BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Exploring Jesus’s Hometown

A tour through Nazareth in the Galilee

In the early first century CE, Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth was a Galilean village like most others. With a population probably numbering only in the hundreds, it was much smaller than neighboring Yafia and was dwarfed by nearby Sepphoris, one of the Galilee’s wealthiest and most prosperous cities at the time.

Nazareth today is a very different place. With a population of nearly 80,000, it is one of the largest cities in northern Israel, but residents are packed into just a few square miles of close-set houses built along steep, narrow streets. Around 70 percent of Nazareth’s residents are Muslim and 30 percent are Christian (primarily Latin and Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox), while Jews make up the bulk of the population of the adjacent city of Nof HaGalil. Thanks to this diversity, Nazareth has become well known for its tolerance, with Muslim sheikhs and boy scouts marching in the annual Christmas Eve parade, church bishops and Christian boy scouts participating in the parade on the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr, and many Jewish families from Nof HaGalil filling Nazareth’s restaurants on Friday evenings.

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Many who visit Nazareth, of course, come to see sites and places associated with the life of Jesus. Outside of the New Testament, however, Nazareth is rarely mentioned in ancient and medieval sources. It does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, Apocrypha, Josephus, or early rabbinic writings, and receives no mention in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which contains stories about Jesus’s childhood, or the Protevangelium of James, which tells of Mary’s childhood. We have a late fourth-century report that Emperor Constantine granted permission for a church to be built in Nazareth, and between the fourth and ninth centuries, Christian pilgrims visited a cave that was identified with Mary’s house, as well as various churches identified with the site of the annunciation, the home of Joseph, Jesus’s childhood home, and the synagogue where Jesus learned his ABCs.

Thanks to these long-venerated spaces, today there is much to see nestled among Nazareth’s sweet shops (the city is famous for them), falafel stands, and clothing boutiques. Let’s take a walking tour through the city’s many historic and cultural sites.

We begin at the Basilica of the Annunciation, whose black cupola makes it the most visible building in the city. Constructed in part to preserve earlier holy spaces, the current structure was built in the 1960s following the demolition of an earlier church that dated to the first half of the 18th century. Between demolition and construction, archaeologists conducted extensive excavations.

The present church preserves the outline of the 12th-century Crusader church. Beneath an octagon in the floor, we can see into the “lower church” that contains the apse of a fifth-century Byzantine monastery church adjacent to a grotto that Catholic tradition continues to venerate as the site of the archangel Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:26–38). Elsewhere on the church grounds, archaeologists uncovered the remains of house walls, oil presses, storage chambers, and silos from the first-century village. Just to the north is St. Joseph’s Church, which was built in the 17th century over a cave that supposedly was the site of the village’s carpenter shop.

Next we head to Nazareth’s old suq (market), where visitors can shop for souvenirs amid a maze of narrow streets, shop stalls, and restaurants. If time allows, we’ll walk through Elbabour, the spice market that occupies the old 18th-century community mill. The stone grinders were first turned by horses, then by steam and diesel engines. Until the late 1960s, local farmers brought their grain here to be processed.

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After a café hafukh (Hebrew for “upside-down coffee,” since the espresso is poured into steamed milk), we continue on to the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Gabriel, where the Eastern Orthodox tradition has commemorated the site of the annunciation since at least the 12th century. Located just a few hundred feet south of the church is Mary’s Well, one of the city’s best-known landmarks. It is probably the place identified in some apocryphal sources, including the Protevangelium of James, as the site of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary. The well, which is fed by a nearby spring (one of the few in the Galilee), supplied the village with fresh water as early as the Byzantine period, although it went out of use in the 1990s and now primarily serves as a gathering spot for both locals and tourists enjoying the city’s downtown.

Also worth a stop is Nazareth Village, the Galilee’s answer to Colonial Williamsburg. On a hillside located between Nazareth Hospital and the YMCA, characters in period dress herd goats, thresh wheat, card wool, weave fabric, and crush olives in a reconstructed first-century Jewish village built according to ancient methods. The park provides an opportunity to test the efficiency of first-century industries and building techniques while also trying out foods imagined to be like those eaten by Galileans 2,000 years ago.

Rounding out our trip, we make our way to the so-called Synagogue Church, purported to be the location of the synagogue where Jesus first learned the Torah, although no first-century synagogue has been uncovered there. We will also make quick photo stops at the Gothic revival Church of Jesus the Adolescent, built on the high hill to the west of Nazareth, which is a wonderful spot to overlook the modern city, and then Mt. Precipice, which offers a commanding, panoramic view over the lush Jezreel Valley. Local tradition identifies this as the peak where the residents of Nazareth tried to hurl Jesus to his death (Luke 4:28–30), but he was able to leap to safety onto the peak of nearby Mt. Tabor.

Nazareth is easily reached by car from many of northern Israel’s cities, including Tiberias and Haifa, or if coming from the south, is about a two-hour drive from Jerusalem. Given its central location, Nazareth also serves as a wonderful base to tour other archaeological sites in the Galilee and the north, including Sepphoris, Beth Shearim, and Megiddo, or, with just a little more driving, Beth Shean and sites around the Sea of Galilee to the east. In the temperate fall and spring months, hikers will want to try out sections of the Jesus Trail and the Sanhedrin Trail, both of which traverse the Lower Galilee and pass through or in close proximity to Nazareth.

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James Riley Strange is the Charles Jackson Granade and Elizabeth Donald Granade Professor in New Testament at Samford University.

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