On Sunday, April 13, 1986, Pope John Paul II, Peter’s successor as Vicar of Christ on earth, left St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, crossed the Tiber, and became the first reigning pontiff to visit a synagogue. His action narrowed the chasm caused by the age-old and often tragic “parting of the ways” between Jews and Christians. Traversing the short distance between St. Peter’s and the Rome synagogue, he led his Church across two millennia to Capernaum of the first century, when Peter’s house stood next to the synagogue in which Jesus, his followers, and the early Jewish-Christians worshipped regularly.

In Roman times, Capernaum was strategically located along the major trade route between Egypt and Damascus, on the border between the tetrarchies of Galilee and Gaulanitis (biblical Bashan, the modern Golan Heights). Jesus chose this town as the center of his three-year messianic ministry. The town no longer exists and the highway of antiquity is now only a rural lane. But the gentle contours of the lake and rolling hills, along with the fields and flowers, still conjure up the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied Jesus’ proclamation of the dawn of the kingdom of heaven. Over the course of twenty centuries, the small band of Jewish followers he gathered here swelled to a worldwide church with two billion believers.

The celebrated pilgrim Egeria recorded that in the latter part of the fourth century there were still two centers of religious life in the town, one Christian and one Jewish. “In Capernaum,” noted the pious Spanish nun, “the house of the prince of the apostles has been made into a church, with its original walls still standing. . . . There also is the synagogue where the Lord cured a man possessed by the devil.” Some literary sources suggest that there were tensions between the two communities. It seems certain, however, that Jews and Christians continued to worship across the street from one another in Capernaum until the beginning of the seventh century.

Peter’s house in Capernaum figures prominently in the New Testament account of Jesus’ ministry of teaching and healing. It was venerated from the time of Peter on and served as a meeting place for Jesus’ followers in Capernaum. In the early centuries of Christianity, the homes of prominent Christians doubled as churches, both in the Holy Land and elsewhere. Only after 313, when the Emperor Constantine gave Christianity official sanction, was it possible to erect public buildings for Christian worship. Around a century later, the house-church in Capernaum was replaced by an octagonal basilica over the sacred ruins of Peter’s home. Both this basilica and the neighboring synagogue were destroyed in the early part of the seventh century. They remained buried in oblivion until the beginning of the twentieth century, when they were excavated and partially restored by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land. The modern octagonal sanctuary over the remains of Peter’s house was erected by the Custody in 1990.