The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus (53 page)

Other problems attend the claim of a village on the valley floor in the time of Christ. It is clear that the inhabitants used the hillsides not only for burial but also for agricultural purposes. Is it credible that no artefacts from the Hellenistic Age, from I BCE, or from the turn of the era have been found in or around those installations if they were in use during those eras?

Kicking the can again, traditionalists may retreat to yet another line of defense and claim:
Ah, but Nazareth was not in the basin at all. You see, it was somewhere else!
This is perhaps the ultimate argument from silence. A moment’s thought, however, will show this line to be impossible, for it implies that there was (were) not one but two Nazareths in Galilee. The village we have been studying has been a named place for many centuries, identifiable as “Nazareth” and as a pilgrim destination since the fourth century of our era. Hence, if “Nazareth” existed somewhere outside the basin, then it must have been some other, second, Nazareth. We have no record at all of that other Nazareth, and if we did, then scholars would long since have been discussing which of the two Nazareths Jesus came from.

Sooner or later the time comes when one must credit the evidence that has been produced. Despite the fact that only a small part of the basin has been excavated, the considerable evidence that has come to light is conclusive. That evidence speaks clearly, and in any other valley of Israel it would be ludicrous to contest the issue. The burden of proof regarding Jesus’ village is on the person who claims its existence yet can show no evidence of same. In the case of Nazareth, arguments from silence are seductive and facile, but ultimately of no avail, simply because it is inconceivable that a putative village at the turn of the era
left no archaeological trace at all.

Unfortunately, the facts presented in this book and elsewhere hardly weigh in the balance when dealing with a frank refusal to acknowledge scientific data. Such a refusal is not rare in matters of religion, and is fairly widespread in the West today. Some people are even capable of denying facts which are set before their very eyes. Thinking outside the parameters of reason, they are simply not to be convinced. But for those of us who value empirical data, the birth of Nazareth
after
the turn of the era is clear.

Literary Considerations

(1) “Nazareth” outside the Gospels

In pagan and Jewish sources

Only five Roman notices regarding the Christian movement have been identified dating before
c
. 150 CE. They are a letter by Pliny the Younger to Trajan (112 CE), the emperor’s response, a passage in the writings of Tacitus (regarding the Neronian persecution), and two short notices in the works of Suetonius.
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 These pagan notices know only ‘Christians’ and ‘Christus’ (‘Chrestus’ once in Suetonius), but nowhere ‘Jesus’ or ‘Nazareth.’

Jewish literature does not mention the place Nazareth.
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  Several rabbinic passages contain the name
Yeshu ha-Notsri
,
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  somewhat analogous in form to the Gospel of Mark’s
Iêsou
Nazarêne
(see below), a moniker which has no necessary connection with a place called Nazareth. It remains to be determined, of course, what a
Nazarêne
(Heb.
ha-Notsri
) meant.

The place
Beit Lehem
Tseriyeh
is mentioned once in the Talmud (
Megilla
70a). In the nineteenth century Neubauer considered this equivalent to
Bethlehem Notseriyeh
,
i.e.
, “Bethlehem in the district of Natsareth” = the Galilean Bethlehem.
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  Granted the plausibility of this interpretation, the passage dates long after the appearance of Nazareth, and thus furnishes us no information regarding the turn of the era.

The fourth century Christian sources

It is well known that Nazareth is not mentioned in the writings of Josephus, and we have now seen that it also does not appear in early rabbinic literature. The Christian literature presents a more complex picture, in which we must separate several strands: the canonical writings, the apocryphal literature (including Gnostic and Jewish Christian texts), and the writings of the church fathers. My purpose here is not to carry out a thorough survey of all the texts, but to note the occurrence of one specific element: the appearance of the toponym ‘Nazareth’ (and its cognates). We shall begin with the fourth century, after the legitimation of Christianity, and work back in time. This reverse procedure is adopted because our primary goal is not the later history of the town and of the name ‘Nazareth’ (and cognates), but the earliest history of both.

When Christianity was officially sanctioned by Constantine the Great, the Jewish settlement of Nazareth suddenly emerged from obscurity. The reason is evident: this obscure town held a particular significance for believers of the victorious faith. The reason was also practical: now Christians were free to embark on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, while they advertised their faith without fear of official retribution. Naturally, one of the destinations they sought out was the hometown of the Lord. Only from this time do we begin to have unmistakable geographical references to Nazareth in Lower Galilee. Suddenly the small settlement was thrust into the Christian and imperial limelight—a limelight which must have been most unwelcome to the town’s inhabitants, who as far as we can tell were Torah-observant Jews. As such, they would have avoided mixing with gentiles, and probably harbored rank antipathy to the Christian heresy.

This opposition colored the history of Nazareth from the fourth to the seventh century (when the Jews were expelled by Heraclius in 630 CE—see
Appendix 7
). From Constantine’s time forward, Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, coming from all around the Mediterranean, were seeking (and expecting) to find validation of their faith—a special, uplifting, and even life-changing religious experience. Arriving at their destination, however, Nazareth must have been a disappointing anticlimax to their long and laborious journeys. Jesus’ supposed hometown was not even sympathetic to their faith, much less Christian. The Jewish settlement was most unsatisfactory also from the Church’s point of view, which found it impossible to showcase  Jesus’ hometown. A question must have occurred to more than a few: What sort of victory could the faith claim, if Jesus’ own hometown had not converted? In fact, far from being a source of pride to Christians, Nazareth must have been an embarrassment.

It was not possible to attack Nazareth in word or deed, for the hometown of Jesus required respect. The only option remaining is what we witness in the early pilgrim accounts, and in the writings of the Church fathers: a remarkable silence. St. Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine and a devout Christian, visited the Holy Land in 326 but had nothing to say about Nazareth. She may have been singularly unimpressed (or even irritated) by the antipathy of the locals. Helena was seeking opportunities to found basilicas in the Holy Land, and indeed did so on the Mount of Olives and at Bethlehem, but not in Nazareth. The latter task, apparently, was delegated to Count Joseph of Tiberias (see above).

Eusebius in his
Onomasticon
(
c
. 325 CE?) gives the general location of the village, and thus we know that by his time the settlement was localized to the Nazareth basin.
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  He tells us nothing particular about the place.

About 335 CE the Bordeaux Pilgrim visited Palestine and strangely makes no mention of Nazareth. It is a remarkable omission. Taylor writes that this “certainly does suggest that there was nothing to be visited in the town.” Kopp is in wonderment: “It might be that at that time a sort of anathema lay upon this town which had tried to stone its most illustrious son, and still rejected his teaching.”
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  His explanation is weak, however, for the pilgrims surely wished to venerate Jesus’ hometown, not to condemn it.

In 373 CE Melania the Elder “hastened to bring alms to Christians who had been exiled from Egypt to Sepphoris, but she did not visit Nazareth…”
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This again is a strange omission, particularly given the fact that she was in the very vicinity of Nazareth.

Only in 383 CE do we have the first brief mention of Nazareth in the pilgrim literature. In that year Egeria (as rerecorded by Peter the Deacon in 1137 CE) attests to the existence of a simple shrine: “In Nazareth is a garden in which the Lord used to be after his return from Egypt.” And elsewhere: “there is a big and very splendid cave in which she [
the Virgin Mary
] lived. An altar has been placed there.”
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  This shows us that the first Christian monument had by her time been erected in Nazareth, probably earlier in the fourth century.

In 386 Paula visited Nazareth “where our Lord grew up.” Nothing there appears to have drawn the pilgrim’s attention. Jerome, writing
c
. 400 CE, had virtually nothing to say about Nazareth outside the fact that it was a mere “village” (
viculus
) in his time.
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Thus, it is quite clear that after pilgrims began traveling in the early fourth century, both they and the Church were reserved with regard to Nazareth. The reason, I have suggested, is that the town was an unsatisfactory destination for pilgrimage, being populated by Jews who were not at all sympathetic to the Christian religion.

“Nazareth” in Ante-Nicene literature

The above embarrassment regarding post-Constantinian Nazareth does not apply before his time, for until the legitimation of the religion there was no Christian pilgrimage, nor any pressure to recognize the village in a special way. One might think that the growth of Christianity in the Roman empire would have been accompanied by increased curiosity regarding the hometown of Jesus. But this is not so. In the second and third centuries the Christian faith was widely reviled by the Roman populace (as well as by Jews) and was not officially accepted. To advertise one’s Christian status was problematic and possibly dangerous. During these centuries far weightier matters than the hometown of Jesus were occupying the thoughts of Christians, who were sometimes at risk for their very lives. The Church was preoccupied with the battle for legitimacy, and was in a life-and-death struggle for survival. Given this atmosphere, the place of Jesus’ youth was of interest to hardly anyone except perhaps a few doctors of the church.

This explains why Nazareth—as a geographical place (rather than a narrative element of the Gospels)—receives no particular attention in the writings of Justin Martyr, Origen, and others. But it does not explain two other considerations: (1) an apparent confusion regarding the actual location of the settlement; and (2) the fact that the town is not mentioned even in those innocuous Christian passages where one should expect to find it. This relative silence is curious, because many of the second- and third-century church fathers were in Palestine or spent some years there, and it would have been nothing for them to visit the town or at least take note of it. In any case, we should expect to have some fairly clear indication of the correct location of Nazareth. Instead we have a strange citation from Julius Africanus (see below) The first writer to locate the settlement in Lower Galilee is Eusebius—but not before early IV CE (above)—and he himself gives no indication of having been there, even though he lived in nearby Caesarea.

Since there was as yet no Christian pilgrimage, we must look for a different reason (other than that of embarrassment
vis-à-vis
pilgrims) for the pre-Constantinian shunning of the place. Some other factor regarding Nazareth must have been operative, one which produced hesitation and uncertainty.

That factor, I would suggest, was the unresolved conflict between the northern and southern traditions. As we have seen, this overarching conflict represented two incompatible Christian traditions, and produced two streams of Christian literature.
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Only one became orthodox: the northern (Galilean) tradition. The southern (Judean) provenance of Jesus became heterodox from the fourth century forward. It was during that century, and with the emergence of Christian pilgrimage, that
Nazara-Nazaret-Nazareth
of the gospels was unequivocally identified with the Jewish town of Natsareth (spelled with
tsade
) in Lower Galilee. Before then, there was a certain amount of confusion in the Christian tradition, for some of the texts seemed to place the hometown of Jesus in Judea. Thus, the
Protevangelium of James
:
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… And the heralds went forth and spread out through all the surrounding country of Judea; the trumpet of the Lord sounded, and all ran to it.

And Joseph threw down his axe and went out to meet them. And when they were gathered together, they took the rods and went to the high priest. The priest took the rods from them and entered the Temple and prayed…   (PrJa 8.3)

Now there went out a decree from the king Augustus that all of Bethlehem in Judea should be enrolled. And Joseph said: “I shall enroll my sons, but what shall I do with this child [
i.e. Mary
]? How shall I enroll her? As my wife? I am ashamed to do that…”   (PrJa 17.1)
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