Nazareth Did Not Exist Until After Jesus

[stromboli]

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html

The gospels do not tell us much about this 'city' â€" it has a synagogue, it can scare up a hostile crowd (prompting JC's famous "prophet rejected in his own land" quote), and it has a precipice â€" but the city status of Nazareth is clearly established, at least according to that source of nonsense called the Bible.

However when we look for historical confirmation of this hometown of a god â€" surprise, surprise! â€" no other source confirms that the place even existed in the 1st century AD.

• Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament. The Book of Joshua (19.10,16) â€" in what it claims is the process of settlement by the tribe of Zebulon in the area â€" records twelve towns and six villages and yet omits any 'Nazareth' from its list.

• The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth, nor does early rabbinic literature.

• St Paul knows nothing of 'Nazareth'. Rabbi Solly's epistles (real and fake) mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all.

• No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is first noted at the beginning of the 4th century.

'Never heard of the place' â€" Josephus
In his histories, Josephus has a lot to say about Galilee (an area of barely 900 square miles). During the first Jewish war, in the 60s AD, Josephus led a military campaign back and forth across the tiny province. Josephus mentions 45 cities and villages of Galilee â€" yet Nazareth not at all.

Josephus does, however, have something to say about Japha (Yafa, Japhia), a village just one mile to the southwest of Nazareth where he himself lived for a time (Life 52).

A glance at a topographical map of the region shows that Nazareth is located at one end of a valley, bounded on three sides by hills. Natural access to this valley is from the southwest.

Before the first Jewish war, Japha was of a reasonable size. We know it had an early synagogue, destroyed by the Romans in 67 AD (Revue Biblique 1921, 434f). In that war, it's inhabitants were massacred (Wars 3, 7.31). Josephus reports that 15,000 were killed by Trajan's troops. The survivors â€" 2,130 woman and children â€" were carried away into captivity. A one-time active city was completely and decisively wiped out.

Now where on earth did the 1st century inhabitants of Japha bury their dead? In the tombs further up the valley!

With Japha's complete destruction, tomb use at the Nazareth site would have ended. The unnamed necropolis today lies under the modern city of Nazareth.

At a later time â€" as pottery and other finds indicate(see below) â€" the Nazareth site was re-occupied. This was after the Bar Kochba revolt of 135 AD and the general Jewish exodus from Judea to Galilee. The new hamlet was based on subsistence farming and was quite unrelated to the previous tomb usage by the people of Japha.

None of this would matter of course if, rather like at the nearby 'pagan' city of Sepphoris, we could stroll through the ruins of 1st century bath houses, villas, theatres etc. Yet no such ruins exist.

Credulous believers sometimes suggest that Jesus may have worked (with his father!) on the town's construction or even attended the theatre in Sepphoris (hypocrite, after all, is a Greek word for actor!). Contrariwise, others suggest that the "Torah-abiding Jesus" avoided the town because of its corrupting Hellenism. These mutually exclusive explanations are feeble attempts to solve the "puzzle" of why the gospels fail to mention the "capital" of Galilee.

In reality, in the early 1st century, Sepphoris was no larger than several acres, an erstwhile Herodian palace-town destroyed by Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, in 4 BC. Sepphoris reemerged as an ill-planned townlet during the time of Antipas. Only in the late 1st and 2nd centuries, particularly after the Jewish wars, did a vibrant, Romanised Sepphoris emerge, with theatres, bath houses and all the other amenities of pagan civilisation.

Downsizing
In short order, Christian apologists fall over themselves to explain, 'But of course, no one had heard of Nazareth, we're talking of a REALLY small place.' By semantic downsizing, city becomes TOWN, town becomes VILLAGE, and village becomes 'OBSCURE HAMLET'.

Yet if we are speaking of such an obscure hamlet the 'Jesus of Nazareth' story begins to fall apart.

For example, the whole 'rejection in his homeland' story requires at a minimum a synagogue in which the godman can 'blaspheme.' Where was the synagogue in this tiny bucolic hamlet? Why was it not obvious to the first pilgrims like Helena (see below) â€" it would, after all, have been far more pertinent to her hero than a well? In reality, such a small, rustic community could never have afforded its own holy scrolls, let alone a dedicated building to house them. As peasant farmers almost certainly they would have been illiterate to a man.

If JC had grown up and spent thirty years of his life in a village with as few as 25 families â€" an inbred clan of less than 300 people â€" the 'multitude' that were supposedly shocked by his blasphemy and would have thrown him from a cliff, would not have been hostile strangers but, to a man, would have been relatives and friends that he had grown up with, including his own brothers. Presumably, they had heard his pious utterances for years.

Moreover, if the chosen virgin really had had an annunciation of messiah-birthing from an angel the whole clan would have known about it inside ten minutes. Just to remind them, surely they should also have known of the 'Jerusalem incident' (Luke 2.42-49) when supposedly the 12-year-old proclaimed his messiahship?

Indeed, had no one mentioned what had happened in Bethlehem â€" star, wise men, shepherds, infant-massacre and all? Why would they have been outraged by anything the godman said or did? Had they forgotten a god was growing up in their midst? And what had happened to that gift of gold â€" had it not made the 'holy family' rich?

If Nazareth really had been barely a hamlet, lost in the hills of Galilee, would not the appellation 'Jesus of Nazareth' have invoked the response 'Jesus of WHERE?'  The predictable apologetic of quoting gospel John ("Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" - 1.46) implies that the questioner, Nathanael, had indeed "heard of" the vanishing small hamlet (Nathanael was supposedly a local boy from Cana). But would anyone outside of Galilee have recognized the name?

Then again, if Nazareth had really been a tiny hamlet, the nearest convenient 'mountain' from which the god-man could have been thrown â€" a cliff edge (Luke 4.28-30) â€" would have been 4 km away, requiring an energetic climb over limestone crags. Would the superman really have been frog-marched so far before 'passing through the midst of them' and making his escape?

Of course, all these incongruities exist because the 'Jerusalem incident' and the whole nativity sequence were late additions to the basic messiah-in-residence story.

It is these little glitches in the historic account of Jesus that just sort of don't get looked at. Hey, its in the book, so there.

[Poison Tree]

James Randi mentioned some of this in one of his videos . Making all of this even stranger is that Jesus being from Nazareth is about the only thing all 4 gospels agree on.

[stromboli]

James Randi mentioned some of this in one of his videos . Making all of this even stranger is that Jesus being from Nazareth is about the only thing all 4 gospels agree on.

I saw the Randi video. And choosing Nazareth, a city that never had a synagogue or was big enough until some time after Jesus to even be called a city. And also it was built above a burial area. I recall that would make it unholy ground to Jews. Smacks of collusion to me.

[ApostateLois]

James Randi mentioned some of this in one of his videos . Making all of this even stranger is that Jesus being from Nazareth is about the only thing all 4 gospels agree on.

Christians will jump all over that, saying it is proof that Jesus really did live in Nazareth, no matter that there is no evidence for its existence in the time when Jesus would have lived. Oddly, but not surprisingly, when the gospels disagree on something, they will also claim that as proof that the gospels are true, for we wouldn't expect the accounts to agree in every little detail. But I digress.

The fact that Nazareth didn't exist in Jesus' time, yet he was said to have lived there, presents problems for people who say that the Bible is the infallible word of God. Did God, himself, not know about the non-existence of Nazareth? Did he deliberately lie for whatever reasons? Neither of these is true, of course. The real answer is that these stories were concocted many, many years after Jesus died, in a time when Nazareth was a thriving city, or at least a town of decent size, and were added to the already-existing texts.

Furthermore, we know that this sort of thing happened all the time to the gospels, over a period of centuries. Far from being sacred and infallible, they were fair game for any scribe or priest with an agenda, or who simply thought up a neat idea to include in the scriptures. This does not seem like the work of an all-knowing, perfect God who has an important message to convey to humanity. Would God settle for such slipshod work when he could have simply done the job himself and kept it perfect from the very beginning? Would he need to write this message at all, when he could simply implant it into our heads?

[pioteir]

...
The fact that Nazareth didn't exist in Jesus' time, yet he was said to have lived there,
...

...presents no problem at all. It's just another miracle to prove jesus was who he claimed he was! Compared to washing humanity's sins away, living in a town that didn't exist seems trivial to me.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Hey, I've seen Bugs Bunny coloring books which proves rabbits can speak English with a Brooklyn accent AND walk on 2 feet upright.

[PickelledEggs]

JESUS IS FROM THE FUTURE. HOLY SHIT THIS GUY WAS RIGHT.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

JESUS IS FROM THE FUTURE. HOLY SHIT THIS GUY WAS RIGHT.

Which makes Bugs Bunny more historically accurate!

[Irrational]

The problem with such a doubt is that it fails to answer why, if this is so, the early creative Christians chose Jesus to be from Nazareth rather than from Bethlehem (as prophesied in the OT) if this was made up. I'm not necessarily saying there is no answer from the perspective of one who denies Nazareth existed in the time of Jesus, but the article fails to provide that answer.

[Irrational]

Also, if Nazareth was an insignificant town, why should it have been mentioned in the Talmud or any source in those days?

Oh, and to be clear, I'm an atheist.

[aileron]

I read this thoughtful article years ago and I pointed it out to one of my fundie in-laws.  His first response was to send back a current-day web map with Nazereth on it.  Once I explained it again his response was, "Yes it did."  So I guess that settles the matter once and for all.

[aileron]

The problem with such a doubt is that it fails to answer why, if this is so, the early creative Christians chose Jesus to be from Nazareth rather than from Bethlehem (as prophesied in the OT) if this was made up. I'm not necessarily saying there is no answer from the perspective of one who denies Nazareth existed in the time of Jesus, but the article fails to provide that answer.

The OT prophesy never claimed he would be from Bethlehem.  It claimed he would be born there.  The evangelists invent completely incompatible stories to get him born there. 

As far as the article not addressing why they thought he was from a town called Nazareth, there's whole section titled "Getting a Name" that does exactly that.

Also, biblical scholars have known for centuries that the evangelists get the geography of that area mixed up in their writings quite a bit.  It would not be surprising at all for them to have heard a term and thought it meant that Jesus was from a town that didn't exist.

[stromboli]

Luke 4:16  "And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read."

The earliest archeological dating of the city is about 67 CE. But it is not a city, at best a small hamlet of 50 people or so. And it did not have a sybagogue, which, besides being the birthplace of Jesus, is the significance of the city.

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

The Encyclopaedia Biblica, a work written by theologians, and perhaps the greatest biblical reference work in the English language, says: "We cannot venture to assert positively that there was a city of Nazareth in Jesus' time."

Nazareth is not mentioned in any historical records or biblical texts of the time and receives no mention by any contemporary historian. Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, the Talmud (the Jewish law code), nor in the Apocrypha and it does not appear in any early rabbinic literature.

Nazareth was not included in the list of settlements of the tribes of Zebulon (Joshua 19:10-16) which mentions twelve towns and six villages, and Nazareth is not included among the 45 cities of Galilee that were mentioned by Josephus (37AD-100AD), a widely traveled historian who never missed anything and who voluminously describes the region. The name is also missing from the 63 towns of Galilee mentioned in the Talmud.

The first reference to Nazareth is in the New Testament where it can be found 29 different times. However, there is still cause for speculation as to whether or not the city existed at the time of Jesus. It is mentioned only in the Gospels and Acts. These books do refer to Nazareth, but they did not originate at this time, they are later writings. The earlier writings of the NT (Paul etc) mention Jesus 221 times - but never mention Nazareth.

[Irrational]

The OT prophesy never claimed he would be from Bethlehem.  It claimed he would be born there.  The evangelists invent completely incompatible stories to get him born there. 

As far as the article not addressing it, there's whole section titled "Getting a Name" that does exactly that.

Yes, so why didn't they just make him be from Bethlehem as well? What I'm trying to say is: What was the point of Nazareth?

I just checked the section you're referring to. I'm still skeptical of this new position on Jesus and Nazareth only because it still doesn't answer the main question I'm throwing here. And after all, Mark mentions Nazareth (Mark 1:9), Matthew mentions Nazareth, and Luke mentions Nazareth.

[Irrational]

Luke 4:16  "And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read."

The earliest archeological dating of the city is about 67 CE. But it is not a city, at best a small hamlet of 50 people or so. And it did not have a sybagogue, which, besides being the birthplace of Jesus, is the significance of the city.

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

Ok, but what does this prove exactly? That Nazareth wasn't known before then? If it was a small hamlet of 50 people or so, then why should it have been mentioned in any of the texts at the time, and why should it be standing out archaeologically?

How is the view that Nazareth didn't exist at the time of Jesus more parsimonious than the view that it did exist when asked what was the point of Nazareth being mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels then?