The socio-economic context of Capernaum’s limestone synagogue and Jewish–Christian relations in the late-ancient town

In this article, I consider a set of contextual questions related to the social and economic influences on the construction and use of Capernaum’s great limestone synagogue, and ask what these influences might tell us about Jewish–Christian relations in this village during the fifth and sixth centuries ce. After a survey of current scholarship, I address issues of method and engage in the interpretation of the relevant primary sources, some of which have only very recently been discov­ ered, while others have been overlooked in discussion of the question, or are deserving of reinterpret­ ation. Building upon previous proposals, and in places revising them, I argue that we should see a dynamic interplay at work between local and non­local sources of funding for the synagogue and an intensely interactive and relational setting for the town’s Jews and Christians. The socio-economic context of Capernaum’s limestone synagogue and Jewish–Christian relations in the late-ancient town DOI: https://doi.org/10.30752/nj.102988 Fig. 1. Main hall of the limestone synagogue, looking ne. W al ly V . C ira fe si


Introduction
In the summer of 1838, the American explorer Edward Robinson and his travelling companions came to the ruins of Tell Ḥum, a village resting just off the northwest shore of the Kinneret Lake and today firmly identified as the site of ancient Capernaum known from the New Testament as the hometown of the Apostle Peter and a centre of activity for Jesus of Nazareth (see Robinson 1841: 288-301, esp. 297-8). 1 While Robinson described the 1 Jonathan Reed (2000: 142) mistakenly claims that Tell Ḥum was not properly identified as Capernaum until 1866 upon the expedition of Charles Wilson. But Robinson himself notes (1841: 300-1) that Tell Ḥum had a centurieslong tradition of being regarded as ancient Capernaum, including by some of his contemporaries, most notably John Wilson, who published his travel log in 1847, nearly twenty years before Charles Wilson ( J. Wilson 1847: 143). As time has shown, Robinson, for his part, wrongly rejected Tell Ḥum as the site of Capernaum. Rather, he argued at length in his 1841 publication (Robinson 1841: 288-95) and then again in 1856 (Robinson 1856: 348-58), that Capernaum should be identified with the nearby site of Khirbet alMinya. Although Robinson never lived to know it, his theory was definitively disproved in 1937, when the German archaeologists Alfons Maria Schneider and Oswin PuttrichReignard uncovered an Umayyad mosque at Khirbat alMinya, making it clear that the remains Robin son had seen almost a century earlier and the grand complex Schneider and Put trichReignard had been digging out since 1932 were, in fact, an early Islamic palace that rendered no preIslamic remains (see Schneider 1952: 23-45; and more recently Kuhnen 2014). This discovery made the identification of Khirbet alMinya as ancient Capernaum impossible and strengthened Capernaum's identification with Tell Ḥum. The most recent fullscale argument for identifying Tell Ḥum as Capernaum is in Laughlin 1989: 191-9. place as, on the whole, 'desolate and mourn ful', he quickly and clearly recognised the remarkability of the ruins themselves. One set of remains drew his particular attention: 'Not far off,' he says, 'are the prostrate ruins of an edifice, which, for expense of labour and ornament, surpasses anything we had yet seen in Palestine' (Robinson 1841: 298). That summer in 1838, he supposed that these elegant ruins, consisting mainly of compacted limestone, had once formed the structure of either a church or a 'heathen' temple (ibid. p. 299). 2 However, upon a second expedition in May of 1852 -fourteen years after his initial visit and after having seen the comparable 'Jewish remains' at Kefar Bar'am and Meiron -Robinson changed his mind and became the first to conclude that the edifice at Tell Ḥum was a synagogue: 'The edifice therefore was once a Jewish synagogue, apparently of unusual size and magnificence; surpassing everything of the kind, which we saw else where' (Robinson 1856: 346; see fig. 1). 3 2 As did J. Wilson (1847: 143). 3 The fact that Robinson was the first to iden tify this building, as well as other buildings in Galilee, as synagogues is noted also by Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger (1916: 1): 'Die antiken Ruinen, deren Auf nahmen hier veröffentlicht warden, sind zuerst 1852 von Eduard Robinson auf Grund der hebräischen Inschriften und der Übereinstimmung ihrer Architektur als Synagogen bezeichnet und mit der Blüte der jüdischen Schulen in Galiläa in Zusam men hang gebracht worden.' Worth noting here also is that it was not until 1894 that the ruins of Tell Ḥum came under the formal control of the Franciscan Custodia Terrae Sanctae, which purchased the land from the Samakieh Bedouin tribe. According to the Custodia's own account, its purchase of the Capernaum ruins almost 125 years ago was the result of a long and complicated process in which various Christian groups competed with each other and with 'the Jews' to acquire As subsequent excavations throughout the twentieth century only confirmed, Robinson's identification of Capernaum's great limestone building as a synagogue is beyond doubt. 4 Yet the property (Custodia Terrae Sanctae website). See also Becker 2015: 113-39 (esp. 113-19) for a helpful discussion of Robin son's efforts within the context of the emerging discipline of 'biblical archaeology' in the nineteenth century. 4 Excavations and restorations of the build ing -first only partially by Charles Wilson in the 1860s, and then more systematically by Heinrich Kohl and Carl Watzinger in 1905, Wendelin von Menden from 1906to 1915, and Gaudenzio Orfali from 1922to 1925 Ḥamath Gader mentioning a Jewish man named 'Yosse bar Dosti of Capernaum' (Naveh 1978: no. 33;Foerster 1995: 87-94, 90-1). Arubas and Talgam (2014: 246) date the inscription to the fifth century based on 'the synagogue's mosaic floor, its architectural characters as well as other stratigraphic and epigraphic evidence', but this contradicts Gideon Foerster, who notes the stratigraphy dates the synagogue, as well as the mosaic pavement, to the sixth century. See below for more discussion of this mosaic inscription. Adopting this latefifth / sixthcentury dat ing, I wish to consider in this article a set of contextual questions related to the social and economic influences on the synagogue's con struction and use, and to ask what these influ ences might tell us about Jewish-Christian relations in Capernaum during this period.

Current scholarship
Analyses of the social and economic influ ences on the construction of Capernaum's lime stone synagogue have generally fallen into two camps, revolving around argu ments for either a local or nonlocal source of patronage. Until recently, it was more com mon for scholars to assert the nonlocal ori gins of the synagogue's sponsorship, mainly because, firstly, of the impression given in Roman legal sources that appear to bar the the synagogue in 1969 (Corbo 1975: 113-69). The terms of the subsequent debate were generally bifurcated along disciplinary lines, with arthistorical approaches being pitted against stratigraphic ones. Despite some notable dissent (e.g. Tsafrir 1995) and at least one attempt to reconcile the discrepancy between the artistic style and the stratigraphy of the limestone synagogue (Ma'oz 1999), scholarship has generally favoured the latter dating on the basis of archaeological data. In 1997, Loffreda, in fact, revised his own dating of the entire synagogue to the last quarter of the fifth century on the basis of a new study of the coins found in the building (Loffreda 1997: 232-3), and Jodi Magness has argued strongly for a date in the sixth century on the basis of her interpretation of the numismatic and ceramic records (Magness 2001: 22-3;Magness 2012). Furthermore, in a recent, and in my view quite significant, study, Svet lana Tarkhanova has shown that even the synagogue's decorative style -the main, and really only, data that have traditionally supported the early dating -actually supports the later dating suggested by the stratigraphic evidence, particularly as proposed by Magness (see Tarkhanova 2021).
Jewish community from building new syna gogues (e.g. Theodosian Code 16:8:25), 7 and, secondly, the assumption by scholars that such a small and relatively poor town could not have funded such a grand public build ing. Virgilio Corbo himself, who directed the Capernaum excav ations with Stanislao Loffreda over the course of nineteen seasons , asserted this view in his 1975 report: Who was the patron of a synagogue, for which there is not found an equal in wealth and proportions? For an answer we must keep in mind the poverty of the houses of the insulae found up to now in Capernaum in order to understand that, if any private individual had the opportunity to offer some column shaft (such as the one offered by Herod and the other by Alphaeus, son of Zebedee), certainly no one had the financial means to build a monument full of sculptures, with stone brought from afar and whose construction lasted a whole century. (Corbo 1975: 169) 8 Corbo went on to propose that the building might have been funded out of the imper ial treasury during a time of renewed sympathy for Jews and Judaism under Julian 7 See Linder 1987: 287-8. 8 The English translation is mine. The Italian text reads: 'Chi fu il mecenate di una sin agoga che non trova l' eguale per ricchezza e proporzioni? Per una risposta bisogna tenere presente la povertà delle case delle insulae ritrovate sino ad oggi a Cafarnao per capire che se qualche privato ha avuto le possibilità di offrire qualche fusto di colon na (come quella offerta da Erode e l'altra da Alfeo, figlio di Zebedeo), certa mente nessuno ebbe le possibilità finan ziarie per tirare su un monumento ricco di sculture, con una pietra portata da lontano e la cui costruzione durò tutto un secolo.' (361-3 ce). 9 This proposal, however, went nowhere, probably because it (oddly) con flicted with the late chronology of the build ing that Loffreda had published as early as 1973, which stated the excavators' com bined belief that the synagogue was built in 'the last decade of the fourth to the middle of the fifth century' (Loffreda 1973: 37). In 1997, Loffreda dated the entire building to 9 'We think of the Roman imperial treasury at the time of Julian the Apostate. His tory has handed down to us the gestures of sympathy of this emperor in favour of Palestinian Judaism, sympathy nourished by the aversion of this former Christian towards Christ' (translation mine). The Italian text reads: 'Noi pensiamo all'erario imperiale romano ai tempi di Giuliano l'Apostata. La storia ci ha tramandato i gesti di simpatia di questo imperatore in favore del giudaismo palestinese, simpatia nutrita dall'avversione di questo ex cristiano verso il Cristo' (Corbo 1975: 169).
the period 475-500 ce, further problematis ing any association of it with the Julianic era and, therefore, with Julianic imperial funding (Loffreda 1997). While Corbo and Loffreda had a lot to say about relations between Jews and the 'JudaeoChristians' in the prefifth century period of Capernaum's history, 10 nei ther developed any robust theory on the place of the limestone synagogue in those relations in the fifth and sixth centuries. Their basic assumption remained that 'orthodox' Jews and Byzantine Christians copopulated the village during a time in which Christianity's influence in Palestine was increasing signifi cantly (Loffreda 1993: 30-1).
In 1999, Ma'oz asserted that the con struction of such a magnificent synagogue so close to a Byzantine church during a period marked otherwise by Christian disdain for 10 On this see period, see the discussion in Cirafesi 2021b.  the Jewish community and its synagogues, as reflected in the legal sources, created the most challenging 'discrepancy' for the interpret ation of Capernaum in late Antiquity (Ma'oz 1999: 143-4). Because he was so convinced that Jews and Christians did not 'mix' in vil lages and smaller settlements in Byzantine Palestine, Ma'oz was compelled to develop a 'radical solution', in which neither local nor nonlocal Jews had anything to do with the construction of the Capernaum synagogue. Rather, he surmised that there were hardly any Jews in Capernaum by the fifth century, and certainly no Jews with the money and power to build a grand public building out of imported limestone (ibid. pp. 139, 144). Ma'oz, therefore, suggested that Byzantine Christians, impassioned to make pilgrimage to the 'Holy Land' and backed with imper ial money, built the synagogue in the fifth century as a Christian locus sanctus out of spolia from other earlier Galilean synagogues. He concomitantly rejected the notion that Capernaum's Christians and its few Jews coexisted in any mutually influential way. Drawing a comparison with thirteenthcen tury Jerusalem, in which, according to Ma'oz, 'one Jewish painter was allowed to reside in Christian Jerusalem', Ma'oz similarly imagined that only a few Jewish fishermen, farmers, and artisans were allowed to live in Capernaum merely as tokens of its Jewish past now under Christian rule (ibid. p. 144).
In 2014, Benjamin Arubas and Rina Talgam built largely on Ma'oz's theory but departed from it in several important ways. On the one hand, taking the legal sources at face value and affirming the 'discrepancy' concerning the proximity of the monumental buildings as the central historical problem, they, like Ma'oz, were pushed to view the Capernaum synagogue and its grand eur as a unique case demanding a 'stirring appraisal'. On the other hand, while they, too, ultimately attributed the patronage of the synagogue to outside Roman imperial funding, they dif fered from Ma'oz on two main points. First, they proposed that the funding was mediated specifically through Joseph of Tiberias, known from Epiphanius's Panarion as the famous Jewish convert to orthodox Christianity who was commissioned by Constantine in the second half of the fourth century to build churches in the Jewish towns of Galilee. 11 Accord ing to Arubas's and Talgam's historic al construction, Joseph came to Capernaum considerably later than when most schol ars date his building activity, some time after the great earthquake of 363 and before Epiphanius took up his position as bishop of Salamis in 367 (Arubas and Talgam 2014: 242-3, 245). Adopting Corbo's initial dat ing of the limestone synagogue to the second half of the fourth century, they hypothesised the existence of an earlier synagogue on the same site that suffered extensive damage dur ing the earthquake. For Arubas and Talgam, Joseph came with an empiresupported offer to Capernaum's Jewish community to fund a massive renovation of the town's synagogue in exchange for approval to build a church, the socalled domus ecclesia of the house of St Peter, the remains of which were dated to the late fourth century by Corbo and Loffreda. And second, while Arubas and Talgam affirmed that the limestone synagogue was used by the sizeable Jewish community in Capernaum, they asserted on the basis of the reference to the 'sons of Capernaum' as minim in the late Palestinian midrash Qohelet Rabbah 1:8 and 7:26 that this community was entirely comprised of what the rabbis called minim ('heretics'): nonrabbinic Jews who were sympathetic to Christianity and who worked closely with Christian pilgrims to bring economic prosperity to the village. While, for Arubas and Talgam, the syna gogue is fundamental to our understanding of Jewish-Christian relations in Capernaum, the peculiar identity of the town's Jews is made to match the peculiar situation of the grand synagogue erected a stone's throw away from a Christian building.
Although his focus was on identity for mation and the architecture of the church and the limestone synagogue rather than the synagogue's source of funding, Anders Runesson suggested that the synagogue 'was not financed by the local population but rather by politically and economically more powerful Jews in Tiberias' (Runesson 2007: 252-3). He was particularly drawn to the idea that the house of the patriarch, even after the fall of the patriarchate in c. 429 ce, was behind the building's fifth/earlysixth century construction as a way to reassert Jewish -and particularly rabbinic -cultural and political agency through the synagogue's spectacular yet conservative architecture. For Runesson, the synagogue was probably much too large for the actual Jewish popula tion of Capernaum, which he thought justi fied his argument that external funding and ideology supported the building project. The synagogue, for him, represented an act of defiance in the face of Byzantine colonisa tion; it reflected Jewish-Christian conflict in the town and, more broadly, the deteriorating relations between a politically empowered Christianity and a colonised yet still influen tial Jewish community.
In two recent publications, Raimo Hako la (2016, 2021) has suggested a differ ent paradigm of benefaction not only for the Capernaum synagogue but also for others discovered, some quite recently, in eastern Galilee. Setting the limestone synagogue in the broader context of recent excavations at the elaborately decorated synagogues of Huqoq, Horvat Kur, and Wadi Hamam, Hakola has challenged the idea that one should approach the grandeur of the Capernaum synagogue as a special case demanding radical solutions or stirring appraisals (Hakola 2016: 160-1). Hakola has argued that these synagogues, which are roughly contemporary with the Caper naum synagogue, demonstrate that local rural communities in the region could support impressive building projects out of their own resources. Further, Hakola reads the historical sources with suspicion, especially the imperial edicts from the time of Theo dosius II and Justinian banning the construc tion of synagogues, which he sees as an indi cation that Jewish communities in Byzantine Galilee actually ignored such edicts; indeed, the repeated renewal of such imperial enact ments is evidence not of the decline of Galilean Jewish society in this period but rather of its vitality (ibid. pp. 157-60). The rich archaeological record from fifth and sixthcentury Jewish sites continues to bear this point out. Hakola is not as certain when it comes to the question of wealth generation in these local Galilean towns. He neverthe less proposes a couple of possible sources of income: smallscale agricultural production and, more likely, participation in Byzantine trade networks, which brought money in from wealthy Christian pilgrims (ibid. p. 164). While Capernaum as a site of Christian pil grimage is important, too, for Hakola in this regard, he does not, as Ma'oz and Arubas and Talgam do, connect Christian wealth to the construction of the limestone synagogue. The synagogue remains an expression of a secure Jewish identity in contrast to the Christian identity projected by the octagonal church ( fig. 2). But these buildings tell only part of the story. For Hakola, they need to be 'read' sceptically, just like the historical sources, and we should assume that, outside these build ings, Jews and Christians interacted with each other in a variety of ways (ibid. p. 165). 12 Interpreting the dynamics of local and non-local influences on the Capernaum synagogue: methodological issues, neglected sources, and a recent discovery Each of the theories and approaches sur veyed above has a number of strengths and weaknesses. The likelihood that Capernaum's limestone synagogue was erected in the late fifth or sixth century puts it out of the realm of possibility that Joseph of Tiberias, active in the midfourth century, had anything to do with its construction. One must also reckon with the possibility, as Jordan Ryan recently has (Ryan 2021: 190-201), that the 'church' Epiphanius says Joseph built in Capernaum was actually not the latefourthcentury domus ecclesia on the remembered spot of the house of Peter but rather the fourthcentury chapel built in nearby Tabgah to commemo rate the site of Christ's multiplication of the loaves. Either way, any historical construction of the socioeconomic context of the lime stone synagogue and Jewish-Christian rela tions that has Joseph of Tiberias at its centre is on shaky ground.
Theories that posit imperial patronage for the synagogue, whether or not for use as a Christian pilgrimage attraction, run up against a complete lack of evidence. 13 12 I have recently argued something similar to this specifically for the situation in Caper naum and from the perspective of Michel de Certeau's social theory of everyday life. See Cirafesi 2021a. 13 It is certainly true, as Arubas and Talgam assert, that imperial funds were used to build churches in the fourth and following centuries, but there is no evidence that Byzantine East. 15 Further more, the major imperial law codes and Christian theological treatises from the fourth to the sixth centu ries do, indeed, reflect a clear antisynagogue (and antiJewish in general) agenda. If these sources are taken at face value, one could understand the allure of the hypothesis that a grand synagogue built in the fifth or sixth century right next to a Byzantine church would have needed the special approval and the special financial backing of the empire itself. This is especially the case if one begins a historical construction from the assumption that Jewish-Christian relations in late ancient Galilee were fundamentally characterised by antagonism and conflict (e.g. Aviam 1999: 281-300). However, without evidence, a hypothesis, even a reasonable one, has little on which to hang its hat. In this respect, Hakola's meth odological critique of the imperial funding theory is crucially important. The architecture of Capernaum's monumental buildings con fronts us with our hermeneutical assumptions about Jewish-Christian relations in this town and during this time, exposing our historical biases concerning what we believe could or could not have been possible regarding the ways Jews and Christians interacted. Hakola rightly highlights, in not so many words, that architecture, just like literary sources, can 15 Beth Yerah (Khirbet alKarak), on the southern shore of the Kinneret Lake about 8 km south of Tiberias, had once been raised as a site comparable to Capernaum. Scholars had once supposed Beth Yerah afforded evidence of a Byzantine church and, about fifty metres to its south, a synagogue encompassed by a Roman fort. How sever, recent research on the site by Donald Whitcomb has confirmed an Umayyad date for the complex and con cluded that the supposed synagogue was actually a type of Umayyad palace, see Whitcomb 2009: 245-6. participate in the politics of identity con struction, projecting on one social level static boundaries that simultaneously demarcate group identities and establish for them the security of place. In the attempt to under stand the social realia of Jewish-Christian relations on the ground, the iconographies of Capernaum's limestone synagogue and octagonal church need to be 'read' critically. As I have argued elsewhere concerning the situation of late ancient Capernaum, on the basis of the social theory of Michel de Certeau (Cirafesi 2021a), everyday life does not play by the same selfsegregating rules of strategic power, power that shapes through language and objects the realm of 'the proper', 'the official', and the 'whatshouldbedone'. Everyday life, rather, is characterised by the spontaneous manipulation of that realm, chockfull of what de Certeau calls 'tactical actions', which function like soldiers behind enemy lines, creating shortcuts and looking for opportunities to break rules that would otherwise order and partition a society's dis crete social identities. Everyday life therefore involves not merely the crossing of identity boundaries but their exploitation. From this perspective, the architecture of Capernaum's synagogue and church do, indeed, project boundaries between the iden tities of distinct social groups. I concur with Hakola, however, in questioning whether we should see this boundarymaking as striking, in need of special explanation, or as indica tive of conflict between the town's Jewish and Christian populations. Manifestations of strategic power always raise the question of how the boundaries it establishes are negoti ated and manipulated in everyday life. Thus, if we read the historical sources -such as the antisynagogue edicts found in the codes of Theodosius II and Justinian and in the eccle siastical laws of the Canons of the Apostles (see Linder 1987Linder , 1997) -with a hermeneutic of suspicion, then we actually gain a win dow into how some Jews and Christians in eastern parts of the empire engaged in such negotiation. Edicts forbidding the building of new synagogues imply that some Jewish communities were, in fact, erecting new syna gogues. That several of the canons prohibit activity ranging from Christians entering a synagogue to pray with Jews, to Christians cocelebrating Sabbaths and Jewish holidays (especially Unleavened Bread) 16  Such sources, and others like them, sug gest that we need not resort to a theory of Christian imperial funding for a monumen tal synagogue for us to imagine that Jews and Christians interacted closely and that their identities were entangled in complex ways. While Arubas and Talgam read the story 17 See e.g . Linder 1997: nos. 2, 4, 103, 105, 110, 116, 120, 122, 138, 177, 354, 355, 948, 950. 18 The Greek text (from Linder 1997 reads: Εἴ τις κληρικὸς ἢ λαϊκὸς εἰσέλθοι εἰς συναγωγὴν Ἰουδαίων ἢ αἱρετικῶν προσεύξασθαι, καθαιρείσθω καὶ ἀφοριζέσθω. underestimates the exercise of Jewish cultural and politic al agency in a time and place for which the archaeological evidence, especi ally related to synagogues, has increasingly suggested precisely the opposite, that Jews asserted such agency frequently and vocifer ously (see Levine 2005Levine , 2012Hakola et al. 2021: 7-34). That local Galilean Jewish communi ties, such as the one in Capernaum, could boldly assert their identities in the midst of their entangled relations with Byzantine Christians does not mean, however, that these communities were entirely economic ally selfsufficient. The comparative data from Huqoq, Horvat Kur, and Wadi Hamam, while certainly demonstrating the social and cultural vitality of these communities in late Antiquity, do not render conclusive evidence on this front. While inscriptions on mosaic pavements from Horvat Kur, Wadi Hamam, and possibly Huqoq do, indeed, seem to sug gest that local donors contributed to parts of the synagogues, these inscriptions are far from evidence that the total economic bur den of these buildings was borne at the local level. 22 22 At Horvat Kur, a short Aramaic inscrip tion mentioning a certain 'El'azar son of Yudan son of Susu (or Qoso/Qusu)' is set above the remains of what was probably a depiction of a menorah (Zangenberg 2017: 114). Nothing in the inscription is said specifically about a contribution from this person, but Jurgen Zangenberg is right that it is plausible that the individual 'had con tributed to the community, its synagogue, or the floor and was honored with this inscription' (ibid. p. 114). Of course, if this individual was a donor, he almost certainly did not fund the entire building but rather, as was more common, donated to a specific architectural element within the synagogue (see Levine 2005: 386-7 for examples). The mosaic panel with the menorah seems In my view, we should think similarly about the case of the Capernaum syn agogue. On the one hand, although not receiving any comment in the historical scholarship surveyed above, two donor inscriptions were found on individual columns belonging to the period of the limestone building ( fig. 4). While one was carved in Greek and the other in Aramaic, both share a similar donor formula, which mentions (at least) three family generations and the contribution of a column to the synagogue. 23 A man named Herod and his son Justus are the primary donors in the Greek inscription; Ḥalfu/o is the donor named to be the most likely candidate. Analo gously, the donor inscription in Panel 11 in the western aisle of the Wadi Hamam syna gogue states: 'The sons of Simon made [i.e., donated] this panel from their own [means]' (translation from Leibner and Miller 2010: 249). An inscription found in the 'Commemorative Panel' in the Huqoq synagogue (see Magness et al. 2018: 96-7) might also function to bless those who made charitable donations to the construc tion or repairs of parts of the synagogue. No named individuals seem to be men tioned. However, as Magness et al. note  We are, therefore, on quite solid ground in claiming that Capernaum's Jewish population possessed a level -perhaps even a significant level -of internal wealth, which could have been directed towards the construction of the synagogue. The question, of course, is whether there was enough wealth to sustain a building project that, according to Loffreda, from start to finish lasted almost a century (Loffreda 1997: 232-3 On the other hand, the impulse from some scholars to posit some kind of external support also has evidence in its favour and is now further supported by a recent archaeo logical discovery. First, even if Hamat Gader was a special attraction in the region owing to its hot springs, the inscription on the floor of its synagogue mentioning donors from all around Galilee shows that local Jewish communities, and specifically Capernaum, had socioeconomic networks in place from which to draw and to which to contribute. The flow of money and resources, human and material, does not appear to have been static, controlled only by the urban elite, or confined to isolated towns and villages but rather was dynamic and relatively diffuse, and operated with a strong sense of translocal social connectivity. 25 In other words, late 25 For example, the same craftspeople and artisans could work in multiple towns and on multiple synagogues. Lee Levine (2005: 373) notes a father and son pair who laid the mosaic floors in the synagogues of Beth Alpha and Beth Shean, and another artisan who worked in ' Alma and Bar'am in the Upper Galilee. Town marketplaces ancient Galilee was not a rural backwater. As Sharon Mattila has recently shown, villages and villagers were engaged in high levels of market exchange, with relative sophistication and access to wealth (Mattila 2014: 312-45).
As Hagith Sivan has noted (2008: 46-7), the rise of Christian pilgrimage to the region certainly contributed to this general state of prosperity in the first half of the sixth century, but it would be a mistake to say Christian pil grimage was the only factor generating this wealth. Village life, as Mattila puts it, was a much more 'diverse and complex phenom enon', and one could easily apply this descrip tion to the nature of Jewish-Christian rela tions in late ancient Galilee as well.
Second, the studies of Ma'oz and Runes son have highlighted that the limestone materials used in the construction of the syn agogue must have been imported from out side Capernaum (Ma'oz 1999: 139;Runes son 2007: 239, 252-3), from a site, as Ma'oz says, no less than ten kilometres away, such as Mout Arbel. Ma'oz goes on to assert that 'The import of building material from outside sources is not recorded at any other Galilean synagogue, and it is extremely rare even in the excavated areas of Tiberias' (Ma'oz 1999: 139). Ma'oz presumed this point sup ported his overall theory of Christian imper ial involvement in the construction of the (called in rabbinic literature the shuk) could bring in a significant level of outoftown foottraffic and generate notable economic gain. Note what Cynthia Baker says about the shuk in lateancient Galilee: '[It was] the chief locale for commerce in goods, services, and information of all sorts. It is … that place where all manner of people of local, distant, and foreign origin had access to one another, as well as to goods that were similarly of local, distant, and foreign origins' (Baker 2002: 105). Capernaum's shuk comprised of houseshops that lined the major north-south road (see L39 in fig. 3). See Mattila 2015: 224 (her ' Fig. D'). limestone synagogue. Runesson, however, was led to theorise that it demonstrated the involvement of wealthy Jews in Tiberias.
In late 2015, Runesson's theory received a boost. During excavations at Kursi Beach, 26 led by Haim Cohen and Michael Artzy of the University of Haifa, a marble slab with a dedi catory Aramaic/Hebrew inscription dat ing to circa the fifth century was discovered on the floor of a synagogue. The inscription was first published in 2016 in the Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting (JJMJS). 27 Not only does the inscription confirm the existence of a Jewish population in Kursi contemporaneous with its Christian one, but it also seems to confirm, pace Ma'oz's earlier assumption, that building material could, indeed, be imported from an outside source. Although fragmentary in places, the inscrip tion clearly mentions a donation to the Kursi synagogue from an individual 'from Tiberias' ‫טיבריה(‬ ‫.)דמן‬ The statement in lines 2-3 of the donor (the name is fragmentary/indiscern ible) 'who contributed marble ‫)מרמריה(‬ 28 for the honor of (this) holy [place]' 29 does not appear to be a reference merely to the marble tablet itself but to a general contribution of marble that was, perhaps, used in architec tural elements throughout the synagogue. As the excavators judiciously note, since the synagogue has not been fully excavated, it is impossible to know this with any certainty 26 Kursi is an archaeological site on the eastern shore of the Lake of Galilee near the foothills of the Golan Heights. Since the fifth century, it has been known as a Christian pilgrimage location and as home to Galilee's largest monastic complex. 27 Open access to the publication (and all of JJMJS's publications) can be found at <jjmjs.org> (Misgav et al. 2016: 167-9 (Misgav et al. 2016: 169). Nonetheless, marble, as a highdemand yet nonnatu r al resource in Palestine, was quarried and im ported from all over the Mediterranean world to the major cities of the region (Fischer 2007: 249). It was apparently masoned by associations of marblecutters in these cities , including in Tiberias, 30 but it took individu als with financial means -like the Tiberian mentioned in the Kursi synagogue inscrip tion -to fund the transport of dressed marble to local villages. Thus, no matter the actual extent of the marble's use in the Kursi synagogue, the inscription encourages us to imagine a dynamic socioeconomic network in place during the fifth and sixth centuries, a network that both connected Jewish com munities to one another and involved them in the broader complex currents of commercial activity throughout the Byzantine Empire.

Conclusion: towards a more complex historical construction
The socioeconomic context of Capernaum's limestone synagogue was clearly complicated and multifaceted. In my view, we are safe to rule out Christian imperial involvement in the construction of the building, but there is, indeed, evidence that supports the idea of both local and nonlocal Jewish patronage. The best historical conclusion to draw, there fore, might be that a dynamic duo of both internal and external funding was behind the project: on the one hand, local residents, made relatively wealthy from their participa tion in vibrant commercial networks active Relations between Jews and Christians in fifth and sixthcentury Capernaum, I suggest, mirrored the dynamic, interac tive, and fluid socioeconomic context of its synagogue. There is obviously no way to know with any certainty the specific kind of boundaryexploiting activities in which Caper naum's Jews and Christians might have engaged. Capernaum had a particu lar cultural and commercial attachment to Syria, specific ally Antioch, 31 which, as I have argued elsewhere, might have brought the village's residents within earshot of the harsh prohibitions on Jewish-Christian interaction given in the sixthcentury Antiochene edi tion of the Canons of the Apostles (see Cirafesi 2021a). As mentioned in several examples from the Canons given above, activ ities such as Jews and Christians praying in each others' 31 See Loffreda 1993: 18-19, where he points to the numismatic record, imported vessels, and the town's proximity to an imperial highway that ran directly to Damascus as evidence. We can also note the discovery of Syriac graffiti in the latefourth to mid fifthcentury remains under the octagonal church as a significant religiocultural con nection as well. Mattila 2015: 251 also lists Antioch, specifically, as one of the major eastern centres to which Capernaum vil lagers seemed to have had close economic ties. sacred buildings, contributing oil for lamp lighting rituals, 32 and sharing festive meals are prohibited and severely condemned. 33 All 32 The locus labelled L119 in fig. 3, situated just off the ne corner of the synagogue, has been identified as an oillamp/pottery shop (for description of this 'bottega', see Corbo 1975: 207). 33 Christian participation in Jewish heal ing practices might be added to this list of potential tactics. One point that Levine makes in commenting on John Chrysostom's Adversus Iudaeos is that Christian attraction to synagogues seems to have been, in part, due to the 'powers' believed to be linked to Jewish healing pro cedures, procedures which themselves were closely connected in the ancient world to magical practices such as incantation and amulet texts (Levine 2005: 295). There are many sources now known that demonstrate that Jews in late Antiquity were involved in this realm, and several canons of the Church indicate that Christians routinely went to the Jewish community for healing and medical attention (e.g. Canon 11 of the Council in Trullo, 692 ce: 'No one of those enlisted in the sacerdotal order, nor a layman, should eat the unleavened bread of the Jews, or associate with them, or call on them in sickness and receive from them medicines, nor bathe with them in baths. If anyone should attempt to do this, if a cleric, he shall be deposed; if a layman, excommunicated' [Linder 1997: no. 124]). Among the excavations in Capernaum's Area 5, in the oillamp shop adjacent to the ne corner of the synagogue (see L118-19 in fig. 3), a Greek magical pendent was found with the words αγιος / αγιος / αγιος / Ιαω / υγι<ει>α inscribed on the obverse and πινω / Υ / υγι<ει>α inscribed on the reverse ('holy / holy / holy / Iao [i.e., YHWH] / health' and 'I drink health'; for images, see Loffreda 2008: 120 (DF 86331t190); see also Mattila 2015: 237. It is impossible to know the specific social context of its use. But it is possible -and this is my conjecture -that this amulet was produced by Capernaum Jews in the oillamp/pottery shop near the synagogue but consumed by Capernaum Christians of them plausibly took place in Capernaum. The monumental landscape of the limestone synagogue and the octagon al church certainly established architectural symbols of identity that express the desire to control the move ment of its respective subjects. But these buildings also, and at the same time, were drawn into the intense sociality and liminal ity of Capernaum's everyday domestic land scape; the synagogue and the church cannot be removed from this broader setting. This suggests, to me, that the same spontaneous, opportunistic, and transgressive performance of identities that marked everyday spaces in Capernaum, such as its housing complexes, streets, and marketplace, also marked on theground relations between its Jews and Christians, even if the architecture of the synagogue and the church gave Jewish and Christian identities something concrete on which to hang their hat.  Wally V. Cirafesi (Ph.D., University of Oslo) is Visiting Researcher in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. He has published on a range of topics related to the study of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient synagogues, churches, and Jewish-Christian relations. He has participated in recent archaeological excavations at Magdala (Galilee), and he is currently working on a major research project on the history of Jews and Christians in Capernaum from the time of Jesus to the rise of Islam in Palestine.