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According to the New Testament Jesus journeyed up
to the Golan and even worked a famous miracle there,
at Gadara (or Girgasha), now known as Kursi. A man
having been possessed by a demon, Jesus forced the
demon out of the man and into the bodies of some
 pigs,
who thereupon rushed madly down the steep slope
and into Lake Kinnereth below, where they drowned.
The monastery and church built at Kursi to commemorate
the miracle have been excavated by Dr. Vasilis Tzafiris
and his finds can now be seen in the Museum. In
the dozens of Golan Christian villages surveyed
a great number of ornamented stone blocks were found
in secondary use, among them lintels and the capitals,
bases, and mid-sections of pillars. Numerous inscriptions
in Greek have been found on lintels and tombstones
(many of them published by Prof. Urman). Like their
Jewish predecessors, the Christians also supported
themselves from the cultivation of olive trees and
the production of olive oil.
The ancient church at Dir Karuakh, in the Gamla
nature reserve, has recently undergone restoration.
A number of the Golan's Christian villages have
been the subject of a survey by Prof. Claudine Dauphin.
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