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This is about the Middle East city of Nazareth. For other uses, see Nazareth (disambiguation).

Nazareth (Arabic الناصرة an-Nāṣirah; Hebrew נָצְרַת, Standard Hebrew Náẓərat, Tiberian Hebrew Nāṣəraṯ) is an ancient town in northern Israel. It is the largest Arab city in Israel.

Modern Nazareth

Nazareth is situated among the southern ridges of the Lebanon Mountains, on the steep slope of a hill, about 14 miles from the Sea of Galilee and about 6 west from Mount Tabor, at an elevation of 1150 feet. The modern city lies lower down upon the hill than the ancient one. The main road for traffic between Egypt and the interior of Asia passed by Nazareth near the foot of Tabor, and thence northward to Damascus. It has a population of 60,000.

The majority of Nazarenes are Israeli Arabs, about 35-40% of whom are Christians and the rest Muslims. The Israeli government built a new city since the 1950s called Natzrat Illit (נצרת עילית "Upper Nazareth", Standard Hebrew Náẓərat ʿIllit) and populated it with a Jewish majority.

Public representatives in Nazareth have frequently complained about treatment of the town by the Israeli government, which they ascribe to government prejudice against its Arab population. In recent years, there has also been considerable controversy over plans to build a large mosque beside the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Nazareth in History and Archaeology

Nazareth is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, nor in Josephus, nor in the Talmud. Jerome in the 5th century says it was a viculus or mere village, and modern estimates of its size in the first century are in the low hundreds. It was a satellite village of Sepphoris, 6.5 km (4 miles) away.

In 1962 a Hebrew inscription found in Caesarea, dating to the late third or early fourth century, mentions Nazareth as one of the places in which the priestly divisions were residing after the First Jewish revolt. From the three fragments that have been found, it is possible to show that the inscription was a complete list of the twenty-four priestly courses (cf. 1 Chronicles 24:7-19; Nehemiah 24:1-21), with each course (or family) assigned its proper order and the name of each town or village in Galilee where it settled.

Julius Africanus (around 200), cited by Eusebius (Church History 1.7.14), speaks of Nazareth as a Jewish village, and in the same passage tells of desposunoi, or relatives of Jesus, who came from Nazareth and nearby Cochaba and kept 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" (Clemens Kopp, Die heiligen St&aumlaut;tten der Evangelien , Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg, 1959: page 90).

Epiphanius, who died in 402, says (Panarion i. 136), based on a conversation with a Joseph who built churches in Sepphoris and other towns, that until the time of Constantine (4th century), Nazareth was inhabited only by Jews. This may imply that in Epiphanius's own day some Christians lived there (and does not exclude Jewish believers in Christ living there previously); whether Joseph built any church at Nazareth or Capernaum is uncertain. In the 6th century, legends about Mary began to spark interest in the site among pilgrims, founding the Church of the Annunciation and associating a well with Mary. In 570, the Anonymous of Piacenza reports coming from Sepphoris to Nazareth and refers to the beauty of the Hebrew women there, who say tha St. Mary was a relative of theirs, and records: "The house of St. Mary is a basilica" (P. Geyer, Itinera Hierosolymitana saeculi, Lipsiae: G. Freytag, 1898: page 161).

Jack Finegan writes about the archaeology of Nazareth:

The oldest known human life in the region of Nazareth is attested by the skull found in 1934 by R. Neuville in a cave about one and one-half miles southeast of the city, a skull which may be older than that of Neandertal man. In Nazareth itself a complex of burial caves was found in the upper city in 1963, in which there was pottery of the first part of the Middle Bronze Age (Revue Biblique 70 , p. 563; 72 , p. 547). Down in the area of the Latin Church of the Annunciation there was certainly an ancient village of long continuance. Archeological investigation in and around this church was conducted by Benedict Vlaminck in 1892, by Prosper Viaud in 1889 and 1907-1909 and by Bellarimo Bagatti in 1955 and thereafter when the previously standing eighteenth-century (1730) church was demolished to make way for the new and larger Basilica of the Annunciation (No. 49). The area under and around the church, as well as at the Church of St. Joseph not far away, was plainly that of an agricultural village. There were numerous grottoes, silos for grain, cisterns for water and oil; presses for raisins and olives, and millstones. While the silos are of a type found at Tell Abu Matar as early as the Chacolithic Age (Israel Exploration Journal 5 , p. 23) the earliest pottery found in them here at Nazareth is of Iron II (900-600 B.C.). Vardaman calls attention to the characteristic large jar with a small "funnel" beside the mouth; this appendage, though designed like a funnel, is simply attached to the shoulder, and does not actually pierce the wall fthe jar (for an illustration of this jar, see Bagatti in DB Supplément VI, col. 323, Fig. 601). Other pottery of the site comprises a little of the Hellenistic period, more of the Roman, and most of all of the Byzantine period. Of the numerous grottoes at least several had served for domestic use and had even been modified architecturally for this purpose. One of these, where walls were built against a grotto to make a habitation, under the convent adjoining the Church of the Annunciation. Twenty-three tombs have also been found, most of them at a distance of something like 250 to 750 yards from Church of the Annunciation to the north, the west, and e south. Since these must have been outside of the village proper, their placement gives some idea of the limits of the settlement. Eighteen of the tombs are of the kokim type, which was known in Palestine from about 200 B.C., and became virtually the standard type of Jewish tomb. Two of the tombs, one (PEFQS 1923, p. 90) only 60 yards from the other (QDAP 1 , pp. 53-55) 450 yards southweset of the Church of the Annunciation, still contained objects such as pottery lamps and vases and glass vessels, and these date probably from the first to the third or fourth centuries of the Christian era. Four of the tombs were sealed with rolling stones, a type of closure typical of the late Jewish period up to A.D. 70. From the tombs, therefore, it can be concluded that Nazareth was a strongly Jewish settlement in the Roman period. (The Archaeology of the New Testament, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1992: pages 44-46)

Richard Carrier further comments: "See: 'Nazareth,' Avraham Negev & Shimon Gibson, eds., Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, new ed. (2001); and B. Bagatti, Excavations in Nazareth, vol. 1 (1969), esp. pp. 233-34, which discusses 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), as well as their cheap material (cancite instead of marble); pp. 170-71 discusses Aramaic-inscribed marble fragments paleographically dated around the end of the 1st century or early 2nd century, demonstrating that Nazareth had marble structures near the time the Gospels were written (even if not before)."

Accordingly, there is some evidence that Nazareth was a Jewish settlement both before and after the First Jewish Revolt in AD 70. However, some critics such as Zindler assert that Nazareth did not exist in the first century. His arguments include the silence on Nazareth in Paul, Josephus, the Hebrew Bible, and the Talmud as well as the statement that the brow of the hill near Nazareth is not steep enough for someone to be thrown off and killed, referring to Luke 4:28-30.

Nazareth in the New Testament

It is evident from John i. 46 that Nazareth was an obscure place; it was assumed in Judaea that 'nothing good' could possibly come out of this provincial town of Galilee. According to the New Testament, Nazareth was the home of Joseph and Mary and the site of the Annunciation, when Mary was told that she would bear the son of God. Nazareth is also assumed to be where Jesus grew up from his infancy to manhood. However, some historians have called this into question, suggesting instead that what was originally a title was corrupted (Nazarene) into the name of his hometown (alternately, Nazara or Nazaret or Nazareth). Alfred Loisy, for example, in The Birth of Christianity argues that Iesous Nazarene meant not "from Nazareth", but rather that his title was "Nazarene."

The etymology of Nazareth is not secure (see also Nazarene); Easton's Bible Dictionary 1897 derives Nazareth from separated, making it a Greek form of the Hebrew netser, a "shoot" or "sprout" but offering the alternative from the Hebrew notserah, i.e., one guarding or watching, thus designating the hill which overlooks and thus guards an extensive region and noting the hill "from which one of the finest prospects in Palestine is obtained."

External links

• The History of the Ancient Near East
• Nazareth City Website
• Jewish Encyclopedia: Nazareth
• www.jesusneverexisted.com "Nazareth: the town that theology built": a highly critical view of archaeology at Nazareth.
• Easton's Bible Dictionary 1897: Nazareth
• W.R.F. Browning, Oxford Dictionary of the Bible: Nazareth
• Nazareth Village: A model villiage and vistors center.

• Cities in Israel
• Holy cities
• Jesus
• New Testament places
• History of Israel