What was found. In 1986 a severe drought dropped the level of the Sea of Galilee, and two brothers from Kibbutz Ginosar, Moshe and Yuval Lufan, fishermen and amateur archaeologists, spotted the outline of a buried hull in the exposed mud near Magdala. The Israel Antiquities Authority excavation that followed (led by Shelley Wachsmann) recovered the boat in a now-famous 12-day-and-night rescue dig before the lake rose again, floating the fragile hull out in a cocoon of fiberglass and polyurethane foam. The hull is 8.27 m long × 2.3 m wide (≈27 × 7.5 ft), preserved to ~1.3 m high, flat-bottomed, pointed bow, rounded stern, suited to working close inshore.
Date and construction. Radiocarbon put the timbers at 40 BC ± 80 years; pottery and construction technique point to ~50 BC–AD 50, i.e., a working boat of exactly the Gospels' lake and era. It was built mostly of cedar planking joined with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints, with about ten different wood species in the hull, evidence of repeated repair with whatever timber was at hand, a hard-used working vessel. A boat of this class would carry a crew and a dozen-plus passengers, the size the Gospel fishing scenes assume (e.g. Mark 4:35-41). After ~7 years of conservation in a polyethylene-glycol bath it is displayed at the Yigal Allon Centre, Kibbutz Ginosar.
Label the link honestly: nothing connects this particular boat to Jesus or his disciples, it is a boat of the type and time, not "Jesus' boat."
Sources (read live 2026-06-12): Madain Project, "Sea of Galilee Boat" (madainproject.com/boatofjesus, with references incl. Wachsmann 1988); excavation-report citation confirmed via the published abstract of S. Wachsmann et al., The Excavations of an Ancient Boat from the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), 'Atiqot (English Series) 19 (1990). Formal reference: Wachsmann, 'Atiqot 19 (1990).
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