A fishing boat from the time of Jesus surfaced in a 1986 drought

In January 1986, a drought left the Sea of Galilee lower than it had been in years. Two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar, Moshe and Yuval Lufan, walking the exposed shore, spotted the outline of a wooden hull in the mud.

Archaeologists led by Shelley Wachsmann dug it out over eleven days and nights, racing the rising water, then wrapped it in polyurethane foam and floated it to shore. The pottery and lamp found with it, the way it was built, and radiocarbon tests all point to roughly the first century BCE or the first century CE. The press called it the "Jesus boat," though nothing ties it to Jesus or his disciples; what it shows is the kind of boat the Gospels describe.

It is about 27 feet long and 7.5 feet wide, built to be rowed or sailed. Its builders used mostly cedar planks on oak frames, and later owners patched it again and again, until it held as many as twelve kinds of wood, some likely salvaged from older boats. It was a working boat, kept going for years by people who could not afford a new one, then stripped of its reusable parts and left in the shallows. The first disciples in Mark's Gospel fit that picture. James and John are in their boat mending nets when Jesus calls them, and they leave their father Zebedee "in the boat with the hired servants" (Mark 1:20): a family fishing business with paid crew, working a boat much like this one. Where to see it: read Mark 1:16-20. The boat is on display at the Yigal Allon Center, Kibbutz Ginosar, on the Sea of Galilee.