Biblical Archaeology Review

Eugenio Alliata, “I recenti scavi a Kefer Kenna,” La Terra Sancta 1 (1999), pp. 16–17.

Perhaps the most famous cartographer of the 16th century, Gerardus Mercator published a map of the Holy Land in 1585 and located Cana of Galilee northwest of Sepphoris with Nazareth to the southeast, as one would find it today. A richly illustrated early 17th-century map produced by the Englishman Thomas Fuller follows this pattern and illumines Cana of Galilee with a church or monastery enclosed by a wall.

Milka Levy-Rubin, “Marino Sanuto and Petrus Vesconte,” in Ariel Tishby, ed., The Holy Land in Maps (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum and Rizzioli International Publications, 2001), p. 74.

Text cited in Peter Richardson, “What Has Cana to Do with Capernaum?” New Testament Studies 48 (2002), pp. 314–331.

Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, p. 231.

See the discussion of Crusader-era pilgrimage and texts in Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage.

John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage: 1099–1185 (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1988), p. 111.

Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, p. 105.

Translation of text in John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims Before the Crusades (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, Ltd., 2002), pp. 103–116. See also Yoram Tsafrir, “The Maps Used by Theodosius: On the Pilgrim Maps of the Holy Land and Jerusalem in the Sixth Century C.E.,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 40 (1986), pp. 129–145.

We have identified the sarcophagus lid with incised crosses as “a kind of an altar,” as it appears to have been intentionally set in place to invite pilgrims to approach it and perhaps to interact in some way with the stone vessels in place behind the lid. We contend that the placement and decoration of the make-shift altar constitutes some type of liturgical action in the cave setting.