Nazareth

[trencacloscas]

http://www.thenazareneway.com/nazarene_or_nazareth.htm

Archeologists have now proven that the city of Nazareth did not exist until three centuries after his death, and questions long debated in scholarly circles are now coming to the forefront. Armed with ancient sources like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the papyrus books of Nag Hammadi, and the long overlooked writings from the early church, modern scholars and theologians are reconstructing the life and times of Jesus, and what they are finding is very different from the life and teachings we have been "led to believe."

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.

So, there was no Nazareth after all? Probably no Jesus also...

And Christians still believe?

[Chimp]

No evidence does not equal didn't exist...

It would be more accurate to say "currently there is no evidence for the
existence of Nazareth, PRIOR to the 4th century".

Troy was thought to be mythical...until they found it some 2500 yrs later.

If the intent of the post was mere curiosity and desire for debate, why the
snide title?

[Lotan]

So the absence of the Birth narrative is really inconsequential. Since Mark upholds the tradition that Jesus was born to the tribe of Judah, and more specifically, a son of David.

Yes. I agree that Jesus could very possibly have been a descendant of the house of David through his father, Joseph.

[trencacloscas]

Still don't quite see the point. Many fictitious mentors and founders of religions have been given pretty concrete birthplaces, like Orpheus in Thrace or Siddhartha in Lumbini (Nepal).

It would be more accurate to say "currently there is no evidence for the existence of Nazareth, PRIOR to the 4th century".

No. That would be completely inaccurate since the alleged Nazareth of the 4th could not possibly be the hypothetical Nazareth of the 1st century.

Troy was thought to be mythical...until they found it some 2500 yrs later.

But that's not an argument. Should we believe in the existence of Atlantis or Shangri-la without the slightest evidence?

[Lotan]

Many fictitious mentors and founders of religions have been given pretty concrete birthplaces, like Orpheus in Thrace or Siddhartha in Lumbini (Nepal).

Hi trencaclosas

How many of these fictitious mentors were believed to be born in the wrong place? That's my point.
From Wikipedia...
"Some scholars argue that there is no evidence Nazareth existed before the 4th century AD. Against this theory is the fact that all four Gospels specifically speak of a place named Nazareth (see Matthew 2:23, Mark 1:9, Luke 1:26, John 1:46) in contexts where it cannot possibly be a confusion with "the Nazirite". In addition, Dr. Ray Pritz observes that the Gospels frequently give examples of Jesus drinking wine, which was forbidden for Nazirites."
The existence of 1st century Nazareth isn't an extraordinary claim, and as Chimp pointed out 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. Until we have more information I am inclined to give this claim the benefit of the doubt.
In order to claim that Nazareth was a fiction you would need to answer this question...
Why would the evangelists create a story about a messiah who came from the wrong place, and then go to the further trouble of creating another story to put his birth into the scripturally correct place? IOW why Nazareth at all? Why not Bethlehem in the first place? If you are going to charge that Nazareth was a hoax you should also provide a motive. I'm afraid that I don't see one in this case.

That would be completely inaccurate since the alleged Nazareth of the 4th could not possibly be the hypothetical Nazareth of the 1st century.

Por que?

[trencacloscas]

In order to claim that Nazareth was a fiction you would need to answer this question...
Why would the evangelists create a story about a messiah who came from the wrong place, and then go to the further trouble of creating another story to put his birth into the scripturally correct place?

I don't know if it's really necessary, but I think many answers were given. Many related to the lack of prophecy support coming from the Old Testament. Those stories were fabrications superposed and reelaborated until they reached the form we know now. Anyway, in search of explanations, here it is one taken from Ken Humphries' site:

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.

[youngborean]

Yes. I agree that Jesus could very possibly have been a descendant of the house of David through his father, Joseph.

Then the point about puposefully making Jesus Judean is null and void since every example within the Old and New Testament adheres to matricarchal lineage in terms of tribal and clan idendtity. If Joseph was from the royal line his clan alone would have fufilled the Bethlem prophecy. Mark leaves whether or not he was born there in the flesh but the testimony of Luke and Matthew (though disputable about whether or not it happened) is still complementary and not contradictory.

[Lotan]

I don't know if it's really necessary, but I think many answers were given. Many related to the lack of prophecy support coming from the Old Testament. Those stories were fabrications superposed and reelaborated until they reached the form we know now.

Hi trencaclosas

I haven't seen anything so far that points to the necessity of creating 'Nazareth', especially in light of the more correct 'Bethlehem'. The 'Bethlehem' stories are obvious fabrications, but I fail to see why the 'Nazareth' stories need be. The 'explanations' from Ken Humphries' site seem to suggest that the author of Matthew created the Nazareth tradition in order to agree with Judges 13.5. This doesn't explain why Nazareth was already present in 'Mark', some 15 or so years earlier. 'Matthew' may very well have chosen the Judges verse to justify Nazareth rather than the other way around. This would hardly be the only example of his "if it don't fit, then make it fit" approach to scriptural exegesis.
As for physical evidence, Richard Carrier, who knows something about these things, had this to say on another forum...

"Nazareth archaeology. None of the books anyone has cited here contained any references at all to any archaeological reports on Nazareth. They simply make vague and unsupported assertions about what wasn't there. So I was able to track down on my own the most extensive report, that of Bagatti (Excavations in Nazareth, vol. 1, 1969), and I looked through all the subsequent reports on Nazareth from Excavations and Surveys in Israel, and this is what I found:

(a) Very little of Nazareth has been excavated, and therefore no argument can be advanced regarding what "wasn't" there in the 1st century.

(b) Archaeological reports confirm that stones and bricks used in earlier buildings in Nazareth were reused in later structures, thus erasing a lot of the evidence. Therefore, it is faulty reasoning to argue that there were no brick or stone structures simply because we have not recovered them from the relevant strata (i.e. one of Hoffman's sources assumed that the absence of this evidence entailed mud-and-thatch housing, but that is fallacious reasoning--especially since no clear evidence of mud-and-thatch housing has been found, either).

(c) One example of the above includes four calcite column bases, which were reused in a later structure, but are themselves dated before the War by their stylistic similarity to synagogues and Roman structures throughout 1st century Judaea, and by the fact that they contain Nabataean lettering (which suggests construction before Jewish priests migrated to Nazareth after the war). This is not iron clad proof of a 1st century synagogue (since the pieces had been moved and thus could not be dated by strata), but it does demonstrate a very high probability--especially since calcite bases are cheap material compared to the more expensive marble of structures archaeologists confirmed started appearing there around a century later, i.e. by the end of the 1st century AD (or early 2nd century at the latest, since marble fragments have been found inscribed in Aramaic that is paleographically dated to this period), and more extensively again in the 3rd century (when a very impressive Jewish synagogue was built there, this time using marble, which was later converted to Christian use).

(d) I confirmed beyond any doubt that Nazareth was built on a hill--more specifically, down the slope of a hill, with a convenient "brow" roughly one city block away from the edge of the ancient town as so-far determined archaeologically. Because the town was built down the slope of a hill, we have found numerous examples of houses, tombs, and storage rooms half cut into the rock of the hill, leaving a diagonal slope for structures to be built up around them to complete the chambers (as I described above). Since these structural elements were so completely removed and apparently reused by later builders, no evidence remains of what they were composed of (whether mud, brick, or stone).

The bottom line: there is absolutely no doubt that Nazareth existed in the time of Jesus. Also, there is nothing I have seen in Luke or Mark that is contradicted by the physical evidence available (i.e. even if we reject the evidence there is, we still have no evidence against what they say was there, while if we accept the evidence there is, what they say was there appears to have indeed been there)."

Also, could you please explain this statement...

That would be completely inaccurate since the alleged Nazareth of the 4th could not possibly be the hypothetical Nazareth of the 1st century.

Why could it "not possibly be"?

Then the point about puposefully making Jesus Judean is null and void since every example within the Old and New Testament adheres to matricarchal lineage in terms of tribal and clan idendtity. If Joseph was from the royal line his clan alone would have fufilled the Bethlem prophecy. Mark leaves whether or not he was born there in the flesh but the testimony of Luke and Matthew (though disputable about whether or not it happened) is still complementary and not contradictory.

Null and void? I guess all I'm saying is that if Jesus wasn't a Judean (which nobody can say for sure) then the evangelists would have had to make him one. As near as I can tell, Mary was supposed to be a Levite, so we have the royal and priestly lines converging in Jesus, which is rather convenient. As for the two nativity accounts being "complementary", that term implies that they somehow support each other when, in fact, they do no such thing. Attempts to harmonize them result in absurdity.

[serapha]

HI there!



From archaeology, we may estimate the population of the village of Nazareth. The lower spectrum is two dozen families in a clan or about 120-150 people.

The critics will argue that Nazareth did not exist during the first century since there is no written record of the town of Nazareth outside the biblical text, but the land tells us that there were occupation levels in the first century.

Archaeology and the New Testament, McRay, page 158, Baker Book House
“The location of twenty-three tombs several yards to the north, west, and south of the Annunciation Church indicates the limits of the town during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, for tombs were built outside towns.”

The places of these tombs give us an outline of the city limits of Nazareth as they are Jewish tombs and Jews were buried outside the city.

(EAEHL III, pp 911-922, Bagatti, B. in Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement vi, col. 318-321, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly, 1923, p. 90, Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 1, 1931, pp 53-55.)

There were kokim type tombs and four of the "rolling stone" type no later than 70 CE
The Archaeology of the New Testament, Jack Finegan, Princeton University Press, 1992. Page 46-47, 48


Jack Finegan's research indicates that relatives of Jesus were still alive and living in Israel, he believes at Nazareth. The fact that relatives of Jesus were still living becomes significant because they could verify the birthplace of Jesus (Bethlehem), the family being in Nazareth, and the circumstances of the death and resurrection of Christ.

An excerpt from the text,

“With respect to the possible resemblance of any particular location in Nazareth associated with the life of Jesus, it is possible to recall that, according to positive evidences, members of the family of Jesus were still living in Palestine, some of them perhaps in Nazareth, until the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, and further descendants were probably there much longer than that. The Jewish Christian writer Hegesippus (c. 180), quoted by Eusebius (Ch. Hist. in, 11 and 32), says that Symeon (who succeeded James, the brother of the Lord, as head of the church in Jerusalem, and was himself a cousin of Jesus, being son of Clopas who was brother of Joseph) lived to the age of 120 and suffered martyrdom under Trajan (in the latter's tenth year of reign, i.e., 107, according to the Chronicle of Eusebius [ed. Helm p. 194]); and (Ch. Hist. 11i, 20) that two grandsons of Jude, the brother of Jesus, were brought before Domitian (in his fifteenth year of reign, i.e., 96, according to Eusebius, Ch. Hist. iii, 18) because of suspicion attaching to them as descendants of David, but were freed and lived on till the time of Trajan (98-117). In their examination before the emperor these two men admitted that they were indeed of the house of David, but declared possession between them of only a piece of land thirty-nine quarter-acres (nXéeewv Xo') in extent and worth 9,000 denarii, which they worked to pay their taxes and support themselves, and they confirmed their statement by showing their toil-calloused hands, so in the end the imperial suspicions were entirely allayed. They were, therefore, farmers, and since they were undoubtedly brought from Palestine to Rome for the examination, they may very well have been living at Nazareth, in an area the agricultural nature of which of which was abundantly demonstrated by the archeological finds cited above (No 43). Upon release the two men also became also became leaders of the churches, both because they were witnesses (ýtagrveas) and because they were relatives...”

It becomes more important to know that descendents of the family of Jesus were still living in the area when the excavations of Nazareth begin to reveals such things as inscriptions.


"Scratched on the base of a column appeared the greek characters XE MAPIA (read: Ch(air)e Maria). Translated as: "Hail Mary". Recalling the angel's greeting to the Virgin, this inscription is the oldest of its kind known to us. It was written before the Council of Ephesus (431) where devotion to Mary received its first universal impulse. Other graffiti, all jealously conserved at the adjacent museum, confirm the Marian nature of the shrine. One in armenian reads "beautiful girl" (referred to Mary) and another one in greek reads "on the holy site of M(ary) I have writen"."

http://198.62.75.1/www1/ofm/san/TSnzz04.html

There are also pictures of the inscriptions and references to Conon which, according to the written record (and which Flinigan writes)... was a descendent of the family of Jesus.

Finegan writes:

"... who come from both towns and keep the records of their descent with great care. Also a martyr named Conon, who died in Pamphylia under Decius (249-251), declared at his trial: "I belong to the city of Nazareth in Galilee, and am a relative of Christ whom I serve, as my forefathers have done" (Kopp 1959, p. 90; SWDCB I, p. 621)"

Along with speaking of Nazareth and Cochaba as Jewish villages, Africanus in the same passage also tells of the (greek symbols) or relatives of the Lord, who come from both towns and keeps the record of their descent with great care.¨

(page 179)
" WE HAVE SEEN (NOS. 45-46) that descendants of the family of Jesus lived on in Nazareth at least into the middle of the third century, and that by this time the house believed to be that of Mary the mother of Jesus was a synagogue-church and by the fifth century a Byzantine basilica. ..."

Currently, there are private excavations ongoing in Nazareth regarding the excavation of an ancient Roman bath, dating to the first-century.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/...1067930,00.html

"What we are looking at now is probably Roman but even if it proves to be from a later period, then the bath underneath certainly is Roman," says Freund. "Either way, we know that under the shop lies a huge new piece of evidence in understanding the life and times of Jesus."


A good read from those who might know...

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/ANE-DIGES ... v1998.n111

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/ANE-DIGES ... v1998.n112

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/ANE-DIGES ... v1998.n114

~serapha~

[youngborean]

Null and void? I guess all I'm saying is that if Jesus wasn't a Judean (which nobody can say for sure) then the evangelists would have had to make him one. As near as I can tell, Mary was supposed to be a Levite, so we have the royal and priestly lines converging in Jesus, which is rather convenient. As for the two nativity accounts being "complementary", that term implies that they somehow support each other when, in fact, they do no such thing. Attempts to harmonize them result in absurdity.

But you are saying that the evidence is complementary by your admission that his father was from the royal line. By complementary I mean complementary to the account in Mark, by converging on the line of Judah. And not the issue of their collective cohesion. That is a seperate issue. I was simply addressing the point that Mark (the proposed earliest gospel) presents a different Jesus (lineage wise) than Matthew and Luke.

[Lotan]

But you are saying that the evidence is complementary by your admission that his father was from the royal line.

Hi YB
I'll admit that Joseph might be from the royal line, but not more than that, unless there is some kind of conclusive evidence that he actually was.

By complementary I mean complementary to the account in Mark, by converging on the line of Judah.

I get it. It would be surprising if the synoptics didn't agree on this point. The fact that they do doesn't increase the likelihood that it's a fact IMHO. He might have been a descendant of David or he might not.
Where the gospels are not complementary is the issue of Bethlehem. 'Mark' suggests otherwise.

I was simply addressing the point that Mark (the proposed earliest gospel) presents a different Jesus (lineage wise) than Matthew and Luke.

Was that my point or yours? I'm just trying to argue that the tradition that Jesus came from Galilee is likely to reflect an historical reality.