The excavations at the Pool of Bethesda, Church of St Anne, Jerusalem · Photograph by Aleksei m (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Pool of Bethesda (Jerusalem)

Second Temple period; excavated from the 19th century

Two large rock-cut basins north of the Temple Mount, in the grounds of the Church of St Anne in Jerusalem. Their layout, with a dividing wall between them, matches John’s description of a pool “having five porches”, where Jesus healed a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years.

What it says of Christ Read the text

About this artifact

John’s Gospel places a healing beside a pool in Jerusalem “by the sheep gate”, called Bethesda and having five porches, or colonnades. There Jesus told a man who had been disabled for thirty-eight years to take up his mat and walk. The manuscripts spell the name in several ways, Bethesda, Bethzatha and Bethsaida; Bethzatha was also the name of the quarter north of the Temple.

The site lies just inside the Lions’ Gate of the Old City, near the Church of St Anne, a twelfth-century Crusader church. The Ottoman sultan gave the property to France in 1856, and excavations from the late nineteenth century onward, carried on by the White Fathers, the French missionary order that keeps the church, uncovered two deep reservoirs side by side, separated by a wall of rock.

A pool with colonnades on its four sides and a fifth across the dividing wall would have five porches, as John says. Commentators once took the five porches as symbolic, since no such building was known; the excavated plan shows that John was describing a real place. The Copper Scroll from Qumran may also refer to the site, though its reading is disputed.

The pools went on being used after John’s day. In the second century, when Jerusalem was rebuilt as the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina, a healing sanctuary stood beside them. In the fifth century a Byzantine church was built over the site in memory of the miracle, and its ruins and those of a later Crusader chapel can still be seen among the excavations.

Five porches

Now in Jerusalem by the sheep gate, there is a pool, which is called in Hebrew, “Bethesda”, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, or paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water;

John 5:2–3

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The text

An account of the site written for this site from the archive’s source record and the research dossier.

The site

Two large rock-cut reservoirs north of the Temple Mount, divided by a central wall, with the remains of later Roman, Byzantine and Crusader buildings over and around them.

The Gospel

John describes the setting precisely:

Now in Jerusalem by the sheep gate, there is a pool, which is called in Hebrew, “Bethesda”, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, or paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water;

The account that follows, of an angel stirring the water (John 5:3b–4), is absent from important early manuscripts and is usually regarded as a later addition. The pool and its five porches belong to the original text.

Excavation

The site passed to France in 1856. Excavations from the late nineteenth century, continued through the twentieth by the White Fathers, revealed the two basins, the dividing wall, and the later shrines built above them.

Five porches

Colonnades on the four sides of the double pool and a fifth along the central wall would give the five porches John mentions. The feature was once read as an allegory, perhaps of the five books of Moses; the excavations show a building of that plan in the right place.

Later history

After AD 135 a healing sanctuary stood beside the pools in the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina. A Byzantine church was built over the site in the fifth century, and the Crusaders later built a chapel among its ruins and the Church of St Anne nearby.

What it establishes

That a double pool north of the Temple, near the area of the sheep gate, existed in the late Second Temple period, and that John’s description of it, five porches included, is accurate.

Open questions

The exact form of the colonnades in the first century is reconstructed from limited remains, and whether the healing sanctuary continued an earlier Jewish tradition of healing at the pool is debated. The site supports John’s setting; it cannot record the healing.