Abstract

After more than a century and a half of largely unscientific ‘Biblical Archaeology’, in the last two decades, mainstream scientific archaeological research has been transforming our understanding of the earliest Christians in the Holy Land. This lecture will outline some of these exciting twenty-first-century discoveries, shedding new light on Nazareth and its surroundings, urban settlement around the Sea of Galilee, the earliest churches, and re-dating the origins of Christian pilgrimage. The implications of each of these for understanding the early Christian world, and even – at Nazareth and on the shores of the Sea of Galilee – for the interpretation of the Gospels themselves, go far beyond the topographical identifications of earlier archaeologists working in this region, offering new insights into both the New Testament narrative and pre-Constantinian Christian life in this region.