Nazareth

The objection comes first, because it is real. Nazareth is named in no book of the Old Testament. Josephus, who commanded in Galilee during the revolt and listed forty five of its towns, never names it. It is absent from the Talmud. Some readers draw the conclusion that the town did not exist in the first century, and that case has a published advocate: René Salm, The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, American Atheist Press, 2008. The field has not accepted it. What follows is the evidence, with the names, the years and the publications. Nazareth was a farming hamlet with no fortress, no road junction and no political weight. Josephus wrote about the places that mattered to a war. Absence from a general's list is what a hamlet looks like in the record, and an argument from that silence carries only as much weight as the list was built to carry. In 1962 a fragmentary Hebrew marble slab was found at Caesarea Maritima listing the twenty four priestly courses of 1 Chronicles 24 with the Galilean towns each course settled in after the destruction of the temple. The eighteenth course, Happizzez, is assigned to Nazareth, written נצרת. Michael Avi-Yonah published it as A List of Priestly Courses from Caesarea in the Israel Exploration Journal, volume 12, 1962. It is the earliest known mention of Nazareth outside Christian sources. Most date the stone itself to the third or fourth century AD, and the list it records reflects the resettlement of priestly families in Galilee after the Temple fell in AD 70, most likely after the Bar Kokhba revolt of AD 135, so the inscription attests the town in the Roman period without dating the village to the first century on its own. Bellarmino Bagatti dug under and around the Church of the Annunciation for the Franciscans from 1955 into the 1960s and found silos, cisterns, cave storage, olive and wine installations and rock-cut tombs, with Herodian period pottery. He published it as Excavations in Nazareth, volume 1, in 1969. The picture is an agricultural village. Because Jewish practice put burial outside a settlement, the ring of early Roman shaft tombs marks the village limits, and those limits enclose a very small place. Population estimates run in the low hundreds and are drawn from the excavated area rather than from any record. A survey and excavation on land beside the Nazareth Hospital between 1997 and 2002 found agricultural terraces, a watchtower and a rock-cut winepress with Early Roman material. Stephen Pfann, Ross Voss and Yehudah Rapuano published the final report in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, volume 25, in 2007. Ken Dark published a critical review in the same bulletin the following year, volume 26, disputing the dating of some of those features. The Nazareth Village Farm project is run by a Christian organisation, which this page says plainly rather than presenting it as neutral ground, and the dispute over the dates is live. Ken Dark, then of the University of Reading, directed the Nazareth Archaeological Project and re-studied a site the nuns and Henri Senès had recorded under the Sisters of Nazareth convent in the centre of the town. He identified a first century courtyard house cut partly into the rock, later enclosed by a Byzantine cave church and then by a Crusader structure, and published it as The Sisters of Nazareth Convent: A Roman-period, Byzantine, and Crusader Site in Central Nazareth in 2020. Dark noted that a seventh century pilgrim account describes a church in Nazareth built over the house where Jesus was raised, and that this site fits the description. He also said plainly that the identification cannot be proven. Both halves of that belong on the page. In 2009 a salvage excavation for the Israel Antiquities Authority near the Church of the Annunciation, directed by Yardenna Alexandre, exposed the remains of a first century dwelling with a courtyard and a rock-cut cistern, with Early Roman pottery and chalk vessels. Chalk vessels matter because Jews used them for purity reasons, so they mark the people who lived here as Jewish. Alexandre's fuller Nazareth work was published as Mary's Well, Nazareth: The Late Hellenistic to the Ottoman Periods in 2012. What is not disputed is that the site was inhabited in the early Roman period, that it was a small Jewish farming village, and that a Jewish inscription from Caesarea names it Nazareth. What is disputed is the dating of individual features at the Village Farm, and whether any one excavated house can be tied to the family of Jesus. No inscription naming them has been found, and no one has claimed one. The excavators' interests are stated where they bear on the reading: the work under the Church of the Annunciation was Franciscan, and the Village Farm project is Christian run. This page prints the positions and the publications and leaves the question where the evidence leaves it.