The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus (27 page)

With few Roman soldiers, Jerusalem fell to the rebels. After prolonged preparations, Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, entered Palestine with the twelfth legion and many auxiliaries. Soon Titus and Vespasian arrived with more troops, so that the Romans had three legions, 23 auxiliary cohorts, and many cavalry on Palestinian soil. Thus began seven years of war, which space does not permit us to review in detail here. We note, however, that the Galilee was not spared, with the exception of Sepphoris, which handed itself over to the Romans and became their strong garrison city in the north. Jotapata (15 km north of Nazareth), defended by Josephus himself, was taken by siege (July, 67 CE) and with it Galilee fell to the Romans.

In August of 70 CE Jerusalem was besieged and conquered. The Temple burned down in a general conflagration, despite the orders of Titus. The rebels held out in part of the city and then finally in the mountain stronghold of Masada. There they were commanded by one Eleasar son of Jairi, a descendant of Judas of Galilee. This virtually impregnable bastion also capitulated in April, 73 CE after a prolonged and famous siege. The Romans found only seven women and children alive, and 953 bodies of rebels who had committed suicide.

A note on method

The turbulence of the First Jewish War was accompanied by much dislocation in settlement patterns, as towns were destroyed and people displaced. One of the results, as we shall see, was the establishment of the small Jewish town of Nazareth in Lower Galilee.

The incipience of a village is not equivalent to the arrival of the first settlers at a site. No village springs up overnight. It requires a certain amount of time—perhaps a generation or two—to come into existence. Most encampments do not become villages, but are transient as people move on after a few years. In order for an encampment to become a named village two things must take place: (1) settlers must stay at the site; and (2) their number must be augmented sufficiently that the place merits a name. In other words, permanence and population are the factors that can transform an encampment into a village. A stable population, of course, will soon begin constructing edifices and tombs, and will make major agricultural alterations to the surrounding landscape.

The presence of tombs indicates both permanence and population, and it is strongly suggestive of a “village.” Thus,
the earliest
tomb
at Nazareth is a significant clue regarding the existence of a village. Determining its date will be an important goal of these pages. The period of tomb use can be revealed by dating funerary artefacts found
in situ
.

Even as a village worthy of a name is not contemporaneous with the first settlers, so it may not be contemporaneous with the earliest artefacts found at a site. Those artefacts may be extra-funerary and may predate the first tomb. We can suppose that a named village comes about at least 1–2 generations after the first settler.  This represents a lag-time of at least 25–50 years, one which could be added to the “earliest” estimates we will be discussing. On the other hand, certain counterbalancing factors conspire to weight the evidence in an earlier direction, such as the possibility that the earliest evidence from a site has not yet been found—and may never be found. Thus, there are mutually offsetting biases affecting the limited Nazareth evidence, and we will therefore treat that evidence at face value, according to the time spans that the most recent scholarship has determined.

The Time of Christ
, as these pages are entitled, by convention refers to the turn of the era. Though I know of no scholars who claim that Jesus lived later than the turn of the era, a few have proposed a considerably earlier time for him.
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Some have identified Christ with men other than Jesus,
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and others have denied his existence altogether.
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In this work
The Time of Christ
denotes the time span from the Roman conquest of Palestine (63 BCE) to the fall of Jerusalem in the First Jewish War (70 CE). That era is called the Early Roman Period, though other ways of dividing Roman chronology are extant.
^[348]

It is not my intention here to question the conventional understanding of Christian origins, that a man by the name of Jesus (Yeshua, Joshua) lived in Palestine in the early first century CE and inspired the religion we now call Christianity. Yet at the beginning of the third Christian millennium these axiomatic tenets are coming under increasing scrutiny by a number of scholars. Mindful of this, I use
The Time of Christ
for expedience, without thereby ascribing to any historical assumptions implied. We shall take up questions associated with the historical Jesus in a second volume,
A
New Account of Christian Origins
. In
The Myth of Nazareth
I restrict consideration to the archaeology of Nazareth, with the purpose of showing that the provenance of Jesus, as set forth in the gospels, is not historical.

Roman burial customs in Palestine

The kokh tomb

In Chapter Three we discussed the kokh-type tomb in connection with six oil lamps which were claimed to be Hellenistic but which are in fact Roman.
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A score of kokh tombs have been discovered in the Nazareth basin. These tombs are the principal source of our evidence from Nazareth, and we must now consider their chronology more carefully. The discussion which follows is indebted to the analysis of Hans-Peter Kuhnen, published in 1990.
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Scholars of Galilean archaeology have been greatly influenced by the archaeology of Jerusalem and its environs. A large city, the center of Judaism and home of the Temple of Yahweh, and commanding political and military power in the region since time immemorial, the Judean capital has understandably served as an archaeological reference for the rest of the land. Certainly, many archaeological innovations in Palestine are first detectable in Jerusalem, and only later in other parts of the Holy Land. As regards Nazareth, the failure to completely appreciate a lag time between the appearance of kokh tombs and bow-spouted oil lamps in Jerusalem and their appearance in the Galilee has generally resulted in an early chronology for the site. For example, in 1969 Finegan writes:

At Jerusalem, the great majority of ancient tombs
are of this [
i.e
.
kokh
] type, and date approximately from 150 B.C. to A.D. 150. It may fairly be said that this type of tomb virtually became the canonical form of the Jewish family grave.
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Finegan’s statement may be true, but it would still be a mistake to suppose that the kokh tomb simultaneously appeared in the Galilee and Jerusalem. Kuhnen writes:

Kokh tombs
[
Schiebestollengräber
], which under the Hasmoneans gradually replaced the older chamber tombs, also dominated the graveyards of [Jerusalem] almost with exclusivity after the accession of Herod… Under
Herod and his heirs, the kokhi type of grave also appeared in the Jewish-populated surroundings of Jerusalem, for example, in Tell en-Nasbe and in el-‘Ezriye (Bethany)… Apparently only later, from approximately the middle of the first century after Christ, did people begin to build kokh tombs in other upland regions of Palestine, as seen in Galilee at Huqoq, Meron, H. Sema and H. Usa…

So it is evident that during the first century after Christ kokhim
came into fashion in all parts of the land west and east of the Jordan…
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From this we see that kokh tomb use begins
c
. 150 BCE in Jerusalem, comes to prevail in that city after Herod’s accession, and spreads to Galilee only after
c
. 50 CE.
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Thus, M. Aviam has noted that “no Jewish tombs from the Hasmonaean or Early Roman periods have yet been excavated in the Galilee.”
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In all, there is a 200-year delay between the first beginnings of kokh use in Jerusalem and its appearance in Galilee. The delay is even greater if we consider that the first kokhim in Palestine may date as early as III BCE.

We are now able to deal with a false assumption frequently encountered in the Nazareth literature: that the presence of kokh tombs in the basin automatically attests to human presence there in Hellenistic times, or in the time of Christ, or even in Early Roman times. Thus, already in the 1930s, Fr. Clemens Kopp considered the Nazareth tombs to be as early as III BCE
^[355]
—by comparing them to possibly the earliest kokhim known in Palestine (those at Marisa). His error amounts to no less than three centuries. The same assumption persists even to the present day. For example, in a 1998 German reference article on Nazareth, we read: “Grabfunde bezeugen eine Besiedlung seit dem Ende des 3 Jh. v C”
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Such a view has fueled the false Hellenistic Renaissance doctrine, disproved in Chapter Three.

Similar examples are readily encountered: “Of the twenty-three tombs found
c
450 m (500 yd.) from the [Church of the Annunciation] most were of the kokim type… known in Palestine from
c
200 BC and which became the standard Jewish type”
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This is true enough yet, as Kuhnen reveals, there is no connection between the kokhim tombs of 200 BCE and those at Nazareth.

Again, in another dictionary article on Nazareth we read: “The location of the tombs of the first century BCE to the first century CE disclose that the occupied area extended hardly 300 by 100 meters.”
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In fact, this is not at all the case. The Galilean kokhim tombs, as we have just seen, were not “of the first century BCE to the first century CE.” We can now say that,
at the earliest, the
Nazareth
tombs date to the latter half of the first century CE.
As regards the emplacement of the ancient village, we must defer that interesting question until Chapter Five, when we consider scriptural demands to locate the village on the hillside.

Contrary to the implications found in much Nazareth literature, the many kokhim excavated in the basin are evidence neither of Hellenistic times nor of Early Roman times. Per Kuhnen’s analysis, they postdate 50 CE, and probably 70 CE. A Middle Roman beginning for kokh tombs at Nazareth accords with the dating arrived at from other data in the basin, including pottery, rolling stones, arcosolia, trough graves, and stone vessels.

The so-called “Herodian” tomb

An interesting complication of the above discussion—and one that has led to a good deal of confusion—is the fairly recent designation of the kokh tomb as “Herodian.” Only one archaeologist, to my knowledge, has taken up this identification, but he is quite influential. We shall see that “Herodian” is problematic not only in connection with tombs, but in connection with the bow-spouted oil lamp, a type which also figures importantly in the Nazareth evidence (see below).

As a valid archaeological designation for the turn of the era, “Herodian” came into currency in the 1930s with the work of Kathleen Kenyon and others. Though Bagatti often refers to “Herodian” oil lamps, he never calls the kokh-type tomb “Herodian.”
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Nor did Kenyon. The first such attribution that I have been able to discover is in James Strange’s 1992 article “Nazareth” from the
Anchor Bible Dictionary
:

As inferred from the Herodian tombs in Nazareth, the maximum extent of the Herodian and pre-Herodian village measured about 900×200 m, for a total area just under 60 acres.

The type of tomb Strange designates by the term “Herodian” is revealed later in the same article:

Beneath the convent of the
Dames de Nazareth about 100 m W of the
Church of the Annunciation are remains of houses, a tomb of the Herodian period, and other underground working spaces typical of those found beneath the other churches.

The “tomb of the Herodian period” is Bagatti’s tomb 73, which contained at least seven kokhim. In fact, there are two chambers under the convent, both of the kokh type. They may at one time have been connected, forming a single large tomb complex. If so, then they subsequently became divided by intrusive secondary constructions.
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Yet, some scholars have proposed that the kokh tomb ended in the first or second centuries CE. This is especially the case with Catholic scholars. R. Smith wrote in 1961:

Various viewpoints on the use-span of the kok type of interment are brought together by H. Vincent in [
Revue Biblique
], XLIII (1934), pp. 564–67. Vincent expresses a preference for the round dates of 200 B.C.–A.D. 200… J.T.
Milik informs me from his wide knowledge that kok burials definitely came to an end by A.D. 135. The late date formerly given probably arose from instances in which tombs cut prior to 135 were re-used after that date.
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