Artifact
House of Peter at Capernaum
c. AD 1
May be the actual house where Jesus stayed during his ministry in Capernaum, making it potentially the oldest identified Christian house of worship. The continuous veneration from the 1st century through the Byzantine period provides remarkable evidence for the historical memory preserved by the earliest Christian community.
About this artifact
Identified during excavations led by Franciscan archaeologists Virgilio Corbo and Stanislao Loffreda beginning in 1968 at Capernaum on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Beneath the remains of a 5th-century octagonal Byzantine church, they uncovered a 1st-century domestic dwelling that had been progressively modified into a house-church as early as the mid-1st century. The walls bore over a hundred devotional graffiti in Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin, many invoking the names of Jesus and Peter. The room's original fishhook and pottery finds confirmed its domestic origin, while its conversion into a place of worship within decades of Jesus' ministry suggests the earliest Christians venerated it as Peter's actual home — where Jesus healed Peter's mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31) and which served as his base during the Galilean ministry.
