just makes sense.

Various Christians presume Jesus lived with his students. But that’s a 19th-century American custom, not a first-century Israeli one. Pharisees considered it inappropriate for unrelated people to live together. Visit, sure; live with, no. Jesus ignored plenty of Pharisee customs, but when he did, the gospels pointed it out—and living with unrelated people wasn’t one of those customs.

Average first-century Israelis spent most of their lives outdoors. Work was outdoors. Cooking was outdoors. Laundry, chores, napping—even bathing and sex were outdoors. (Done in privacy, but still.) Indoors was for sleeping, and dodging harsh weather. Hence houses were usually small—two rooms, an outer room for guests and animals, and an inner room where the family slept. Bigger or richer families would have more inner rooms, to house relatives or valuables. Or even an upper room, to host guests.

These houses were made of the primary building material in Israel: Stone. Stones are everywhere. They’d either cut blocks and carefully place them, or use uncut rocks, glued together with clay, mortar, asphalt, or concrete. The roof would either be wooden slats with mud and straw thatching, or—especially if you wanted to use your roof as a deck, or build a second floor—stone, clay, or adobe tiles.

Second reason Jesus moved there: Capharnaum had a synagogue whose president, Jairus, Mk 5.22 let Jesus teach there. (The limestone synagogue you see in Capharnaum’s ruins today was a Christian synagogue, dating from the late 300s—but built on top of the place Jesus originally taught.) When you drum up as much controversy as Jesus, you’re gonna need a sympathetic synagogue president in your corner. Jesus definitely had that after he raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead.

Capharnaum was a fishing village. Popular culture assumes these fishermen were poor. Hardly. The Roman Empire’s most popular condiment—way more popular than ketchup or mustard today—was garum, a fermented fish sauce similar to today’s Asian fish sauces. Romans put it on everything. It was made from freshwater fish, which never were all that common—and Lake Tiberias was one of the few sources of freshwater fish in the Empire. Demand for fish was high enough for Galilean fishermen to make really good money, even with high taxes. That one miracle where the students caught a boatful of fish? Lk 5.1-11 —that’d pay for them to take a few years off to follow Jesus. They only became poor when they stopped fishing, and gave up everything to follow him. Mt 19.27

Four of Jesus’s students—his two cousins, and Simon Peter and his brother Andrew—were already from Capharnaum. Jesus might’ve first met them in Bethany-beyond-Jordan, Jn 1.40-51 but he called them to follow him on the Capharnaum beach, Mk 1.16-20 and he collected other students in other towns as he traveled. But Capharnaum was home.

So if you wanted to find Jesus back then, that’d be the town. He’d always come back eventually.