Places Confirmed
Capernaum and the House of Peter
Beneath Capernaum's octagonal church, archaeologists uncovered an ordinary 1st-century basalt house with one room - unlike any other in the village - that was cleared of household use and set apart by the late 1st or early 2nd century. By the 4th century it had become a house-church, and by the 380s the pilgrim Egeria reported that 'the house of the prince of the apostles' stood there as a church on its original walls. The Church identifies this as the house of Simon Peter, where Mark 1:29-31 places Jesus's healing of Peter's mother-in-law.
AD 30 – AD 30
First-Century Nazareth
Archaeology confirms a small Jewish hamlet stood at Nazareth during the Early Roman period, the same era and place the Gospels give for Jesus's upbringing. A 2009 excavation uncovered a Jewish dwelling with chalk vessels there, and a 3rd-4th century inscription from Caesarea independently names Nazareth as home to a priestly family, anchoring the town's existence outside any Christian text.
4 BC – AD 30
Hezekiah's Tunnel and the Siloam Inscription
2 Kings 20:20 and 2 Chronicles 32:30 credit Hezekiah with cutting a tunnel to bring the Gihon spring's water inside Jerusalem's walls before Sennacherib's siege (~701 BC). A 533-meter rock-cut tunnel matching that description still runs under the City of David, and in 1880 the Siloam Inscription was found inside it — an 8th-7th century BC Hebrew text describing two crews meeting mid-tunnel.
715 BC – 701 BC
Jacob's Well at Sychar
John 4 places Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman at 'Jacob's well' near Sychar, a well the text describes as too deep to draw from without a bucket. A deep, rock-cut well fitting that description survives beside ancient Shechem, and Christians have identified it as this well continuously since at least the fourth century.
AD 30 – AD 30
The Hittites: An Empire's Capital, Found at Boğazköy in 1906
Scripture names the Hittites dozens of times, including the plural 'kings of the Hittites' feared alongside Egypt in 2 Kings 7:6. By the 1880s, Egyptian and Assyrian texts had already put a people called 'Hatti' or 'Kheta' on the map, and A. H. Sayce identified them with the Bible's Hittites in 1888. In 1906, Hugo Winckler's excavation at Boğazköy uncovered the empire's own capital and royal archive, including a treaty text that independently matches Ramesses II's inscriptions at Karnak.
1600 BC – 1200 BC
The Pool of Bethesda's Five Porticoes
John 5:2 places a five-porticoed pool at Jerusalem's Sheep Gate. Excavations at the Church of St. Anne uncovered a genuine pre-AD 70 twin-pool complex there, split by a dam, with colonnaded porticoes on its four outer walls -- matching John's unusual double-pool detail against the actual topography of first-century Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scrolls' Copper Scroll independently names a Jerusalem site 'Bet-eshdatain,' the double pool.
AD 30 – AD 30
The Pool of Siloam
In 2004, sewer-repair work in Jerusalem's City of David uncovered a monumental Second Temple-period stepped pool fed by the Siloam Tunnel and dated by embedded coins to no later than the first century BC. It is identified as the 'pool of Siloe' of John 9:6-7, where Jesus sent the man born blind to wash and receive his sight.
AD 30 – AD 30
Gabbatha: the Stone Pavement
John 19:13 places Pilate's judgment seat at 'Lithostrotos' (Greek, 'the Stone Pavement') and 'Gabbatha' (Aramaic, 'the Ridge') - two accurate, non-synonymous names for one site, reflecting real, detailed knowledge of Jerusalem's topography before its destruction in AD 70.
AD 33 – AD 33