The TV and internet news organization, Sat 7 Türk Haber, which promotes its mission as “news for Christians from Christians,” issued the above-entitled Turkish language article on September 5, 2022, from an unidentified original report.

[As translation by Lahbrais O’Coileain]

A team composed of Israeli and American archaeologists uncovered a 1500-year-old inscription on a centuries-old basilica in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee.

The statement, in Greek, ‘Constantin, Christ’s servant,’ refers to the fourth-century Roman Emperor who accepted Christianity. However, the archaeologists believe that the statement, ‘the leader and head of the heavenly emissaries,’ refers to Peter. It was specified that this expression was used in the Byzantine era by Christian writers to refer to the Apostle Peter.

The exploration was conducted by Kinneret College in Israel and Nyack College in New York. Last year, the same team announced that they had found the ‘Church[1] of the Apostles,’ believed to have been built over the homes of Peter and his brother Andrew, in the same region. Steven Notley, the academic director of the excavation, said: “This discovery is the strongest evidence concerning the fact that Peter had a special relationship with the basilica. As it is thought in our day, Christian tradition in the Byzantine era oriented Peter’s home to be in Bethsaida, not in Capernaum.”

The inscription, which is a piece of the mosaic floor in the church, was translated by Leah Di Segni (Hebrew University) and Yaakov Ashkenazi (Kinneret College). The mosaic is decorated with flower patterns. The basilica, on the Sea of Galilee, is located in the El Araj/Beit haBek region. The team believes the site to be the village of Bethsaida. Mordechai Aviam, the dig’s archaeological director, said: “One of the goals of the dig was to check whether or not a stratum remaining from the first century [A.D.] will permit our proposing a better candidate in identifying Bethsaida. We not only found important remains belonging to this period, but at the same time we also discovered the church and the monastery around it.”

These statements concerning the region are in a book surviving from the seventh century about the travels of Eichstätt bishop Willibald: “They went to Bethsaida, being the location of Peter and Andrew. Here there is a church at the location of their homes. They stayed there that night and the next morning they went to the country of the Gerasans, where Jesus Christ rebuked evil spirits and gave permission for them to enter a herd of swine.” (CHL)

[1] ‘Kilise’ is the gloss in Turkish for ‘church,’ but is actually a distorted phonetic transposition of the Greek word ‘ekklesia,’ which over the centuries has been mistranslated as ‘church.’ Cf. https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/125354824/posts/4069473697