A City of Jesus, Josephus and Philip Herod
Bethsaida is mentioned in the four Gospels and by the Roman historian Josephus. It was a fishing village located on the shores of the Sea of Galilee where the Jordan River enters the sea. The program will examine Bethsaida's importance to Christians as a home to apostles, and the site of the feeding of the multitudes, the healing of a blind man, and where witnesses reported seeing Jesus walk on the waters. Josephus describes Bethsaida, renamed Julius by Philip Herod, and its' role in the Roman and Jewish War that would see the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70CE. Yet sometime after the first century, the city was lost.
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The Search for Bethsaida
For nearly two millennia the location of Bethsaida remained a mystery to crusaders, pilgrims, and scholars. By the Fourth Century CE, many of the sites associated with the New Testament had been discovered, except Bethsaida. No one place was consistently identified as Bethsaida. Researchers have uncovered 27 pilgrim accounts that describe their attempts to find the city. By the 1800's archeology as a science began to develop and two theories emerged as to the location of Bethsaida:
et-tel - A large mound located two miles from the Sea of Galilee
el-Araj - A smaller site located on the shore of the Sea of Galilee
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The Discovery
In the early 1980s a Benedictine monk, Father Bargil Pixner, began a personal search for Bethsaida. Combing the scriptures and other historical records for clues, he determined that a mound known as et-Tell (literally: the mound) set back from the Sea of Galilee two miles, must be the site of Bethsaida. He published a landmark article in the Biblical Archaeological Review in 1985. Many experts said he was wrong, that the site was too far from the sea. But a subsequent archeological dig turned up evidence that seemed to confirm Pixner's contention. Then geological experts determined that geological activity and deposits from the Jordan River had changed the area, and the sea had receded. In 1987 the Israeli government officially recognized et-Tell as the site of Bethsaida. Each year since that time, the site has yielded exciting new archeological discoveries.
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The First Century City
Today Bethsaida is the only place where one can actually see the remains of an entire city of the biblical era which has not been destroyed and reconstructed in intervening centuries. Bethsaida provides scholars a first hand look at life 2000 years ago. Questions are being answered as to what happened to Bethsaida during the Roman-Jewish War and what the world of Jesus and his apostles was like.
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The Unknown Bethsaida
As the excavations have progressed an Iron Age Palace and Temple have been discovered. A Bronze Age city wall has also been found. The story of Bethsaida has become much more complex. It is now believed to have first risen at the time of the Egyptian Pyramids, and played a major role in the time of King David.
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