The year is AD 150, and you are walking along the sea of Galilee. It’s been a long day, casting trammel nets over the side of your boat and hoping for a good catch. In fact, the fish were elusive today and you came home feeling a bit defeated.
In the city of Capernaum, a church stands over the ruins of a very special house. Called “the House of Peter,” evidence suggests that this is the house that belonged to Peter’s mother-in-law, where Jesus stayed during his ministry in Galilee. Below the church, you can still see the stones that made up the foundation of the house—and a circular room that marks the very place where Jesus stayed.
The ruins before a Catholic church was built over them. Photo credit: Garo Nalbandian.
No matter about the fish, though. Because tonight is meeting night, and your wife greeted you at home with a smile and a nice meal of salted fish and bread and dates, and your son came running in from the field to welcome you home and rattle off all the little things that he’d been doing all day while you were fishing. Tomorrow is another day, you think as you grasp your wife’s hand. The sun is beginning to set and the breeze feels a bit cooler as your little family nears the house-church.
The house itself is simple, built like others of that time. Rooms surround two courtyards, and the walls are simple rough stone. The roof, at one point, had been typical straw and earth—in fact, that was likely the very roof that a paralyzed man was lowered through in order to receive miraculous healing from Christ himself. The house may have begun like any other, but it was clearly a very special house as later it was added onto in an unusual way.
An illustration of the House of Peter as it was before becoming a church (photo credit)
As you near the place where tonight’s meeting will be held, your son lets go of his mother’s hand and dashes towards a group of boys his age that are playing just outside the door. “Let him go,” you tell your wife before she can call him back. “It’s best that he run off his energy now, before the meeting starts.” You are greeted warmly by the leader of the group. He jokingly referred to himself as “shepherd” when you all first started meeting here, a diverse group whose only common thread is being followers of Jesus. The name stuck, he’s still called shepherd by everyone who gathers here.
Excavations of the House of Peter have shown that the home was turned into a sort of church, in the very earliest days of Christianity. One of the rooms was changed into a meeting room, plastered over and painted with frescoes of flowers and geometric shapes. Eventually, the walls were shored up to support more weight, and buttresses were built for a new stone roof held up by a two-story arch. Clearly, this home had become a church—the meeting place of the first Christians.
You enter the house, and a sense of peace washes over you. The house has changed in the last few years, but it still carries the special quality you’d noticed the first time you met here—a sort of quiet energy, a feeling of home. When you first started coming to these meetings, the house was a regular home—a few rooms surrounding a courtyard, just like any other. But in the last few years, it’s slowly evolved. It’s becoming a sanctuary, a true church-home.
In what little spare time you can muster, you and the other men in this little band of Christians have been shoring up the walls, plastering the bare stone with white limestone and creating a meeting space that has the feel of both the synagogue you used to attend and the home that this space once was. Peter’s mother-in-law had offered this very room to Jesus, who stayed there as he taught in the towns along the lake. It seems fitting that now, years after his death and resurrection, this would become the place where Christians meet.
Further supporting the house’s identity as the home of Peter and the location of one of the earliest known Christian churches is the graffiti found on the walls. In Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, statements have been written that mention the Lord Jesus and Peter. Furthermore, archaeologists have found artifacts that suggest the building’s use as a church, such as oil lamps and storage jars. In deeper layers, household items have been recovered—suggesting that the house had once been a home, but its purpose changed early in the first century AD.
Ancient “graffiti” from the domus-ecclesiae (photo credit)
The room fills, and your family settles together as others filter in. John raises his hands and begins to sing, and voices join his until the house seems to burst with praise. When this singing is over, John talks about Jesus and his teachings—you are leaning forward, listening to what he says, when your wife elbows you in the ribs. She points to your son, whose attention has wandered. In the still-soft plaster of the wall behind him, he’s scratching words! You start to discipline him, but pause as you see what he’s written on the wall…there, inscribed in childish Hebrew letters, he’s written what’s brought you all together in this house-church:
“Jesus Christ is Lord”
The House of Peter is located near a synagogue where Jesus taught, and you can visit it today. After touring the remains of the synagogue, you can see the excavated home and even peer into the rooms and Christian meeting place through the glass floor of the “floating church” above. Truly, this is a piece of history that brings the Bible to life!