Sandy Curnow Reflection

The Jesus Boat

They called it the Jesus Boat though nobody could prove it. 

The 1986 drought in Israel dried the Sea of Galilee and from the mud emerged the wooden frame of a First Century AD fishing boat with an old lamp and a cooking pot lying on the floorboards.  It was made chiefly of cedar, though repaired with up to ten other types of timber, and the planks held together by wooden pegs and nails.  Apparently when the boat was no longer repairable, any useful timber was removed, and the rest was towed out into the middle of the lake and sunk.  It was exactly the sort of boat that figures in the gospels.  Larger than you might have imagined; over 8m x 2m, no skiff, but seemingly very shallow and able to be rowed as well as carrying a sail.  Stable and secure enough to provide a platform for preaching to people on the seashore.

The find was near Migdal, Mary Magdalene’s town, just a few kilometres round the shoreline from Peter’s house at Capernaum, a settlement close to the water’s edge and the centre of much of Jesus’ preaching and teaching.  It is one of the few sites in Israel about which there is little disagreement.  From the time of the gospel writers, one roughly built house there seems to have been preserved and enlarged.  There is no domestic detritus in the building – just lamps and large storage jars there which suggest it was a very early meeting place.  An octagonal 4th century church  built above it really confirms it as Peter’s house.  This place, together with the skeleton of the First Century boat nearby brings the gospel narratives startlingly to life.

Some of the disciples were fishermen by calling, but in theory they had “left their boats to follow Him”.  However, watercraft kept reappearing, there are a surprising number of boat events in the gospels.  It seems that the Jesus group often found it easier to move by sea than by land – perhaps because of the crowds, perhaps because of terrain or distance.  Jesus fished from boats and taught from them, provided miraculous catches for them, fell asleep while others rowed or sailed the boat across the sea and woke to quell a storm that threatened them; again, he walked on water towards them.  And when it all became too much, he used them as a means of escape ‘across the water to a quieter place’.

Boats were not simply a means of transport or an attractive setting for the gospel narrative.  They became both occasions and symbols of faith, sometimes of  blind trust, often vehicles of community endeavor, “arenas of human vulnerability and divine protection; and places of community and collaboration”.  The phrase “walking on water” (which Peter managed to do until his reason challenged his impulsive faith) represents all that is impossible without faith and divine intervention.

The Jews were not innately a sea people.  The waters at the beginning of the Creation narrative represented chaos, and Jonah’s being thrown overboard into the sea to save the ship was not a happy experience.  Three days in a whale.  But the boat that became Noah’s Ark shares its name with the vessel that rescued Moses in the bullrushes.  Old Testament life is saved by boats.  St Paul was shipwrecked under awful conditions, but there was no loss of life.

The ship metaphor leads naturally to the Church as the Barque of Peter; the community of Christians guided by Peter or the papal authority of his successors through difficult times/stormy rough seas.  It worked well for the Roman Empire centered round the Mediterranean Sea and now Christianised, and could describe church experience any time in the centuries since. 

But it turns up again quite unexpectedly in our places of worship today. 

Look again at the ceiling of the building above, Salisbury Cathedral – but you could find an example in almost any city. 

The roof structure is actually in the shape of an upturned boat – a keel – above your head rather than below your feet.  And that part of a church that lies below it here is typically called the nave, which is the body of the church building where all believers gather to form a community of endeavor.  Of course its name derives from the Latin word Navis – a boat.

How far are our church communities from the Jesus boats on the Sea of Galilee?

By Sandy Curnow

Images
Top:  ‘Jesus Boat’ or the ‘Ancient Galilee Boat’ housed in the Yigal Allon Museum in Kibbutz Ginosar
Middle: ‘Where Jesus Sleeps’ by Fr George Smiga from Building on the Word.
Bottom: The nave of Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, England.  Image by David Iliff, available on Wikimedia Commons.

Published: 9 August 2024