Did the city of Nazareth exist in the time of Jesus?

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It's very easy to look back thousands of years, once time has had plenty of time to change things, and say that there's no evidence for something and so it must be false. But it's a very different matter when there aren't thousands of years in the way.

The Gospels were written in the first century AD, by people who experienced it personally, to their contemporaries, and they were believed. Now, miracles are one thing--believing in them takes faith, of course. But miracles aren't the only things in the Gospels.

If I wrote a supposedly non-fiction account about my own experiences living in the city of Blargsenberg, New Jersey, it wouldn't take long before someone looked at it and said "hey, there's no such city! This is a made-up story!" But the interesting thing is, there's no evidence of contemporaries rejecting the Gospels on the basis of them contradicting easily verifiable facts on non-miraculous claims.

In the video, the speaker suggests that if there was no such city as Nazareth, the entire Gospel narrative falls apart. But he does not seem to understand that if there was no such city as Nazareth, it would not have taken people 2000 years to realize that!

Occam's Razor cuts his argument to ribbons. Now, if no evidence for an ancient town matching the Biblical narrative exists on the present-day site known as Nazareth, a much more plausible explanation is that the present-day site is located in the wrong place.

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An archaeological dig found evidence of a house from the first century in the heart of Nazareth. See here:-

http://www.antiquities.org.il/article_eng.aspx?sec_id=25&subj_id=240&id=1638&module_id=#as

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The most credible arguments against the existence of Nazareth at the beginning of the first century are that the earliest pottery remains found at the site date to the Roman period, possibly no earlier than the first century, and that Josephus never mentioned the town, although he listed almost every town and village in first-century Galilee. However, this is only circumstantial evidence and is at least consistent with Nazareth being a small hamlet until the middle of the century, when events elsewhere meant that Nazareth became an important Jewish centre in Galilee.

The most credible arguments for the existence of Nazareth at the beginning of the first century are the many gospel references of Nazareth as the home town of Jesus. It used to be believed that at least two of the gospels were written by disciples who had actually lived and preached in the vicinity of Nazareth and would therefore have known that there was such a town. It used to be believed the gospels were written so soon after the time of the crucifixion that some would have realised that Nazareth did not really exist, if that were the case. Recent research means that we now know that the first gospel, Mark's Gospel, was not written until approximately 70 CE, by which time the town certainly existed. None of the Gospel's audience would have known whether Nazareth had already existed almost a century earlier. Even the author of Mark might not have known how long Nazareth had been in existence, although he certainly knew of the town at the time of writing. Once again, this is circumstantial.

Luke chapter 4 mentions a synagogue in Nazareth by the 30s of the first century, which means that Nazareth was by now a substantial town, but there are grounds for believing that the author of Luke did not really know whether there was a synagogue that Mark and Matthew had not mentioned when written decades earlier. In any case, this tells us nothing about Nazareth at the beginning of the century, or earlier.

There are those who, for ideological reasons would insist that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus and there are those who would insist that it must have existed, if only because of faith in the gospels. John Dominic Crossan contends that Nazareth was probably a minor village in the early years of the first century, which is probably as close to the truth as we can come. We know there was a town there later in the first century, and towns require a reliable source of water; if a reliable water supply existed then a village would probably have grown up there long before the town was established. While we might prefer to think of Jesus growing up in a town of some significance, at least a minor village (with no synagogue) is more acceptable to the Christian story than no village at all.

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