Bible Synapse
Sea of Galilee boat
Object · 1st century BC – late 1st century AD · Time of Jesus · also called Jesus boat, Ginosar boat, Galilee boat
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- 1st century BC – late 1st century AD (the boat's use (pottery and radiocarbon dating))
- Found
- Shore of the Sea of Galilee near Kibbutz Ginosar, Israel, 1986. Spotted in January 1986 by the brothers Moshe and Yuval Lufan when a drought lowered the lake. Shelley Wachsmann, then Israel's inspector of underwater antiquities, led an eleven-day rescue excavation in February 1986.
- Now
- Yigal Allon Centre, Kibbutz Ginosar
- Passages
- Mark 1:16–20, Mark 4:35–41, Luke 5:1–11, John 21:1–8
What it is
The hull of a wooden working boat, about 8.2 metres long and 2.3 metres wide, preserved in the mud of the lake shore. It was built mainly of cedar planks on oak frames, joined with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints, and had been repaired many times with reused timber. It had a mast and could be sailed or rowed. Pottery and radiocarbon tests date it between the 1st century BC and the late 1st century AD.
How it connects to the Bible
Boats appear often in the Gospels, from the call of the fishermen, found “in the ship mending their nets”, to the storm on the lake. This hull shows the kind of boat that fishermen used on the Sea of Galilee at that time. Nothing connects this particular boat with Jesus or his disciples.