The Church of the House of Peter
"As soon as they left the
synagogue, they went with James and John to the house of Simon and
Andrew." (Mark 1:29)
Archeological investigations carried
out over a 70-year period (at the beginning of the 20th century) by the Studium
Biblicum Franciscanum (Jerusalem) revealed an octagonal mid-5th-century
ecclesiastical structure built around an earlier one-room dwelling dated to
the 1st century CE. The central octagonal shrine, enclosing a dry-wall basalt
structure, was surrounded by an octagonal ambulatory similar to the ambulatory
in the Rotunda of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem; or the later octagonal
Islamic shrine built on the Haram esh-Sharif (the Temple Mount).
The room contained within the central
octagonal shrine appears to have been part of an insula (a complex of
small single-storey residential rooms and courtyards) that toward the end of
the 1st century was put to public use, possibly as a domus ecclesia, a
private house used as a church. The plastered walls of the enshrined room were
found to be scratched with graffiti in Aramaic, Greek, Syriac and Latin,
containing the words "Jesus", "Lord", "Christ"
and "Peter".
The enshrined room is presumed to be
the "House of Simon, called Peter" reported by the Spanish pilgrim,
the Lady Egeria, who visited the town sometime between 381-384 during her
pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She described in some detail how the house of
"the prince of Apostles" had been made into a church, with its
original walls still standing.
In the mid-5th century, this room was
enshrined within an octagonal-shaped building. This was the church later
described by the 6th-century Piacenza Pilgrim who wrote, "The house of
St. Peter is now a basilica." Like the nearby synagogue, the
octagonal-shaped church was destroyed early in the 7th century, possibly at
the time of the Persian invasion.
The present Franciscan church was
built in 1990 over the site of the Insula Sacra to preserve the
archeological finds and to permit visitors and worshippers an overview of the
various architectural elements.
Sources: Israeli
Foreign Ministry |