Where did Jesus live? From Bethlehem to Capernaum

Ask the Gospels where Jesus lived and they give four places. He was born in Bethlehem, was carried to Egypt as a small child to escape Herod, grew up in Nazareth, and made his home as a grown man in Capernaum, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee. Apart from those early years in Egypt, all of it was in the land of Israel under Roman rule, in the districts of Judea and Galilee.

Two of John the Baptist's disciples once asked him the same thing. "Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?" (John 1:38, KJV). He did not give them an address. He said, come and see.

Where did Jesus live, place by place?

Mostly in Galilee. Luke says he was about thirty when his ministry began (Luke 3:23), and nearly all of those years were spent in Nazareth. The ministry years centred on Capernaum, which Matthew calls "his own city" (Matthew 9:1). Bethlehem and Egypt cover only his earliest childhood, for a length of time the Gospels never give.

He also kept returning to Jerusalem for the feasts, to Bethany for his friends, and to the lake itself. The map and table give rough distances, as the crow flies; the roads were longer.

Place	What happened there	Where to read it	How far, roughly
Bethlehem, Judea	Born, visited by shepherds and the wise men	Luke 2:1-20; Matthew 2:1-11	About six miles south of Jerusalem
Egypt	The family's refuge from Herod	Matthew 2:13-15	Well over a hundred miles southwest of Bethlehem
Nazareth, Galilee	Childhood, the carpenter's trade, about thirty years	Matthew 2:19-23; Luke 2:39-52; Luke 4:16	About seventy miles north of Bethlehem
Capernaum, Sea of Galilee	His base through the Galilean ministry	Matthew 4:13; Matthew 9:1; Mark 2:1	About twenty miles northeast of Nazareth
Bethany, near Jerusalem	Home of Martha, Mary and Lazarus; where he lodged in his last week	John 11:1; John 12:1-2; Matthew 21:17	Under two miles from Jerusalem
Jerusalem	The feasts, the Temple, the cross and the empty tomb	Luke 2:41-51; John 2:13; Matthew 21-28	About sixty-five miles south of Nazareth

For the events that happened between the places, we have told the whole life of Christ in order.

Why was he born in Bethlehem and not at home?

A Roman census brought them there. Luke says Joseph went up from Nazareth to Bethlehem, "the city of David", because he was of David's family line, and Mary went with him. The baby came while they were there. In Luke's telling, Nazareth was already home; Bethlehem was where they had to be.

"And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem" (Luke 2:4, KJV). Bethlehem was a small town in the hills a short walk south of Jerusalem, the town where David had kept his father's sheep.

Tradition has filled in the next verses, so read them slowly. Luke says Mary "laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:7, KJV). A manger is named. A stable is not; that detail comes from the manger, and from centuries of Christmas pictures.

Matthew adds a detail of his own. When the wise men arrive, "they were come into the house" and saw the young child with Mary (Matthew 2:11, KJV). By then the family seems to be living in Bethlehem, in a house, and Matthew calls him a young child, not a newborn.

Why did the family go to Egypt, and for how long?

Joseph took them there to keep the child alive. An angel warned him in a dream that Herod meant to kill the child, and Joseph left that same night. Matthew does not say where in Egypt they stayed, or for how long; only that they remained until Herod died.

"When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt" (Matthew 2:14, KJV). It was not a short trip. Egypt's towns along the Nile lay well over a hundred miles from Bethlehem, much of it across dry country, with a small child.

Egypt was also a sensible place to go. It lay beyond Herod's reach, governed directly by Rome, and Matthew connects the stay to a line from Hosea: "Out of Egypt have I called my son" (Matthew 2:15, KJV). When the danger passed, the family came home, but not to Bethlehem. Joseph was afraid of Herod's son, who now ruled Judea, so they went north to Galilee.

Why is he called Jesus of Nazareth?

Because Nazareth is where he grew up, and where he lived longest, roughly thirty years. Luke calls it the place "where he had been brought up" (Luke 4:16, KJV). To everyone who met him later, he was the carpenter from that small hill village in Galilee, whatever town his birth had happened in.

The name carried a small irony that the Gospels notice. In John 7, a crowd in Jerusalem argues about him: "Shall Christ come out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?" (John 7:41-42, KJV). Many readers take it that they knew him only as a Galilean, and never knew where he had been born.

Nazareth was small enough that Nathanael could ask whether anything good came out of it. What the Gospels say about those years is brief, and we have set it out in what the Gospels say about his childhood, from the Temple at twelve to "increased in wisdom and stature".

Archaeology has added a little. In 2009 the Israel Antiquities Authority announced a first-century house near the Basilica of the Annunciation, which it described as the first dwelling from Jesus' time found in Nazareth.

Beneath the Sisters of Nazareth convent nearby, excavated long before, is another house of the period that Christians honoured as his home by the seventh century. The archaeologist Ken Dark has argued that nothing in the archaeology rules the identification out, and says plainly it cannot be proven. The finds show what kind of village it was. They cannot show which house was his.

Where was his home during the ministry years?

His home was Capernaum. After John the Baptist was put in prison, Matthew says Jesus left Nazareth and settled in this fishing town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. Peter and Andrew had a house there, and the Gospels speak of Jesus being "in the house" when he came back to town.

"And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim" (Matthew 4:13, KJV). It was a different kind of place. Nazareth was a hill village; Capernaum was a working lakeside town on a road, with fishermen, a synagogue and a customs post where Matthew sat.

The Gospels treat it as home. After crossing the lake, "he entered into a ship, and passed over, and came into his own city" (Matthew 9:1, KJV). In Mark, "it was noised that he was in the house" (Mark 2:1, KJV), and so many came that four men lowered a paralysed man through the roof. Whose house it was, Mark does not say. Many readers take it to be Peter's, since Mark 1:29 has him entering the house of Simon and Andrew.

This sits beside a hard saying. To a man who offered to follow him anywhere, Jesus said, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20, KJV). The Gospels hold both. He had a town he returned to, and he owned nothing he could call his own.

Capernaum's ruins are still there. Franciscan archaeologists excavating from 1968 found a first-century house beneath the remains of an octagonal church, with a room early Christians had plastered and pilgrims had written on.

The modern church stands on stilts above it. It is very likely the house Christians venerated as Peter's, though, as in Nazareth, that cannot be proven.

Which places did he keep coming back to?

The Sea of Galilee, Bethany and Jerusalem. The lake runs through almost every Galilean story. Bethany was where his friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus lived. Jerusalem drew him at the feasts, from the Temple at twelve to the last week of his life.

The lake was his road and his pulpit. He taught from a boat, slept through a storm in one, and walked out to his disciples across the water one night when the wind was against them. "And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea" (Matthew 14:25, KJV). We have written about what happened on the water in Matthew 14, and about what Jesus did, act by act, most of it within a day's walk of that shore.

Bethany sits on the far side of the Mount of Olives. "Now Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs off" (John 11:18, KJV), a little under two miles. It was the village of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, and John says they made him a supper there six days before the Passover.

In his last week, Matthew says that after the day in the city, "he went out of the city into Bethany; and he lodged there" (Matthew 21:17, KJV). At the end of his life, he went back out to the village where his friends lived.

How have painters shown the places he lived?

For most of history, painters set these scenes in the places they knew. Bethlehem and Nazareth turn up in Italian hills and Flemish towns, because the Gospels describe almost nothing of how the places looked. A few later painters went to see the land itself.

Giotto painted The Flight into Egypt in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua around 1305, with Mary on a donkey and an angel leading them past the pale, stylised rocks of the chapel's other scenes.

A few years later Duccio painted The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, with Christ on the shore and two brothers in a small boat on a gold-sky lake.

The Scottish artist David Roberts sketched Nazareth in April 1839, and the view at the top of this page is the lithograph made from that drawing, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. You can see why Luke speaks of "the brow of the hill whereon their city was built" (Luke 4:29, KJV).

In the 1880s the French painter James Tissot travelled to the Holy Land to sketch the hills, houses and shoreline before painting his long series on the life of Christ, now at the Brooklyn Museum. He wanted the places to look as a visitor would find them.

CHRIST, our coffee-table book of the life of Jesus in art and Scripture, gives Galilee its own spread. A small boat with its sail up labours on dark water across one page; on the other, Jesus walks toward it across the waves, and Matthew 14 runs beneath. It is the lake from this article, made for a table where someone can stop on one place and read the passage.

The CHRIST book sits with the books we are making in our books, in one place. For other reading on his life, from the Gospels on, see our guide to books about Jesus and where to start.

The next moment on that lake, when Peter begins to sink and Jesus reaches down for him, is the one we made as a canvas, Reaching Through the Water. It hangs well in a reading corner or a hallway, where the lake can be part of an ordinary day.

Keeping the places in mind

The boy found in the Temple at twelve still had several days on foot ahead of him, home to Nazareth. In his last week, the man with nowhere to lay his head walked out to Bethany and lodged there.

Keep the map beside your Bible tonight, and when a passage names a town, find it.

Frequently asked

Where did Jesus live as a child?

In Nazareth, a small village in the hills of Galilee, after a stay in Egypt as a small child. Matthew says Joseph "came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth" when the family returned (Matthew 2:23), and Luke says they went back to "their own city Nazareth" (Luke 2:39). He lived there until he was about thirty.

What country did Jesus live in?

He lived in the land the Bible calls Israel, ruled at the time by Rome through Herod and his sons. Galilee, where he spent most of his life, and Judea, where he was born and died, were separate districts. Today Nazareth, Capernaum and Jerusalem lie in Israel, and Bethlehem lies in the West Bank.

Did Jesus own a house?

The Gospels never say he did. In Capernaum he was "in the house" (Mark 2:1), very likely Peter's, and in his last week he lodged in Bethany (Matthew 21:17), the village of his friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus. He told one would-be follower that "the Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20).

How far did Jesus travel from Nazareth to Jerusalem?

About sixty-five miles as the crow flies, and more by the roads pilgrims took, often down through the Jordan valley. On foot that is several days. Luke 2 describes the family making the trip every year for the Passover, travelling in a company of relatives and neighbours.

Passages cited: John 1:38-39 (quoted: 1:38); Matthew 9:1; Luke 2:1-20 (quoted: 2:4, 2:7); Matthew 2:1-11 (quoted: 2:11); Matthew 2:13-15 (quoted: 2:14, 2:15), with Hosea 11:1 in the background; Matthew 2:22; Matthew 2:19-23; Luke 2:39-52; Luke 4:16; Luke 3:23; Matthew 4:12-13; Mark 2:1-4; Mark 1:29; Matthew 9:9; John 11:1; John 12:1-2; John 11:18; Matthew 21:17; John 2:13; Luke 2:41-44; Matthew 21-28; John 1:45-46; John 7:41-42; Matthew 8:19-20; Matthew 8:24; Matthew 14:22-33 (quoted: 14:25); Luke 4:29.