St Peter's Primacy & Capernaum

Rock Upon Which Jesus Cooked
 the Fish - copied from Wikipedia

May 3 - Again, the sky is clear and blue over the Galilee .  After a visit to the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, we moved a  short distance along the shore to St. Peter's Primacy. The former church marks the site where Jesus fed the five thousand. The latter marks the site where he fed the apostles after his resurrection.  Here Jesus told Peter to feed his lambs, marking Peter as the head of his church. See also the Wikipedia articles on St. Peter's Primacy and the theological debate about Peter's appointment as the leader of the apostles. 

We had Mass here in a beautiful spot on the shore of the Galilee.

Before heading up the Golan Heights for the afternoon, we watched a movie about the discovery and preservation of a fishing boat from the first century. See Jesus Boat.

May 4 - Dawn brought another beautiful morning on the Galilee. We visited Capernaum before heading for the Golan Heights again. A big bicycle race around the Sea of Galilee closed the roads so we were stuck for a little while before the police agreed to escort our bus through the race course. How nice was that!

 Capernaum, unlike Nazareth, was located on an "international" travel route. Its residents would have been routinely exposed to new and different ideas of travelers from a wider world than the Galilee. That Nazareth, on the other hand, was relatively isolated may explain why Jesus was accepted in Capernaum while facing rejection in his home town of Nazareth. 

Capernaum was also a fairly wealthy town, its residents receiving income from farming, fishing and taxes on travelers crossing the border.

A church built in 1990 sits above an earlier church built to mark the location of Peter's house. We had Mass here.

Check out the excellent photos at  Bible Walks-Capernaum.

We learned something else from Marian along the way. When the Bible uses two names for a person, the second name is a modifier that emphasizes something about the person. Take Mary Magdalene, for example. Magdalene refers to the town of Migdal and also the Hebrew word for strong. Migdal was a wealthy town. Thus, the Bible is saying Mary Magdalene was a wealthy and a strong woman.