Garo Nalbandian, courtesy Museum of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum

Reconstruction of a first-century Capernaum house. This bird’s-eye view shows a model of a house whose size, number of rooms, and building materials are all typical of houses built in Capernaum about 60 B.C. The simple stone walls of the one-story residence could not support a masonry roof. Instead, a crisscross of tree branches was used, augmented for some rooms with a mixture of earth and straw.