JERUSALEM -- Archaeologists have located the ancient city of Bethsaida where the New Testament says Jesus performed the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, a researcher at Haifa University said Sunday.
Rami Arav, an archaeologist at the university's Golan Research Institute, said Bethsaida has been 'definitely identified' about 2 miles inland from the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Since the 19th century, scholars have believed Bethsaida was at one of two sites near the Jordan River, but lacked the proof to establish either Et-Tell or El Araj as the ancient city, Arav said.
In September, archaeologists dug shafts at the two sites to search for remains from the time of Jesus, Arav said in a telephone interview from Katzrin in northern Israel.
'We found at Et-Tell a very thick layer of a town dating from the time of Jesus,' Arav said. 'We couldn't find the same layer at El Araj.'
'Et-Tell is now a mound covering about 20 acres and 25 yards high at its most prominent point,' he said.
Between 1948 and 1967, the site was in a demilitarized zone between Syria and Israel. The Syrians at one time had an observation post atop the mound, which commands the surrounding countryside. Israel seized the area in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
'Bethsaida is where Jesus was very active,' Arav said. 'He performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes there; he healed the blind man.'
According to the New Testament, Jesus miraculously fed hundreds of followers with a few loaves of bread and a small number of fish.
Three of Jesus' apostles were from Bethsaida, which was settled in the Bronze Age about 3,000 B.C. and destroyed by the Romans during the Jewish rebellion in the 1st century.
Excavations have revealed that Et-Tell was not a Greekor Roman city, said Arav, who received his doctorate in archaeology from New York University.
'It was a Jewish town,' Arav said. 'It makes very much sense because we know that Jesus wandered between Jewish settlements and did not perform many miracles among the Gentiles,' the researcher said.
Archaeologists will resume excavating the site in January and a full-scale dig will start in June.
'We hope in a few years we will be able to walk on the same streets that Jesus did,' Arav said.
