Matthew 8:1-17, A leper, a centurion and a mother-in-law

Centurions led sixty to eighty men, not a hundred, and were the backbone of the army (Keener), though Wilkins's table of Roman units gives a century as a hundred men. Pious Jews did not normally enter Gentile homes, and healings at a distance were rare and thought extraordinary. Exorcists of the day used incantations, Solomon's name or foul-smelling roots; Josephus says he saw a Jew named Eleazar, before Vespasian, draw a demon out through a man's nose with a ring holding a root that Solomon had prescribed. Excavations near Capernaum's synagogue uncovered single-story basalt houses around a shared courtyard. The largest had plastered walls covered with inscriptions, mostly short prayers to Christ and some naming Peter, so it was venerated in antiquity as Peter's house (the cultural backgrounds article on houses). Wilkins adds that it served as a family home from about 63 BC until about AD 50, then as a place of Christian worship. The excavators read its relaid floors and plastered walls as veneration from the first century on, though Kathleen Kenyon doubted the identification (the Zondervan archaeology handbook).