Luke4chapter 4

Luke gives the clearest picture in the New Testament of how a synagogue service ran. The reader stood to read from the scroll, and the attendant — a paid officer who kept the scrolls in their chest — handed it to him and took it back. Then the reader sat down to explain what he had read, and everyone's eyes turned to him because sitting was the teaching posture. In an Aramaic-speaking village, a translator would render the Hebrew aloud for the congregation.

Nazareth was a small village of perhaps a few hundred people, most of them related to one another. That is what makes the reaction so violent: this was the congregation he grew up in, and they knew his family.

The town sits on a ridge with steep drops on its edges. Driving a man to a cliff was the recognised first step in a stoning — the crowd casts the condemned down before stones are thrown — so this was a lynching in progress, not merely an angry shove.

Capernaum, where he goes next, was a larger and busier place on the trade road, with a garrison and a customs post, and a synagogue whose black basalt foundations still lie under the later ruins.