The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus (10 page)

We have no solid archaeological evidence for events in the abandoned territories of the Galilee. Many sites have been dated to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, but none could be clearly dated to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.
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The
Great Hiatus extended at least until the end of the Persian period, that is, a minimum of four hundred years (732–332 BCE). How much longer it continued will be determined in subsequent chapters.

The Babylonian period

In 612 a Medean-Babylonian coalition, taking advantage of a fortuitous civil war in Assyria, invaded the land and destroyed Kalakh (Nimrud), Nineveh, and other places. They exacted a terrible revenge on the hated Assyrians, and partitioned the land. The Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, carefully trained by his father for kingship, proved a redoubtable general. Though he ultimately failed in attempts to conquer Egypt, he crushed the Egyptian armies on more than one occasion and was continually campaigning in the Levant.

The Babylonian period in Palestine was relatively brief but traumatic. On one of his many campaigns Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem (in 597) and deported 3,000 of its leading citizens, installing Zedekiah as puppet king. According to the biblical account, Judah rebelled in 589. Nebuchadnezzar returned, laid Jerusalem to an 18-month siege, and then completely destroyed the city. A second, and larger, contingent of Jews was exiled, and Palestine was made a province of the Babylonian empire. A third deportation occurred in 582.

Nebuchadnezzar levied heavy taxes, and Babylon (which had been impoverished under the Assyrians) became the largest city in the known world and fabulously wealthy. Hundreds of thousands of laborers graced it with a moat, multiple city walls (one 30 m high) and terraced gardens. Temples were also built, one being the Tower of Babel. The latter’s base measured 91 m (about 300 ft.) per side, the Tower reaching exactly the same height – double the height of other temples.

Nabonidus, from Haran and a devotee of the moon-god Sin, ruled Babylon from 555–539. The powerful Babylonian priests of Marduk, newly delegitimized, looked to Cyrus the Persian for aid, and promised the latter the surrender of the city in return for their ancient privileges. In 539 Cyrus attacked northern Babylonia with a large army, defeated Nabonidus, and entered the city of Babylon without a battle.

Of Achaemenid lineage, Cyrus immediately issued his famous edict allowing the Jews to return to their homeland. Many chose not to, and with that decision began an enduring Jewish presence in the Land of the Two Rivers. Judaism would be bi-polar for many centuries, culminating in the compilation of the two great Talmuds, Palestinian and Babylonian, in Roman-Byzantine times.

The Persian period

The Persian era in Palestine witnessed several waves of destruction, beginning with the initial conquest (539–38) by Cyrus, whose destruction was evidently limited to the Judean hills. The son of Cyrus, Cambyses II, succeeded where his father had failed and conquered Egypt in 525. The Pharaoh was carried off in captivity to Susa and Cambyses proclaimed himself Pharaoh. Darius I (
r
. 522–486) extended Persian dominions from India to Carthage.

In general, the Persians tolerated religious expression and managed the conquered territories with a light hand. In 516 construction of the Second Jerusalem temple was completed, and sacrifice reinstituted. Incidentally, the Persians employed Jewish mercenaries to garrison Elephantine, on the remote southern border of Egypt. The Hebrews there built their own temple, celebrated Passover and also offered sacrifice, a practice distasteful to the Egyptians and not sanctioned by Jerusalem. In 410 the priests of the local god Khnum incited a riot and the Elephantine temple was destroyed (Judea refused aid). It was rebuilt a few years later with the proviso that animal sacrifice would be discontinued. (Schiffman:42).

A wave of destruction occurred about 480 BCE when many sites in Palestine were leveled due to some unknown cause, perhaps local warfare. A wave of destruction also occurred one hundred years later, and was connected with the Egyptian struggle for independence. “Palestine,” writes Ephraim Stern, “was a battleground throughout the fourth century.”
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Egypt revolted in 405, and to all intents and purposes was independent from that time forward. Persia had become increasingly embroiled in warfare with Greece, and was experiencing a slow decline at home. Opulence, corruption, court intrigues, and regicide were the order of the day, and the Persian hold on the provinces weakened. The fact that 10,000 Greek mercenaries, hired in an unsuccessful revolt, could escape from Mesopotamia in 401 (the famous march recorded by Xenophon in his
Anabasis
) illustrates the essential internal weakness of the Achaemenid Empire.

In the Persian period the Samaritan schism widened, and in the waning years of that period a temple was built on Mt. Gerizim. Samaria was governed by the powerful Sanballats who, together with the Tobiads (rulers of the province of Ammon on the eastern side of the Jordan), constituted a formidable league opposing Jerusalem hegemony.

The material culture of Palestine in Persian times was divided sharply between a coastal Greek-oriented culture and an inland, Eastern-oriented culture. Galilee, of course, belonged to the latter. The period was one of invention, expansion, and building activity. Cement was used for the first time, and new advances were made in cistern and pool construction.
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Pottery, metal objects, alabaster, faïence, arrowheads, coins (common from the end of the fifth century), statuettes and figurines, seals and seal impressions – all these are attested in Palestinian settlements of the Persian era. None, however, have been found in the Nazareth basin, though numerous settlements of the Persian Period have been discovered in Northern Palestine. As of 1992, Stern counted thirty-one settlements in Galilee and the coastal plain, and additional contemporaneous settlements have since come to light. In the Nazareth region, the closest Persian evidence appears to be a tomb 3.8 km northwest of the CA, near Ailut (Elut) and quite outside the basin.
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It was excavated in 2005 by Yardenna Alexandre, who writes: “No other caves or settlements from this period have yet been discovered in the immediate vicinity.”
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The Question of Continuous Habitation

The early archaeologists

As late as the 1930s, few people were aware of pre-Christian evidence from the Nazareth basin. Excavating between 1892 and 1909, Fathers Vlaminck and Viaud either did not know that some of the Nazareth material dates to the Bronze and Iron Ages, or they failed to write about it. In his book
Nazareth et Ses Deux Églises
(1910) Père Viaud does not mention pre-Christian times. In fact, he does not discuss pottery or movable finds at all, but contents himself with a discussion of the structural remains of the various Christian edifices, and with pilgrims’ accounts. Incidentally, Viaud did not ascertain any masonry evidence before the fourth century CE – a verdict that still obtains today.

In 1935 Henri Leclercq penned a 17-page article on Nazareth which hardly goes beyond Viaud’s book and similarly makes no mention of the Bronze or Iron Ages.
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The older school of Nazareth archaeology, represented by Vlaminck, Viaud, and Leclercq, was exclusively focused on the common era. The pre-Christian history of the site was incidental, if mentioned at all. But Leclercq notes with emergent awareness the unsatisfactoriness of the data: “il semble difficile d’accorder un assentiment sans réserve,” he writes in one place. He also chides the imprecise and  arbitrary conclusions that were being proffered at the time, most especially regarding the early Christian history of the site, noting “une sorte de vague tradition,” and “Nous hésitons, pour notre part, à croire possible une méthode tellement arbitraire et qui consiste à appliquer à Nazareth l’argumentation qui précède.”

Already in the 1920s observations were beginning to circulate regarding the existence of Bronze-Iron Age tombs and pottery at Nazareth. This brought  a changed focus to the place. The first reaction was to suppose that Nazareth was a very ancient settlement indeed, one with a long and continuous history. However, this view immediately confronted what had been known for a long time: Nazareth is not mentioned in Jewish scripture, nor in the writings of the first century Jewish general Josephus, nor in the Talmud of later times. How, then, was it possible for the town to exist and yet to evade mention for so many centuries?

The convenient riposte, and one which is still prevalent today, is that Nazareth was small and unimportant – too small to be mentioned in the Bible and in later writings. In this connection, the settlement’s removed location also comes into play, as mentioned by Leclercq at the beginning of his 1935 article:

Nazareth is located at some distance from the great roads, though one can reach it easily, and this situation explains the absence of all mention of this hamlet in the Old Testament, as well as in the historical writings of Flavius Josephus.
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This opinion assumes that Nazareth existed in biblical times, for otherwise Leclercq would not need to explain why it is not mentioned in the “Old Testament.”

Father Clemens Kopp and the new evidence

In 1930, the Franciscan cloister between the Church of the Annunciation and that of St. Joseph was torn down and a new one was constructed. The opportunity was taken to conduct excavations in the area separating the two churches, about 100 m in length and 50 m in breadth. The following year, R. Tonneau wrote an article in which he registered an amazing fact: no evidence of either Greek or Roman settlement had been found in the excavations.
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Together with the emerging Bronze-Iron Age evidence, this disturbing new information required reconciliation with tradition, as well as explanation. Between 1938 and 1948 a Jesuit priest, Fr. Clemens Kopp, published a series of articles on the history and archaeology of Nazareth. These appeared in four issues of the
Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society
, all under the title
Beiträge zur Geschichte Nazareths
(“Contributions to the History of Nazareth”).
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In these articles, which total over one hundred pages of text, the author comprehensively reviews the Nazareth evidence known up to his time and attempts to place it in a light acceptable to the Catholic Church.

Fr. Kopp had a keen interest in Palestine archaeology and an engaging literary style, though he himself was not a trained archaeologist but had studied medieval philosophy.
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Besides a number of scholarly articles, he eventually authored a book that attained wide circulation,
The
Holy Places of the Gospels
(1963).
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In the first article of his
Beiträge
(1938), Kopp immediately deals with the two novel issues mentioned above: (a) the existence of Bronze-Iron Age artefacts; and (b) the lack of evidence for a settlement in the time of Jesus. He writes:

The observations of R. Tonneau, who also visited the excavations, are very important but unfortunately too short and made in passing. He sees in the Franciscan zone “the location of the original settlement. The hill is thoroughly honeycombed with artificially worked caves, the remains of a meager hamlet of peasants. It revealed no trace of a Greek or Roman settlement, no remnant of this pagan civilization.”
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It seems, accordingly, that as early as about 2000 BCE the inhabitants sought out a place for themselves on the valley floor, one which better met their increased needs. This wish was awakened in them when they took up house building. In this period they evidently converted a part of the old cave-dwellings into storage for grain (silos). I have been told that during construction the foundations of the cloister began to sag because no less than 68 silos were counted and filled with cement.
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This citation contains a series of conclusions which are hardly compatible with the evidence in the ground. Kopp proposes that the village began about 3000 BCE and was characterized by cave-dwelling.
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As we have seen in Chapter One, he is a thousand years too early. In addition, the inhabitants could not have lived in caves. This is possibly the first mention of a recurring myth in the Nazareth literature, that the early residents were troglodytes.
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The caves of Galilee “are wet or damp from December to May, and can only be used during the summer and autumn,” writes M. Aviam.
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No humans inhabited the Nazareth caves, at least on any significant scale during historical times. The plethora of “artificially worked caves” and silos in the venerated area that Kopp so heartily acknowledges were for agricultural use, not domestic. Again, they date to Middle Roman times, not Middle Bronze times. Finally, the village could not have “moved”
c.
2000 BCE, for it was only then beginning. These errors are hardly slight, and they continue to be postulated even to the present day. The basic fault—if we can extract one common denominator from the above assortment of errors—is a characteristic looseness with chronology. Only a cavalier approach to dates and a spurning of precision would permit Kopp’s scenario, which is a veritable chronological mish-mash.
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The village begins too early by a millennium, moves when it is only beginning, Middle Roman evidence becomes Middle Bronze evidence, people live in caves, agricultural evidence becomes domestic evidence—all these elements produce a confused tale with little foundation in fact. It is a transparent attempt to deal with the new Bronze-Iron evidence in a way fully compatible with Church doctrine. This
modus operandi
, unfortunately, is not unusual in the scholarly Nazareth literature. It exemplifies the scientific difficulties into which the tradition can fall when ruled purely by doctrinal considerations.