The Jesus Boat at Ginosar

The winter of 1985 to 1986 was dry and the Kinneret fell away from its own shore, exposing bands of lakebed normally under water. In January 1986 two members of Kibbutz Ginosar, the brothers Moshe and Yuval Lufan, went looking over the newly dry ground. They were fishermen and keen amateur archaeologists, working an area where a tractor had already churned up ancient bronze coins. What they found instead was the oval outline of a boat, completely buried in the mud.

The centre's own account adds a detail no archaeological report would carry, and it is on the gallery wall: a large double rainbow stood over the lake at the moment the find was revealed, and the photograph somebody took of it hangs beside the hull. Wachsmann titled a chapter of his book after it.

The find came with a practical problem attached. Rumour went round that the boat was full of gold, so the site had to be guarded day and night, and the lake was expected to rise again, which set the clock the operation worked against.

The excavation began on 16 February 1986, directed by Shelley Wachsmann, then inspector of underwater antiquities for Israel's Department of Antiquities and Museums, with members of the kibbutz and a large number of volunteers. It ran day and night for eleven days. J. Richard Steffy, the ship reconstructor from Texas A&M University, studied the hull where it lay from 20 to 25 February, which is why so much of what is known about how the boat was built was recorded before anything moved.

Getting it out in one piece was the harder half, because waterlogged two-thousand-year-old wood will not take its own weight. The excavation's conservator, Orna Cohen, devised a solution with no real precedent: a frame of fibreglass and polyester resin moulded to the shape of the hull, then a jacket of polyurethane foam sprayed round the whole thing. Water was pumped back into the pit, the foam floated, the boat floated with it, and the package was guided out through a cut in the dike, into the lake and along the shore to Ginosar.

How long the dig took is one of the small things published accounts do not agree on. Wachsmann, who ran it, gives eleven days and nights in both 1988 and 1991. The centre's own page says ten days. English Wikipedia says twelve. Trivial in itself, and a fair warning about the rest of the numbers attached to this object.

One result of the dig gets very little attention. The excavators also found parts of two other vessels and a scatter of planks carrying mortise-and-tenon scars, which suggests old boats were brought ashore here, stripped of every usable timber and abandoned in the shallows. On that reading the museum holds one item from a first-century breaker's yard.

Nothing in the gallery is reconstruction. The timber is the timber that came out of the mud, and the conservation work went into stabilising it rather than completing it. But the boat had already been cannibalised before it sank, and the list of what is missing is long: the stem construction, the stempost, a number of frames and the entire upper structure were all removed, presumably to be reused in other boats. The mast step went the same way, and Steffy only located it by finding four nail holes and a discolouration on the centre of the keel where it had been fastened.

So what stands in the case is the lower shell of a working boat, without a bow post, without upper works and without a mast. The fine cutwater bow and the high recurving stern on every drawing of this vessel are Steffy's reconstruction on paper, read off the run of the surviving planks. They were corroborated on site when two Franciscan archaeologists from Capernaum sketched the boat shown in a first-century mosaic found a mile up the beach at Migdal and produced almost the same shape.

The construction is Mediterranean rather than local: built shell-first, planks edge-joined with mortise-and-tenon joints locked by wooden pegs, frames inserted afterwards. Whoever built it either trained on the coast or was apprenticed to somebody who had. The timber, though, is what a boatyard would normally throw away. Many frames are branches badly fitted to the curve of the hull, several strakes are unusually narrow and look like reused planks with their old mortise scars shaved off, and one length of keel carries a row of mortises that served no purpose in this boat at all.

Wachsmann's account identifies seven woods: Lebanese cedar for most of the strakes, oak for most of the frames, then jujube, Aleppo pine, hawthorn, willow and redbud in smaller quantities, some of them species nobody would choose for a boat. The Yigal Allon Centre says twelve types of wood, all mentioned in the Bible, and does not list them. Both figures circulate widely and this page cannot reconcile them.

• Removed in antiquity: the stem construction, the stempost, some frames, the upper structure and the mast step
• Original and present: the keel, the lower strakes and most of the framing
• Built shell-first, with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints between planks
• Steffy's reading of the shape: a crew of four rowers, two a side, plus a helmsman

Waterlogged ancient wood is held up by the water inside its own decayed cells, and left to dry it shrinks, splits and collapses. The standard answer is polyethylene glycol, a synthetic wax that dissolves in water: the object goes into a pool, the concentration of wax is raised slowly over years, and the wax takes the place of the water inside the cells so the timber can come into the air without losing its shape.

A building was put up next to the Yigal Allon Centre specifically to hold the pool, and the boat was floated to it in its fibreglass and foam cocoon. Writing in 1988, Wachsmann expected the treatment to take five to seven years. Writing in 1991, he described the boat as still in the pool and already a tourist attraction in that state, with visitors coming to look at a hull sitting in a tank of wax solution.

It took considerably longer than the first estimate. The Yigal Allon Centre states that the boat was treated for fourteen years, until 2000, when it was judged ready to move into the visitor gallery. English Wikipedia gives twelve years in the wax bath. This page follows the centre, because the centre owned the pool, but the discrepancy is real and may surface in whatever the guide says on the day.

Since 2000 the hull has been displayed in its own hall, with humidity, temperature and air pressure held steady, alongside a film about the discovery and photographs taken on the day it was found.

The dating is the whole of the connection. Ten wood samples gave a radiocarbon average of 40 BC, plus or minus eighty years, which is a span of 120 BC to AD 40. A cooking pot and an oil lamp found in and around the hull point to the later part of the first century BC through to roughly AD 70. The Yigal Allon Centre publishes the range as 100 BC to AD 100. Any of those windows contains Jesus's ministry on this lake, and also the Jewish revolt against Rome and the naval slaughter Josephus describes off Migdal in AD 67.

That is as far as it goes, and the museum does not pretend otherwise. No inscription, no context and no find ties this hull to any named person. Wachsmann's verdict on the nickname, published while the boat was still in its pool, was blunt: the press invented it, Jesus is not known to have owned a boat, and this is not it.

What the boat does settle is a question the texts could not. Steffy read the hull as a vessel rowed by four men, two a side, with a helmsman at a quarter rudder: exactly the crew Josephus gives for boats manned on this lake with skeleton complements, and exactly what the Migdal mosaic shows once the aftmost 'oar' is recognised as a rudder. Wachsmann estimated capacity from the average height of first-century Galilean male skeletons, about 1.66 metres, at roughly fifteen men. The boats of the Gospels and the boats of the Jewish War turn out to be the same boats.

In March 2023 Pope Francis was given a full-scale working reproduction of it, built by the Aprea shipwrights of the Sorrento peninsula and presented by the Aponte shipping family. The Vatican Museums installed the nine-metre copy on 17 September 2023 and put it on display from 10 October, at the foot of the ramp they call the Way of the Sea. The original stays at Ginosar.

Most people come for ten minutes with a hull and leave having spent an hour, because the ticket covers the whole centre. The Sanhedrin Trail exhibition, mounted here by the Israel Antiquities Authority, holds about 150 archaeological objects from along the 120-kilometre route the trail follows from Beit Shearim to Tiberias, with a Mishnah and Talmud room containing a replica of the mosaic floor from the ancient synagogue at Migdal.

Hoquq Secrets looks out at its own subject: Horvat Huqoq is visible from the museum windows. It covers the Roman and Byzantine synagogue and its mosaics, uncovered there between 2011 and 2023 by the Huqoq Excavation Project under Professor Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the hiding system and agricultural installations found by the antiquities authority's community dig from 2017. The curator is Dr Einat Ambar-Armon.

There is also a display of the Magdala Stone, the carved limestone block from the first-century synagogue at Migdal carrying the oldest known depiction of the Temple lamp found in a synagogue. The centre's description says the stone was first shown in the Israel Museum and afterwards placed as close as possible to its original site, and does not say on that page whether what stands at Ginosar is the stone itself or a copy. Worth asking at the desk.

The remaining rooms are the Yigal Allon memorial room, with his desk, diary and papers; an exhibition on the water level of the Kinneret running from the opening of the Degania dam in 1933 through a century of water policy; and a display of Yiftach Allon's children's book illustrations. Outside is a sculpture trail above the lake. The escape rooms are booked and ticketed separately.