CAESAREA PHILIPPI

A city of Roman times on an ancient site long associated with fertility cults, both Canaanite and Greek. A sizeable river, the Banyasi, one of the main sources of the Jordan, issues from a nearby cave. In the 3d century b.c.

the grotto was dedicated by the predominantly Greek population to Pan and the Nymphs; hence, the nearby city was called Paneas (Panion). Herod the Great received the territory in 20 b.c. from Augustus. Under his son, Philip the Tetrarch, the city was rebuilt, including, on the old sanctuary site, a new marble temple in honor of the emperor. The city was known as Caesarea Philippi or Philip's Caesarea (to distinguish it from several other Caesareas) until agrippa ii altered the name to Neronias (Ant. 20.9.4). Coins from the following centuries call the place Caesarea Paneas. The old Greek name survives in its Arab form, Baniyas, the present-day village.

The city is mentioned in the first two Gospels as the site where Peter professed his belief in the messiah-ship and divinity of Jesus (Mt 16.13–20; Mk 8.27). According to an ancient tradition, known through Eusebius, this was the town of the woman who had been suffering from hemorrhage and was miraculously cured by touching the edge of Jesus' cloak (Mt 9.20–22). In the early Christian era, the city was a suffragan of Tyre. After its recapture by the Crusaders (c. 1132), it became a Latin see. Ruins of columns, capitals, hewn stones, and a city gate are still witness to the splendor it had in Greco-Roman times.

Bibliography: d. baly, The Geography of the Bible (New York 1957) 194–196. c. kopp, The Holy Places of the Gospels, tr. r. walls (New York 1963) 231–235.

[p. horvath]

Caesarea Philippi a city in ancient Palestine, on the site of the present-day village of Baniyas in the Golan Heights. It was the site of a Hellenistic shrine to the god Pan and then of a temple built towards the end of the 1st century bc by Herod the Great and named in honour of the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar.