Galilee

Galilee is the hill country and lake district of northern Israel, and it holds the formative ground of two religions that were not yet separate when the events in question happened.

The gospels place most of Jesus's public activity here: Nazareth, where he grew up, Capernaum on the lake shore, and the villages around it. Galilee in that period was rural, Jewish, agriculturally productive, ruled by a client of Rome rather than directly, and within reach of Hellenised cities its inhabitants mostly did not enter. E. P. Sanders and others have argued that the setting explains a good deal about the movement's early shape: an itinerant teacher, audiences of villagers and fishermen, and a message about the kingdom of God delivered a long way from the temple.

The second beginning came after the catastrophes. The temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt was crushed in 135, after which Jews were barred from Jerusalem, and the centre of Jewish life moved north. The Mishnah was compiled in Galilee around 200 CE, the Jerusalem Talmud took shape at Tiberias over the following two centuries, and the Masoretes who fixed the vowel pointing and cantillation of the Hebrew Bible worked at Tiberias later still.

Both traditions therefore have a Galilean phase, and neither is well understood without the other, since they were competing for the same inheritance in the same small country.

Galilee has been excavated intensively, and what has come out complicates the textual picture in useful ways.

Dozens of ancient synagogues have been found in the region, some of them richly decorated. Several carry mosaic floors with a zodiac wheel, the sun in a chariot at the centre, and the seasons in the corners, alongside biblical scenes and dedicatory inscriptions in Aramaic and Greek. Whatever the rabbinic texts say about images, the communities that paid for these floors evidently did not read the prohibition as excluding them, and the gap between prescriptive literature and actual practice is one of the standing lessons of the region's archaeology.

The dating of these buildings has repeatedly been revised, and Jodi Magness's work on the material has shown that several long assigned to the second or third century belong to the fifth or sixth, which changes the story: the flourishing of Galilean Jewish village life turns out to overlap with, rather than precede, Christian dominance of the province.

Capernaum illustrates the same difficulty. A synagogue in white limestone stands over an earlier basalt structure, and a short distance away an octagonal church was built over a house that had been modified for public use, with Christian graffiti on its walls. The house is traditionally identified as Peter's. What can be said is that a first-century house was venerated by Christians early; the identification itself rests on tradition.