From Nazareth to Capernaum

Some time after having been baptized by John in the Jordan river and tempted by Satan in the Judean desert, Jesus is described as leaving his hometown, Nazareth. While Matthew doesn't explain why Jesus did this, both he and Mark mention that John the Baptist was arrested by Herod Antipas at this time. Luke gives a different circumstance, stating that Jesus left when the people of Nazareth rejected him. The texts don't recount what occurred between Jesus being tempted and John being arrested. France (1985) argues that it was the flight from Nazareth which resulted in Jesus carrying out a ministry based on itinerant preaching, which France sees as being quite different to the ministry which John the Baptist had carried out.Judaea and Galilee at the time of JesusCuriously, the passage describing Jesus leaving Nazareth, both in Luke and Matthew, uses the spelling Nazara for Nazareth, which between them are the only places in the Bible that Nazareth is spelt this way. This has led some scholars[citation needed] to suspect that the parts of this scene were copied by Luke and Matthew from the Q document, although this neglects the fact that most scholars view Q as a collection of quotes[citation needed], much like the Gospel of Thomas, and so wouldn't really contain any scenes at all[citation needed]. After leaving Nazareth, Jesus goes to Capernaum, a sizeable town on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, located in the region that Jewish sources considered to be Naphtali, but near the region considered to be Zebulun.Although the town is mentioned nowhere in the Old Testament, it does feature in all the Gospels, and is likely to have been a new town that arose at some point during Roman control of the region, see also Iudaea Province. Matthew is the only source that has Jesus actually living in the town, while the other Gospels only have him preaching and meeting disciples there. To explain this, those who view the Gospels as harmonious with each other, such as France, feel that the town was less a home and more a base of operations to which Jesus and his disciples would occasionally return. Gundry rejects this view, since to him dwelt unambiguously means that Jesus set up house in the town, and Gundry considers that this was a deliberate embellishment by Matthew to make it easier to find a prophecy to justify the move.Alleged ruins of house of St. Peter under the Catholic Church in Kapernaum, IsraelMatthew does not mention why Jesus moved, though historically the town was prosperous, mainly due to its location on a large lake (the Sea of Galilee) and simultaneously a location on the Via Maris, the Damascus to Egypt trade route. France feels that Jesus moved there as such a prosperous community offered more opportunities to preach, while Albright and Mann propose that Jesus moved there because he was already friends with his disciples prior to them becoming disciples, and he wanted to live with his friends, who lived in Capernaum. According to Matthew, when he spied certain fishermen in the region, Jesus recruited them as his disciples - Simon, John, Andrew, and James.