When the Savior Was Born
This much we know: Jesus of Nazareth was born and raised in a time of horrifying violence.
Modern scholars often dismiss the gospel story of the slaughter of the innocents as mere legend, but it’s virtually certain that far worse atrocities were committed around the time when Jesus was born. When Herod the Great died around the year 4 BC, a bloody revolt broke out in the Galilee region, centered in the newly founded Greek city of Sepphoris (Hebrew Zippori)—located on a hill just four miles from the traditional site of Nazareth. For more than two centuries, there had been genocidal clashes in Palestine between devout Jews and the Greek and Roman populations that had settled there.
With Herod’s death, the entire countryside descended into chaos that lasted for nearly a decade. A civil war broke out between the soldiers who were loyal to Herod and those who opposed him. The rebels captured Sepphoris, seized the weapons in its armory, and declared their independence.
The Romans responded with their usual efficient ruthlessness, dispatching the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus from Syria with three legions to put down the insurrection. Varus retook the city of Sepphoris, executing the men and selling the women and children into slavery. According to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, Varus hunted down the leaders of the rebellion—two thousand men—and crucified them all. Had Varus crucified one rebel every seventy-five yards or so, the line of crucified prisoners would have extended the entire 90 miles from Sepphoris to Jerusalem.
This was what was happening in the area when, around the same time, a young, unmarried Jewish teenager named Miriam (whose name means “bitter sea”) discovered she would soon give birth to a child—and not by her betrothed.
Climbing the hills above her tiny village of Nazareth, Mary could no doubt have seen the fires of Sepphoris burning in the distance and heard the anguished screams of young girls her own age as they were paraded off in chains.
One ancient tradition even asserts that Mary grew up in Sepphoris, after her parents moved there during the final decade of Herod’s reign, as part of a deliberate plan to “re-Judaize” the Galilee region. Mary could have watched in horror as friends of her parents were beaten, hung on poles and trees by Roman soldiers, and left to die, their eyes pecked out by crows and their flesh eaten by wild animals.
Mary could well pray, as in the Magnificat—the prayer ascribed to her in the gospel of Luke, that God Almighty would “brought down the mighty from their thrones” and “helped his servant Israel” (Luke 1:52–53 ESV). Scholars have long questioned the historicity of a “worldwide census” that, according to Luke 2:2 was the reason why Jesus was born in Bethlehem; but census or no census, the mass slaughter in Galilee in the years after Herod’s death provides a plausible explanation for why Mary and Joseph may have decided to flee, even though Mary had just given birth, away from Galilee or even farther, in exile to Egypt.
An Ancient Lineage
There is a theory, common in some messianic Jewish circles, that both Mary and her betrothed, Joseph, were members of a Jewish sect that saw itself as descended from a “branch” of the House of David, a line that was not subject to the famous curse by the prophet Jeremiah. In the Hebrew Bible, God had promised King David that his house and kingdom would endure forever (2 Sam. 7:16). Yet around the year 586 BC, the city of Jerusalem was surrounded by invading Babylonian armies who would soon sack the city, burn the famous temple of Solomon to the ground, and carry off the influential, wealthy, and strong members of the population into bondage. Jeremiah prophesied that the Davidic kings would come to an end due to their corruption and lawlessness. Speaking of the then-king Jehoiachin, Jeremiah declared in the name of God that “none of his offspring will prosper, none will sit on the throne of David or rule anymore in Judah” (Jer. 22:30 NIV).
And that is precisely what happened. Jehoiachin was dragged off in bondage and, according to 2 Kings 25:27, lived as a political prisoner for thirty-seven years. The sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians ended the rule of the royal house of David. And yet, some of King David’s descendants still lived. They were likely part of the Jerusalem aristocracy that was taken off in bondage to Babylon. Supposedly another branch of the royal Davidic family had emerged through one of King David’s other sons, Nathan, brother of King Solomon. This branch of the family, the theory goes, closely guarded its royal heritage for hundreds of years, through exile in Babylon and eventual resettlement in the Land of Israel when the Judeans were permitted to return.
The members of this extended family, possibly ancestors of Mary of Nazareth, looked forward to the coming of a messiah to redeem Israel, based on a different prophecy, one from the Jerusalem prophet Isaiah (11:1–3):
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. (NIV)
During the reign of King Herod the Great, these messianic clansmen may have settled in Galilee, around the newly established city of Sepphoris. The word for branch in Hebrew is netzser (נֵ֫צֶר), and this group, the theory goes, may have called itself netzarim, or Nazoreans, “the branches.” (To this day, the word for “Christians” in Hebrew is Notzrim.) The tiny, isolated community they founded, near a natural underground spring at the foot of rocky, pine-covered hills just south of the Beit Netofah Valley, was called Nazareth.
A Discovery in Nazareth
Today, Nazareth is a bustling, traffic-choked Arab town of about seventy thousand people, about seventeen miles southeast of the coastal city of Haifa. Just over three miles to the northwest are found the vast ruins of Sepphoris. Off in the distance, you can see the round bump of Mount Tabor rising majestically from the Jezreel Valley. The new Jesus Trail, a popular tourist attraction, originates just outside the city and winds its way northeast, past the Horns of Hattin and then downhill to the Sea of Galilee—a strenuous hike of some forty miles.
When I went to visit Nazareth every Sunday in the late 1970s, it was still a sleepy town with few tourists. Today, giant Israeli tour buses bring thousands of people a day to visit Nazareth’s handful of churches and pilgrimage sites, including the Basilica of the Annunciation (the largest Christian church in the Middle East), Mary’s Well (built on top of a Byzantine bath house connected to the only natural spring in the area), the Greek Orthodox Saint Gabriel Church (built on top of another part of the spring), Saint Joseph Church (built over the traditional site of Joseph’s workshop) and a modern theme park called Nazareth Village where actors dressed in biblical clothing re-create what life might have been like when Jesus lived here.
To give you some idea of the flavor of the place, you have to descend into the lower level of the basilica. In the grotto beneath lie the remains of a third-century synagogue blocked off with an iron gate, in which now stands a modern-day altar. Inscribed on the altar are the words, in Latin, from the opening of John’s gospel: Verbum caro factum est “the Word became flesh.” Except one extra word has been added to the biblical inscription on the altar: the Latin word hic, which means “here,” As a result, the words on the altar read, Verbum caro hic factum est.
The Word became flesh . . . here.
But what many tourists don’t know is that until very recently there was very little archaeological or textual evidence for Nazareth in the time of Jesus. The village is not mentioned in any Jewish or Roman sources other than the gospels until about the fourth century. Not one. It’s not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or in the collection of Jewish commentaries known as the Mishnah, which includes traditions dating back to the first century; nor in the voluminous works of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus (ca. AD 37–100). This seems somewhat odd in the case of Josephus, who commanded Jewish forces in the Galilee in the early years of the Jewish War against Rome, which began in AD 66. He mentions dozens of small hamlets in the area, including nearby Japha, Cana, and Beit She’arim, but not Nazareth.
The earliest nonscriptural reference to Nazareth is found in the writings of the Christian travel writer Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 180–250), quoted by the historian Eusebius (ca. 263–339), who describes the town of “Nazara.” The anonymous pilgrim of Bordeaux, who visited Palestine in AD 333–334 and kept a brief journal of his travels, never mentions Nazareth in his list of the places he had visited. The first non-Christian reference to Nazareth was discovered in 1962 on a grey marble fragment in an ancient synagogue in Caesarea Maritima on Israel’s coast. It was dated by Israeli archaeologists to around AD 300. The writing on the fragment (and another like it) mentions various towns and villages in Galilee, including Nazareth (which allowed scholars to know, for the first time, how Nazareth was spelled in Hebrew, with the Hebrew letter tzadik, נצרת).
As for archaeological evidence, until very recently there hasn’t been much to show those busloads of tourists. High-resolution photographs taken in the early 1900s show Nazareth as a tiny Arab village, surrounded by barren hills, with just a handful of stone houses. Mark Twain, who visited in 1867, described the town as “clinging like a whitewashed wasp's nest to the hill-side.” In the 1950s and early 60s, workers tore down the eighteenth-century Franciscan church in the center of town to prepare the foundation of what would become the Basilica of the Annunciation, completed in 1969. Franciscan archaeologist Bellarmino Bagatti undertook an extensive archaeological survey of the site.
Father Bagatti’s team found Iron Age and Roman era artifacts, including wine presses and olive presses, interconnecting passages, water cisterns, and grain silos. Some depressions in the underlying rock led the archaeologists to conclude that stone houses had been there “probably in the Roman period,” and that the area around the basilica was, in fact, a small Roman-period village. Excavations of Mary’s Well in the late 1990s uncovered a handful of ancient coins, including ten from the Maccabean era (165–66 BC), two from the time of Herod the Great (37–4 BC) and one from the time of Archelaus (4 BC–6 AD). Digging in the grounds of the Nazareth Village project, however, revealed little except for pottery shards. All in all, not much to show.
Indeed, one of the common arguments used by people who claim Jesus of Nazareth never existed is that Nazareth never existed! “We know the Wizard of Oz is not real, since we know there never was a Land of Oz,” explains atheist writer and publisher Frank Zindler, author of The Jesus the Jews Never Knew.
But as often happens in the strange world of biblical archaeology, Nazareth’s evangelistic fortunes have recently seen a dramatic reversal. That’s one of the problems with the “arguments from silence” so popular among debunkers of Christianity – those who say there is “no evidence” that a particular person, place or custom existed in the past. Just when you least expect it, evidence has a way of popping up.
Almost one year after a “mysticist” writer named René Salm published a book in 2008, The Myth Of Nazareth: The Invented Town Of Jesus, Israeli archaeologists made a stunning announcement: they had discovered the remains of a stone house in Nazareth, just steps from the Basilica of the Annunciation, dating back to the time of Jesus. The previous summer, construction crews had been digging the foundation of a new Christian evangelism center, the International Mary of Nazareth Center, when they discovered rough stone structures that looked centuries old. As is the custom in Israel, work was immediately halted and experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) were called in.
The team found remains of supporting walls, what looked like an underground hideout or safe room, a courtyard, and an elaborate series of cisterns that appeared designed to collect water from the roof of a dwelling. In addition, a group of grain silos was buried deep in the ground. Today, the ruins are on display on the ground floor of the International Mary of Nazareth Center, which was built by a French Catholic organization and is staffed by members of Chemin Neuf, or New Way, an ecumenically oriented religious order founded in France in 1973.
According to a preliminary report on the excavation from the IAA’s chief archaeologist, Yardenna Alexandre, the ruins are of a domestic house with a few small rooms and an open courtyard dating to the late Hellenistic to early Roman period (first century BC to early second century AD). In addition, pottery sherds found on the floors of the house were of common local Galilean pottery dating to the early Roman era (first century BC). Also found were soft limestone cups and bowls, used for Jewish purity rites in the Roman period. As a result, Alexandre concludes that the architectural remains and the various pottery sherds, vessels, and coins found at the site all indicate the house was originally built in the late Maccabean era, in the first century BC, when there was a deliberate effort to “re-Judaize” the Galilee region with Jewish families from the south.
Other archaeologists go even further. It turns out that the Mary of Nazareth Center site is not the only first-century house archaeologists have turned up in Nazareth. According to Ken Dark, director of Nazareth Archaeological Project and a professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, another site in Nazareth—a first-century house partly made of mortar-and-stone walls cut into a rocky hillside—could very well have been Jesus’ actual childhood home. In an article published in March 2015 in the Biblical Archaeological Review, Dark argues that this site, first uncovered in the 1880s by nuns at the Sisters of Nazareth convent but only excavated in 2006, was revered in the Byzantine era as Jesus’ home. The site Dark refers to is located only yards away from the Mary of Nazareth Center site and the Basilica of the Annunciation.
It’s “an exceptionally well-preserved domestic building, probably a ‘courtyard house’” dating from about the middle of the first century, he says. Dark adds that the stone and wood structures were catalogued and recorded in 1936 by a Jesuit priest, Henri Senès, but his research remained unpublished and unknown except to the nuns and occasional pilgrims. In 2006, when professional archaeologists began excavating the site located in the foundations of the Sisters of Nazareth convent, they were astonished by what they found. The first-century house “had been constructed by cutting back a limestone hillside as it sloped toward the wadi (valley) below, leaving carefully smoothed freestanding rock walls, to which stone-built walls were added,” Dark writes. “The structure included a series of rooms. One, with its doorway, survived to its full height. Another had a stairway rising adjacent to one of its walls. Just inside the surviving doorway, earlier excavations had revealed part of its original chalk floor.”
Dark believes that the house was abandoned sometime during the first century and then used as a burial ground. Two empty tombs have been discovered next to the abandoned stone house. Because one of the tombs is of the kokhim type—a rock-cut tomb with a rolling stone for a door—this suggests it dates to the first century when such tombs were predominantly used.
Centuries later, Byzantine Christians erected a church over the site to protect it, Dark adds, and then twelfth-century crusaders built a new church at this location. For further evidence that this first-century stone house could well have been Jesus’ childhood home, Dark points to a seventh-century travelogue written by Adomnán, abbot of the Scottish island monastery at Iona. The account was based on a pilgrimage to Nazareth made by the Frankish bishop Arculf. According to this text, there was a church in Nazareth “where once there was the house in which the Lord was nourished in his infancy.”
New Testament scholars remain cautious, of course. There is “no name on the door,” as one scholar puts it. However, these archaeological discoveries do suggest that Nazareth was settled in the first century and, moreover, could well have been a thriving, somewhat larger community than previously supposed. Some of the remains found at these sites, such as limestone vessels, point to the presence of a conservative Jewish community, archaeologists say. “Was this the house where Jesus grew up?” Dark asks finally in the Biblical Archaeological Review article. “It is impossible to say on archaeological grounds. On the other hand, there is no good archaeological reason why such an identification should be discounted.”
To learn more about what history reveals about the real Jesus of Nazareth, check out Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth.