Where was Tiberias?

Question

Where was Tiberias?

Accepted Answer

Tiberias stood where the city of Tiberias in Israel stands today, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee below steep hills, with the hot springs of Hammath just to the south; the map point stands on the old town. It is about 115 km north of Jerusalem in a straight line, 12 km south-south-west of Capernaum and 24 km east-north-east of Nazareth. Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, founded it and named it after the emperor Tiberius; the founding is usually dated to about AD 19 or 20, though scholars differ by a year or two. The New Testament names the city only once, in John: after the feeding of the five thousand “there came other boats from Tiberias nigh unto the place where they did eat bread”. John also calls the lake “the sea of Galilee, which is the sea of Tiberias”, and it is “at the sea of Tiberias” that the risen Jesus shows himself to the disciples. The Gospels never say that Jesus entered Tiberias, though it lay a short walk from Capernaum. Josephus tells why many Jews kept away: the town was built over tombs, so that settlers had to be compelled to live there; it was also the seat of Antipas, whom Jesus called “that fox”. In the revolt of AD 66 a party in the city burned Antipas' palace for its images of living creatures, and in 67 Tiberias opened its gates to Vespasian. After the war it grew into a chief centre of Jewish learning: the Talmud names it as the last seat of the Sanhedrin, and the Jerusalem Talmud took shape largely in its schools by about AD 400. At Hammath, the walled town of Naphtali named in Joshua, excavators in the 1960s uncovered a synagogue whose fourth-century mosaic shows the zodiac around the sun god Helios.