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Dodd observes that John has no motive for fabricating Bethsaida as the hometown for Philip, Andrew, and Peter.
"The Synoptics have given most readers the impression that the home of Peter and Andrew was Capernaum... There is no particular reason why the name Bethsaida should be introduced, unless the evangelists believed it was actually the (place) in question."11 There are strong church traditions that John and James, the sons of Zebedee, fishing partners of Simon and Andrew (Luke S:10), also hailed from Bethsaida (Kopp, 16).
The Two Bethsaidas
Both Mark and John testify clearly of a Bethsaida on the west shore of the lake. Even an advocate of the one-Bethsaida (in Gaulanitis) hypothesis, C.Kopp, is led by his honesty to observe that: "In its natural sense, [Mark 6:45] does in fact point to a Bethsaida on the western shore."12 C.H. Dodd also leans towards one Bethsaida, yet must admit that, in John 12:21, "it is definitely stated, as it is perhaps implied in 1:44, that Bethsaida belonged to Galilee. The Bethsaida which the tetrarch Philip rebuilt and named Julias was in Gaulanitis.. At any rate there seems to have been some looseness about nomenclature in these parts. Judas of Gamala (Antique. xviii.4) is called indifferently (names in Greek)." I would submit that a person, who can live in more than one place, is more likely to have two geographic labels than a city, which does not move about. Kopp admits that "people have tried to show that Josephus also counted placed places as belonging to Galilee which lay outside its political boundaries. But this attempt has failed" (Kopp,15). Josephus never mentions a Bethsaida of Galilee, but he leaves most villages unmentioned; of the 204 towns and villages which he says are in Galilee, he names only 40. (Kopp, 14).
We canmot escape the observation that Luke is in some disjunction from the other three evangelists. I would suggest that the disjunction is not geographic or factual, but nominal. Luke, conversant with Gentile affairs and with connections between cities in the empire, knows of the Bethsaida raised by the Romans, though he retains the Jewish name for the site. Luke is the evangelist most remote from the original twelve apostles and the rural middle-Galilee which they frequented. We see in his writing a familiarity with the more important cities of Asia Minor and Palestine. Bethsaida-Julias fits this profile.
Mark and John, more familiar with Galilean viewpoints, know of the little fishing-town half way between Gennesaret and Capernaum, home of several of the fishermen who made up Jesus' group of disciples. Even if Luke knew of a Bethsaida in Galilee, his Gentile readers did not, and he preferred to mention only the more internationally-known city of that name.
Against this interpretation, Kuhn argues that Mark's description (8:23, 26) of Bethsaida as a village reflects its status in Jesus' lifetime, while the later evangelists label (Lk 9:10;Jn 1:44) reflects Bethsaida's status at their time of writing, after its renaming and elevation to (? in Greek) status (Kuhn and Arav, 79). This implies an acceptance of Mark's accuracy in describing the situation as it was in Jesus' lifetime, but Kuhn does not even mention Mark's placement of Bethsaida near Gennesaret on the west coast.
The Talmudic scholar turned Christian, Alfred Edersheim,14 explained that Bethsaida means "fisher-town," and that there were two or more towns with that name. The Bethsaida "on the eastern bank of the Jordan... must, however, not be confounded with the other 'Fisher-town' or Bethsaida, on the western shore of the Lake, which the Fourth Gospel, evidencing by this local knowledge its... Galilean authorship, distinguishes from the eastern as 'Bethsaida of Galilee."15
This places Bethsaida of Galilee in the neighborhood of the towns most frequented by Jesus and the apostles; proceeding from north to south, we have Capernaum, Bethsaida, Gennesaret, and Magdala. From these towns come most of those disciples whose hometowns we know.
In this connection, it seems unlikely that Jesus was condemning this supportive village when he said, "Woe to you Chorazin... Bethsaida... Capernaum" (Lk 10:13-15; Mt 11:21). More likely he was condemning three fairly well-to-do towns whose proud and status conscious inhabitants snubbed his message.
One Bethsaida
The one-Bethsaida theory asks us to imagine Peter, Andrew, and Philip coming from a cosmopolitan city where Jews were engaged in non-kosher fishing, a city that was named after a Roman queen! This hardly fits with the devout and rustic image of the apostles that all our sources give us. Numerous catfish carapaces, with accompanying fishing implements, have been found on et-Tell, suggesting an extensive operation farming these fish, which are non-kosher because they are bottom feeders. Some liberal halakhic rulings of rabbis (of a later period) allowed Jews to sell non-kosher meat to gentiles; such a rationalization may have been accepted in Bethsaida-Julias. But Jesus, at any rate, opposed liberal rulings on divorce and on children's obligations to their parents. John the Baptist (whom Peter and Andrew had followed) may have been even stricter.
A northeast-shore origin for several of the apostles leaves unexplained the fact that the heartland of Jesus' activities was clearly among the villages of the west shore, where also he
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