Archaeologists May Have Found Town Named in Bible

Sometimes, archaeologists discover a sweater; other times, they uncover entire towns. The latter turns out to be the case in Israel, where a town has been found—and it could be one mentioned in a well-known Bible story. LiveScience reports that it was found along the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee, and British archaeologists suggest that it is Dalmanutha, a place that factors into the Gospel of Mark's recounting of Jesus feeding a great crowd of people with just a few fish and loaves of bread: Dalmanutha is where he briefly sailed after that miracle.

The archaeologists made their discovery during a field survey, and team lead Ken Dark theorizes it is indeed Dalmanutha, and one reason he gives is that artifacts collected there indicate it was an active city at the start of the Common Era. In a June lecture Dark gave at the University of Edinburgh, he further explained his thought process, as summarized on the blog of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins: "It is hard to imagine that a Roman-period coastal community of this size is nowhere mentioned in textual sources, and the site might be identified with one of the unlocated toponyms known from the Bible, perhaps the Dalmanutha of Mark 8:10." (In other news in the region, archaeologists recently found a treasure trove in Jerusalem.)