While the ancient village of Capernaum is known by many Christians today as “The Town of Jesus,” it had a long history of occupation stretching all the way back to the Bronze Age and moving all the way forward to the time of the Crusaders. Indeed, although it was likely a village where the historical Jesus spent a lot of his time and where memories of Jesus and his disciples flourished in the centuries after his death, Capernaum was just as much a town of many other kinds of people as well. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others all had lived histories there. The challenge of piecing together and telling stories about those lived histories—and their intersections and entanglements—is what this talk is all about.
Wally V. Cirafesi is Futura Scientia XVI Fellow and Associate Professor at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University. His research and teaching span the fields of biblical studies, archaeology, and the early history of Jewish –Christian relations up to the emergence of Islam. He completed his PhD in 2018 at the University of Oslo and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the MF Norwegian School of Theology from 2019-2020. He is now working on a book related to the social and institutional evolution of the ancient synagogue, considering how it functioned as a site of various types of entanglements between Jews and Christians from the first to the seventh century of the Common Era.
In Partnership with the Swedish Theological Institute.