The evidence for a 1st century town of Nazareth does not exist not literary, not archaeological, and not historical. It is an imaginary city for an imaginary god-man.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus's home town was the 'City of Nazareth' ('polis Natzoree'):
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a
CITY of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgins name was Mary.
(Luke1.26,27)
And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the
CITY of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; because he was of the house and lineage of David:
(Luke 2.3,4)
But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: And he came and dwelt in a
CITY called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.
(Matthew 2.22,23)
And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own
CITY Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.
(Luke 2.39,40)
The gospels do not tell us much about this 'city' it has a synagogue, it can scare up a hostile crowd (prompting JC's famous "prophet rejected in his own land" quote), and it has a precipice but the city status of Nazareth is clearly established, at least according to that source of nonsense called the Bible.
However when we look for historical confirmation of this hometown of a god surprise, surprise! no other source confirms that the place even existed in the 1st century AD.
Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament. The Book of Joshua (19.10,16) in what it claims is the process of settlement by the tribe of Zebulon in the area records twelve towns and six villages and yet omits any 'Nazareth' from its list.
The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth, nor does early rabbinic literature.
St Paul knows nothing of 'Nazareth'. Rabbi Solly's epistles (real and fake) mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all.
No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is first noted at the beginning of the 4th century.
In his histories, Josephus has a lot to say about Galilee (an area of barely 900 square miles). During the first Jewish war, in the 60s AD, Josephus led a military campaign back and forth across the tiny province. Josephus mentions 45 cities and villages of Galilee yet Nazareth not at all.
Josephus does, however, have something to say about Japha (Yafa, Japhia), a village just one mile to the southwest of Nazareth where he himself lived for a time (Life 52). A glance at a topographical map of the region shows that Nazareth is located at one end of a valley, bounded on three sides by hills. Natural access to this valley is from the southwest. Before the first Jewish war, Japha was of a reasonable size. We know it had an early synagogue, destroyed by the Romans in 67 AD (Revue Biblique 1921, 434f). In that war, it's inhabitants were massacred (Wars 3, 7.31). Josephus reports that 15,000 were killed by Trajan's troops. The survivors 2,130 woman and children were carried away into captivity. A one-time active city was completely and decisively wiped out. Now where on earth did the 1st century inhabitants of Japha bury their dead? In the tombs further up the valley! With Japha's complete destruction, tomb use at the Nazareth site would have ended. The unnamed necropolis today lies under the modern city of Nazareth. At a later time as pottery and other finds indicate(see below) the Nazareth site was re-occupied. This was after the Bar Kochba revolt of 135 AD and the general Jewish exodus from Judea to Galilee. The new hamlet was based on subsistence farming and was quite unrelated to the previous tomb usage by the people of Japha.
None of this would matter of course if, rather like at the nearby 'pagan' city of Sepphoris, we could stroll through the ruins of 1st century bath houses, villas, theatres etc. Yet no such ruins exist.
In short order, Christian apologists fall over themselves to explain 'But of course, no one had heard of Nazareth, we're talking of a REALLY small place.' By semantic downsizing, city becomes TOWN, town becomes VILLAGE, and village becomes 'OBSCURE HAMLET'.
Yet if we are speaking of such an obscure hamlet the 'Jesus of Nazareth' story begins to fall apart.
For example, the whole 'rejection in his homeland' story requires at a minimum a synagogue in which the godman can 'blaspheme.' Where was the synagogue in this tiny bucolic hamlet? Why was it not obvious to the first pilgrims like Helena (see below) it would, after all, have been far more pertinent to her hero than a well?
If JC had grown up and spent thirty years of his life in a village with as few as 25 families an inbred clan of less than 300 people the 'multitude' that were supposedly shocked by his blasphemy and would have thrown him from a cliff, would not have been hostile strangers but, to a man, would have been relatives and friends that he had grown up with, including his own brothers. Presumably, they had heard his pious utterances for years.
Moreover, if the chosen virgin really had had an annunciation of messiah-birthing from an angel the whole clan would have known about it inside ten minutes. Just to remind them, surely they should also have known of the 'Jerusalem incident' when supposedly the 12-year-old proclaimed his messiahship?
Indeed, had no one mentioned what had happened in Bethlehem star, wise men, shepherds, infant-massacre and all? Why would they have been outraged by anything the godman said or did? Had they forgotten a god was growing up in their midst? And what had happened to that gift of gold had it not made the 'holy family' rich?
If Nazareth really had been barely a hamlet, lost in the hills of Galilee, would not the appellation 'Jesus of Nazareth' have invoked the response 'Jesus of WHERE?'
Then again, if Nazareth had really been a tiny hamlet, the nearest convenient 'mountain' from which the god-man could have been thrown a cliff edge would have been 4 km away, requiring an energetic climb over limestone crags. Would the superman really have been frog-marched so far before 'passing through the midst of them' and making his escape? Of course, all these incongruities exist because the 'Jerusalem incident' and the whole nativity sequence were late additions to the basic messiah-in-residence story.
Be that as it may, was there even a tiny village?
The expression 'Jesus of Nazareth' is actually a bad translation of the original Greek 'Jesous o Nazoraios'. More accurately, we should speak of 'Jesus the Nazarene' where Nazarene has a meaning quite unrelated to a place name. But just what is that meaning and how did it get applied to a small village? The highly ambiguous Hebrew root of the name is NZR.
The 2nd century gnostic Gospel of Philip offers this explanation:
'The apostles that came before us called him Jesus Nazarene the Christ ..."Nazara" is the "Truth". Therefore 'Nazarene' is "The One of the Truth" ...'
(Gospel of Philip, 47)
What we do know is that 'Nazarene' was originally the name of an early Jewish-Christian sect a faction, or off-shoot, of the Essenes. They had no particular relation to a city of Nazareth. The root of their name may have been 'Truth' or it may have been the Hebrew noun 'netser' ('netzor'), meaning 'branch' or 'flower.' The plural of 'Netzor' becomes 'Netzoreem.' There is no mention of the Nazarenes in any of Paul's writings. The Nazorim emerged towards the end of the 1st century, after a curse had been placed on heretics in Jewish daily prayer.
'Three times a day they say: May God curse the Nazarenes'.
Epiphanius (Panarion 29.9.2).
The Nazarenes may have seen themselves as a 'branch from the stem of Jesse (the legendary King David's father)'. Certainly, they had their own early version of 'Matthew'. This lost text the Gospel of the Nazarenes can hardly be regarded as a 'Gospel of the inhabitants of Nazareth'!
It was the later Gospel of Matthew which started the deceit that the title 'Jesus the Nazorene' should in some manner relate to Nazareth, by quoting 'prophecy':
'And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.'
(Matthew 2.23)
With this, Matthew closes his fable of Jesus's early years. Yet Matthew is misquoting he would surely know that nowhere in Jewish prophetic literature is there any reference to a Nazarene. What is 'foretold' (or at least mentioned several times) in Old Testament scripture is the appearance of a Nazarite. For example:
'For, lo, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.' (Judges 13.5)
Matthew slyly substitutes one word for another. By replacing Nazarite ('he who vows to grow long hair and serve god') with a term which appears to imply 'resident of' he is able to fabricate a hometown link for his fictitious hero.
So how did the village get its name?
It seems that, along with the Nozerim, a related Jewish/Christian faction, the Evyonim the Poor (later to be called Ebionites) emerged about the same time. According to Epiphanius (Bishop of Salamis , Cyprus, circa 370 AD) they arose from within the Nazarenes. They differed doctrinally from the original group in rejecting Paul and were 'Jews who pay honour to Christ as a just man...' They too, it seems, had their own prototype version of Matthew The Gospel to the Hebrews. A name these sectaries chose for themselves was 'Keepers of the Covenant', in Hebrew Nozrei haBrit, whence Nosrim or Nazarene!
In other words, when it came to the crunch, the original Nazarenes split into two: those who tried to re-position themselves within the general tenets of Judaism ('Evyonim'-Nosrim); and those who rejected Judaism ('Christian'-Nosrim)
Now, we know that a group of 'priestly' families resettled an area in the Nazareth valley after their defeat in the Bar Kochbar War of 135 AD (see above). It seems highly probable that they were Evyonim-Nosrim and named their village 'Nazareth' or the village of 'The Poor' either because of self-pity or because doctrinally they made a virtue out of their poverty.
Blessed are the Poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven
(Matthew 5,3)
The writer of Matthew (re-writer of the proto-Matthew stories) heard of 'priestly' families moving to a place in Galilee which they had called 'Nazareth' and decided to use the name of the new town for the hometown of his hero.
The original gospel writers refrained from inventing a childhood, youth or early manhood for JC because it was not necessary to their central drama of a dying/reborn sun-god. But as we know, the story grew with the telling, particularly as the decades passed and the promised redeemer and judge failed to reappear. The re-writer of the Gospel of Mark, revising his text sometime between 140 and 150 AD, introduces the name of the city only once in chapter one with these words:
"And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee ..."
(Mk I, 9)
From then on the name is almost forgotten. We may reasonably suspect that all four references in Mark are a later interpolation.
We can trace the subsequent elevation of Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke. Luke is the writer who emphasizes JC's ties to 'Nazareth.' Luke is the writer who goes out of his way to demonstrate an anti-Capernaum stance. Scholars have concluded Luke was not a Jew himself because of his 'glaring errors in things Jewish'. He also makes mistakes in his geography. He knows little about the place and in his mini-drama describes an impossible incident:
'... and brought him to the precipice of the mountain that their city was built upon.'
(Luke 4).
Nazareth, in fact, is located in a depression, set within gentle hills. The whole region is characterized by plains and mild rises with no sharp peaks or steep cliffs. The terrain is correctly understood as a high basin, for in one direction is the much lower Plain of Esdraelon. But there is no disguising Nazareth is built in a valley and not on a mountain. Even the mediaeval town sat below the summit protected from the wind. Beginning only in 1957, the Jewish suburb called 'Nazerat Illit' ('Upper Nazareth') was built to the top of the hills to the east of the city.
In the 3rd century Church Father Origen knew the gospel story of the city of Nazareth yet had no clear idea where it was even though he lived at Caesarea, barely thirty miles from the present town! Even in Origen's day, as the Church became more institutionalised, intense rivalry was developing between the patriarchs of Caesarea and Jerusalem. This rivalry was only resolved (in Jerusalem's favour) at Chalcedon in 451. Part of the rivalry centred on control of 'Holy places'. Hence, 'finding' the lost city of Nazareth was a matter of major importance,
Perambulating to the rescue, in the early 4th century, came the 80-year-old dowager Empress Helena. Preparing the way for an imminent meeting with her maker with a program of 'Works', she made a conscience-salving pilgrimage to Palestine. In the area of Nazareth she could find nothing but an ancient well in fact the only water source in the area (which in itself demolishes the idea there was ever a 'city' ). No doubt encouraged by canny locals, Helena promptly labelled the hole in the ground 'Mary's Well' and had a small basilica built over the spot. Conveniently, the gospels had failed to make clear exactly where Mary had been when the archangel Gabriel had come calling. Thus the Well site acquired local support for the divine visitation and Nazareth acquired its first church.
A generation after the dowager empress had gone touring, another geriatric grandee, the Lady Egeria, spent years in the 'Land becoming more Holy by the day'.
Egeria a Spaniard, like the then Emperor Theodosius and almost certainly part of the imperial entourage reached the Nazareth area in 383. This time, canny monks showed her a 'big and very splendid cave' and gave the assurance that this was where Mary had lived. The Custodians of the Cave, not to be outbid by the Keepers of the Well, insisted that the cave, not the well, had been the site of the divine visitation. This so-called 'grotto' became another pilgrimage attraction, over which by 570 rose the basilica of another church. Today, above and about the Venerable Grotto, stands the biggest Christian theme park in the Middle East.
By the late 4th century by which time the Church had control of theological correctness Nazareth was being correctly described by Jerome as 'a very small village in Galilee' (Onom. 141:3). He should know: he had fled scandal in Italy to set up an ecclesiastical retreat in the area for well-heeled Romans. The village owed its very existence to the imperial itinerary half a century before.
By the 5th century the supposed site of Nazareth marked by its couple of churches had become a key destination for pious (and leisured) pilgrims. We know of a Piacenza visiting in 570, of an Arculf visiting in 638, a Wilhebald in 724, an Al Mas'udi in 943. Sewulf in 1102, like the earlier visitors, reported that only the annunciation church was to be seen.
In 636 Arab armies overran Byzantine possessions in Palestine, including Nazareth. A Christian presence continued in the area, though it was subject to restrictions and heavy taxes. Nearly five centuries later, Crusaders occupied the valley and built a fort. On the foundations of the earlier Byzantine 'grotto' church they built something a little grander, more befitting their resident bishop.
There you have it, Nazareth, a city that was invented by Christianity.
4th Century Pilgrim Route and NO NAZARETH!Itinerarium Burdigalense the Itinerary of the Anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux is the earliest description left by a pious tourist. It is dated to 333 AD. The itinerary is a Roman-style list of towns and distances with the occasional comment. As the pilgrim passes Jezreel (Stradela) he mentions King Ahab and Goliath. At Aser (Teyasir) he mentions Job. At Neopolis his reference is to Mount Gerizim, Abraham, Joseph, and Jacob's well at Sichar (where JC 'asked water of a Samaritan woman'). He passes the village of Bethel (Beitin) and mentions Jacob's wrestling match with God, and Jeroboam. He moves on to Jerusalem. Our pilgrim preoccupied with Old rather than New Testament stories makes no single reference to 'Nazareth.'
