Artifact
Galilee Boat (Jesus Boat)
c. 50 BC
Provides a tangible connection to the fishing culture central to Jesus' Galilean ministry, where he called fishermen as disciples and taught from boats. It is the only surviving example of the type of vessel that figures prominently in Gospel narratives including the calming of the storm and the miraculous catch of fish.
About this artifact
Discovered in January 1986 by brothers Moshe and Yuval Lufan, fishermen and amateur archaeologists, when a severe drought caused the Sea of Galilee to recede and exposed the ancient hull buried in the lakebed mud near Kibbutz Ginosar. Archaeologists Shelley Wachsmann and Kurt Raveh led a painstaking eleven-day excavation to free the waterlogged vessel, which was then preserved over fourteen years using polyethylene glycol. The 27-foot-long, 7.5-foot-wide wooden boat dates to between 50 BC and 70 AD and is constructed from twelve types of wood, suggesting its builder used whatever materials were available. It matches the type of fishing and transport vessel that Jesus and his disciples would have used on the Sea of Galilee as described throughout the Gospels.
On the timeline
A first-century fishing boat pulled from the mud of the Sea of Galilee during a 1986 drought — the very kind of vessel Jesus and his disciples used, dating to the window of his Galilean ministry.
