Two Pools, Two Digs: How Archaeology Vindicated John's Jerusalem Geography

Twice in the Gospel of John, the narrative pauses to describe a specific place in Jerusalem in oddly precise detail. In chapter 5, a pool has “five porticoes.” In chapter 9, a blind man is sent to wash in the pool of Siloam. For much of the twentieth century, both details were cited by skeptical critics as evidence that John was written by someone with only a vague, secondhand sense of Jerusalem’s geography — or that the details were theological invention rather than reportage. Excavation went the other way.

The Pool of Bethesda: A Five-Sided Problem That Wasn’t

A rectangular pool with five sides is architecturally strange, and for a long stretch of modern scholarship, that strangeness was treated as a red flag. Commentators proposed that John’s “five porticoes” were symbolic — a nod to the five books of the Torah, or simply a narrative flourish with no real referent.

The ground told a different story. Excavations near the Church of St. Anne, beginning with 19th-century investigators including Conrad Schick and continuing through further work in 1964, uncovered a twin reservoir: two rectangular pools set side by side, separated by a dividing wall. That wall carried its own colonnade, so the four outer walls plus the one dividing wall produced exactly five covered walkways — five porticoes. New Testament scholar Urban C. von Wahlde, surveying the site’s stratigraphy, concluded that the excavated structure matches John’s description down to the architectural details that once seemed implausible.

Ruins of the Pool of Bethesda, Church of St. Anne compound, Jerusalem · Photo: James Emery (Flickr) · CC BY 2.0

Siloam: The Pool Under the Sewer Line

Pilgrims visiting “the Pool of Siloam” for centuries were actually standing at a 5th-century pool built under the Byzantine empress Eudocia — a structure completed roughly four hundred years after the events of John 9.

That changed in the autumn of 2004, when workers repairing a sewer line in the City of David struck stone steps. Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Eli Shukron, on site, stopped the work and began an excavation with Ronny Reich. Coins embedded in the pool’s plaster lining — dated to the reign of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus — placed its use squarely in the Second Temple period, meaning this pool, not the Byzantine one down the slope, was standing and in use during Jesus’s lifetime. The trapezoidal basin, with stepped sides on at least three edges, was almost certainly used for ritual immersion. The find was formally announced on August 9, 2005, and Reich, Shukron, and Omri Lernau later published the excavation results in the field’s leading journal.

What This Does — and Doesn’t — Prove

In both cases, the archaeology backs up something specific and checkable: that John’s author knew Jerusalem’s built environment with real precision, down to details modern critics found implausible on their face. That is not a minor point. A narrative inventing symbolic geography from a distance is a different kind of document than one anchored in accurate, on-the-ground topography.

What the excavations do not do is confirm the healing narratives themselves. Finding the pool doesn’t verify what the text says happened beside it. Geographic accuracy and the historicity of an event are separate questions, and it’s worth keeping them separate rather than letting one quietly stand in for the other. Still, it’s a notable reversal: details that spent a century cited as evidence of the Gospel’s unreliability turned out, once archaeologists put a spade in the ground, to be evidence of the opposite.

References

• Urban C. von Wahlde, “The Puzzling Pool of Bethesda,” Biblical Archaeology Review 37.5 (2011): 40–65
• Ronny Reich, Eli Shukron, and Omri Lernau, “Recent Discoveries in the City of David, Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 57 (2007): 153–169
• Hershel Shanks, “The Siloam Pool: Where Jesus Cured the Blind Man,” Biblical Archaeology Review 31.5 (2005): 16–23

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