The Historicity of Nazareth

Just a couple years ago, secular archaeologist Ken Dark published Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth (Oxford University Press 2023), a summary of his own archaeological survey of Nazareth, going over all the previous archaeology there (even admitting its flaws and biases), and updating it with a variety of new and current findings. It is not flawless. But it contains important observations and analyses that completely overwrite everything you’ve heard before. So there is no way to discuss the town without having read this book now (or the 2020 and 2022 academic studies it summarizes: Roman-Period and Byzantine Nazareth and The Sisters of Nazareth Convent). All other discussions of it (including all critiques of them) are obsolete. Dark has some gullibilities and biases (I’ll give some examples here, and especially in my next article on his gullible and slipshod discussion of the historicity of Jesus). But he is not a Christian apologist. And his archaeological analyses are backed by real evidence, and are mostly of sound and cautious logic.

So I will use this article to do two things: summarize what Dark presents for the status and historicity of pre-war Nazareth (meaning the early first century, when Jesus would have been born or raised there, if such he was), and also put together everything I had already said on this point elsewhere, now all in one place.

Dark Has Reinforced My Position

I have long been critical of the illogical and fact-challenged attempts to argue that “Nazareth didn’t exist.” Dark not only bolsters every point I made before, he adds information that is even more important to understanding what someone (or even a movement starting) from Nazareth would be like. The mainstream view that it was a hovel or hamlet is quite false; indeed, impossible on current finds. It had to be a town, of modest size but of more than average wealth and industry, with abundant stone buildings and a considerable manufacturing, quarrying, and agricultural production and trade.

All previous claims that Nazareth was too poor to have a synagogue (even a stonebuilt one—though an assumption that it had to be is already anachronistic) or a torah scroll, or to have literate tradesmen and rabbis, or even tutors providing primary education to its select elite, slaves, and donees, are no longer tenable. It’s not even implausible that tutors were available to provide a secondary education there—after which its denizens would more likely get an advanced education in nearby cities just hours away on foot (on the ancient education system and who had access to it even in rural counties see my study Science Education in the Early Roman Empire). This changes a lot of assertions that get bandied about even by mainstream scholars (e.g. see my recent discussion of Ehrman’s bungling of ancient Galilean literacy)

Dark does mention and for the same reasons as me dismisses the so-called “Nazareth Inscription” as irrelevant (Hitler Homer Bible Christ, pp. 315-26). Adding new information to mine, he explains how we now know that inscription came from the distant Greek island of Kos, likely dates from the time of Augustus (due to a more pertinent incident there), and was only sold on the modern black market in Nazareth. It never had any ancient connection with that town or even Palestine. But he also mentions and for the same reasons as me notes the weight of the Nazarene inscription, which is a very different piece of stonework, not from Nazareth, but that prominently mentions it. This was most relevantly covered by Michael Avi-Yonah in “A List of Priestly Courses from Caesarea,” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962), pp. 137-139.

Some do attempt to claim this refers to the Bar Kochba revolt, but it cannot, as the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, necessitating the relocating of priests then. Not later. And Dark agrees (p. 25); as does Jewish tradition (see below). The debate is discussed in Matthew Grey’s 2011 dissertation for UNC Chapel Hill (“Jewish Priests and the Social History of Post-70 Palestine”). But the facts are these: there is no tradition of their being relocated (much less that relocation traumatically commemorated) twice. Yet Jerusalem and its temple remained in ruins and uninhabited by law until after the Bar Kochba revolt. So there can’t have been priests there to relocate then. Only assigns from the 10th legion remained to ensure the city was not reinhabited. Remarkably scant use of Jewish graveyards near Jerusalem then proves this; Cassius Dio outright reports it; and Josephus explained exactly why that was the case—indeed, this is why Josephus needed Titus to grant him new properties to compensate for the ones he could no longer make any use of there.

So the Caesarea inscription thus proves not only that Nazareth existed in 70 AD but was flourishing and wealthy enough already by then to be deemed suitable (and capable) of taking in revered Jewish priests—indeed, it was among the top 24 towns in the region selected for the purpose. It therefore can’t have been a new settlement. It had to have been developed for at least half a century before then (a single generation). As I wrote eons ago in Not the Impossible Faith (pp. 64–65):

A Jewish inscription from the 2nd or 3rd century confirms that Nazareth was one of the towns that took in Jewish priests after the destruction of the Temple in [70] A.D. Would priests deign to shack up in a despised hick town? And archaeology confirms it may have had a significant stone building before then (perhaps the synagogue claimed to be there in Luke 4:16). Nazareth definitely had grain silos, cisterns, ritual immersion pools, smartly-cut cave dwellings and storerooms, a stone well, and a significant necropolis also cut from the rock of Nazareth’s hill, all in the time of Jesus. This was no mere hamlet, but a village inhabited by hundreds experiencing significant economic success.

I then surveyed some other stonework and inscriptional evidence—which Dark has now rejected or disproved (it had been lazily or apologetically dated), replacing it with better observations and evidence. So that portion of NIF should be replaced with his. But then I (correctly) continued:

Otherwise, very little of Nazareth has been excavated, and therefore no argument can be advanced regarding what “wasn’t” there in the 1st century. All the more so, since evidence suggests any stones and bricks used in first century buildings in Nazareth were reused in later structures, thus erasing much of the evidence. There simply isn’t any case to be made that it was a despised or insignificant hovel.

[Archaeology even confirms] Nazareth was indeed built down the slope of a hill, and many of its houses, storerooms, and tombs were cut from the rock of that hill. The “brow” of that hill would likely have even been cut or built up to provide a suitable place for hurling the condemned as required of every town under Mishnah law (Sanhedrin 6.4).

Dark confirms all this by correcting, adding, and verifying considerably more evidence, and more secure evidence than I had mentioned. His conclusion, of which I am also convinced, is that Nazareth was a small but wealthy agro-industrial town beginning from the late Hellenistic period and thus would have been there in the Herodian era for a Jesus to hail from.

The Best Evidence

First, context: contrary to what you usually hear, Nazareth was surrounded then by woodlands and quarries, suitable for extensive timber and stone buildings; had several springs and seasonal waterways (and extensive cisterns constructed to store waters out of season, and irrigation channels—artificial rivers—to collect and distribute it); and had its hillsides dug into for settlement and agricultural terracing. The entire valley Nazareth was situated in was well developed with numerous settlements and industrial and agricultural operations and flourishing with fields, groves, and husbandry. In fact “the valley between Sepphoris,” the nearest city (a two hour walk), “and Nazareth was very densely settled compared to many other areas of Galilee” (p. 36), and especially compared to Judea. It was a rich and industrious valley.

Conclusive evidence of Nazareth itself engaging in considerable agricultural and quarrying industry from early on indicate it was running a profitable trade even by itself, locally and abroad. Dark tries to make the silly argument that they didn’t trade with the nearby city of Sepphoris because of religious bias (p. 160), but that’s one of his occasional daft inferences. It is literally impossible to even exist and not trade with a nearby city. Indeed it would be economically foolish. And doing so would not conflict with religious purity or separatism, so his inference lacks even internal logic. How often do you see extremely pious orthodox Jews mingling and doing business among the Goyim today—hell, even the Amish trade with “The English,” and in their heathen cities no less! Indeed, Sepphoris was populated with Jews and could plausibly have had a Rabbinical school. And anyone from Nazareth keen on becoming a Rabbi for Nazareth or beyond would not eschew Sepphoris (or any other city) simply because there were some sinners there.

But that goof aside, Dark faithfully documents the facts: extensive quarrying, terracing, wine and olive pressing, and storing of goods, both gathered and manufactured, indicates a considerable town and not a hovel. And even by the critics’ rewrite of all the evidence, this still all existed by the early second century, which is a remarkable (indeed extraordinary) pace of development for a new town, and indicative of the oddity of such a productive area not having been thus exploited before. “Gosh. Look at all this cool stuff here. Why did no one start using it before? Let’s start cutting rock, boys. And to the wine presses! All these wild grapes have magically matured for us somehow.” In short, alternative theories of dating all this don’t sound plausible on sober reflection.

One of the most interesting new observations is that besides extensive evidence of early Roman-era (even possibly pre-Roman) stonecut structures—storage vaults, workrooms, cisterns, and more—there are hastily cut crawl tunnels through them all in a network resembling the war tunnels found at other sites (p. 44). This would indicate the previous stonework indeed predates the Jewish War, and that Nazareth was pegged as a repository for hiding personnel and supplies during the war. The Galilee was not as heavily dug for combat during the later Bar Kochba revolt, and these locations are associated with pottery, various small containers, lamps, and other finds that more likely date to the first century or earlier (pp. 43–45).

Critics do try to throw shade on dating the mobile goods (e.g. Henry Davis) but their efforts suffer five general flaws:

I’m not sure they are even valid. A lot of what I see critics doing is ignoring specific features that date an object and focusing on the general classification of the object, which is a reference-class error. So if you want to take any of this seriously, you have to get Dark’s formal studies and source materials, and the critics’ claims and source materials, and meticulously compare detail by detail. I do not think the effort will turn out well for the critics (e.g. Davis relies on, and misuses, outdated materials to “re-date” things like Herodian lamps). I think they are desperate to get a result, while Dark and his colleagues are simply following existing standards and practices.
The large number and consistency of these finds make it inherently unlikely that they all cluster to the later rather than middle or earlier period of their popularity in use (especially when somehow none are found near any definitely post-war objects). So claiming “they could” is not a sound argument that “they probably do.” This looks more like a possibiliter ergo probabiliter fallacy, more a result of skeptical desperation than sound argument—statistically, that’s simply not the most likely interpretation of it all. The cumulative weight of all the evidence, especially in its specific particulars and in what is absent as well as present, looks to agree with Dark. “But he could be wrong” sounds like “but her emails” at this point.
The only credible critics there are already agree that “if” Dark (and literally every other archaeologist alive who has looked at any of this) is wrong, then the artifiacts (and thus Nazareth) date to before the second war, which began in 135 AD, and likely before the second century altogether. Which creates a mathematical problem. It is extraordinarily improbable that Christians somehow invented, built, and named a whole flourishing town in Galilee based on their own mythology before 135 AD (and no Jews would have). But then it is extraordinarily improbable that Jews did this and just “by accident” its chosen name perfectly agreed with Christian mythology.
Conversely, it is not extraordinarily improbable but still improbable that they did this and Mark or Matthew then chose to assign the town to Jesus, despite it being literally brand new (settled within mere years of their writing), and thus the least likely town they would choose for the purpose. It would be unlikely they could even know it existed, as any reference works or informants they’d rely on would be unlikely to be so remarkably current (in an era with no printing press). And a greater improbability also still attaches to how conveniently these Jews then named this new town—just in time for the Gospels to match it to their lore or prophecy of Jesus being a Nazorian.
And on top of all that: admitting all this evidence is pre-Kochba entails accepting the war tunnels date to the first war in the 60s, and therefore the stone rooms and chambers those tunnels cut through must be pre-war. This pretty much makes Dark’s case. It’s a Catch-22 that honest critics can’t wriggle out of.

The critics’ scheme is further unlikely given the resettlement of priests there (impossible on the critics’ theory, as Nazareth had to already be there, and flourishing, in 70 AD), which corroborates Dark’s dating of all the numerous archaeological finds to date (with which all other actual experts concur), and not the critics’ need for it to not have been there yet.

I should also note the cherry picking of critics. They will zero in on what they think is a weak link but completely ignore the strongest examples. Case in point: the glass phials recovered at Nazareth cannot be post-war, nor derive from a hovel (delicate glassware was a pricey and luxurious trade commodity). As Dark summarizes (pp. 57–58, 118, 136):

[U]nrealized until my work, the glass phials found in [a particular Nazareth] cistern offer the first recorded archaeological evidence for an early first century settlement in Nazareth. [These] glass phials survive in the convent museum today. Some of them can be accurately dated by comparison with examples of known date found elsewhere. Most of them are made of green glass. At least two fragments of pear shaped vessels are characteristic of the first century AD. There are also ten fragments (shards) of others made in dark blue glass with yellow glass trails, which date somewhere between the first century BC and the first century AD.

Glass phials such as these were either put in rock cut tombs or used for perfume in houses. The only way in which these vessels could get into the rock cut cistern at this date was by falling through the opening at its top or being used within it.

Dark is referring to a particular type of distinctively Hellenistic glasswork that died out by the mid-first century. Critics will quickly accuse nuns of planting this (even though no one knew the date range of this type of glasswork then). Which exemplifies the desperation of even trying to be a critic of these kinds of conclusions. And this isn’t the only example. Dark lists others—and gets into the details and sources in his official work (here, pertaining is The Sisters of Nazareth Convent).

I won’t delve into all the evidence we’ve accumulated around a particular Nazareth-related site: Mary’s Well. Dark summarizes that well enough (pp. 32–33, 47–48). This began with studies by Yardenna Alexandre and expanded by others since. Its name is by all conceded to be a dubious legend (no serious archaeologist thinks Mary the Mother of Jesus drew water there). I’ve been skeptical of the use of this evidence before. But Dark’s summary, and my consulting subsequent publications on it, leave me more convinced that this site is indisputably pre-war. Dark admits it is not conclusively evidence for Nazareth, as it’s only certainly a farmstead that “might be associated with another settlement adjacent to” Nazareth (p. 47). But in conjunction with all the other evidence that is the less likely interpretation. It was more likely settled on the outskirts of ancient Nazareth.

Caveats and Sidenotes

I do recommend reading Dark carefully. Because I’ve seen him often misquoted or incorrectly interpreted by critics before, and his choice of wording is itself careful to maximize brevity without losing accuracy, and lazy critics will miss this. I’ll give one example of what I mean. Some take his reference to a tomb with a round stone door (pp. 37, 117) as proof that that tomb is pre-war (early first century) when “we know” it should be the other way around (such tomb doors tend to be post-war; though not always, and one should not confuse trends in Judea with trends in Galilee, since a similar tomb doorstone was identified at Migdal of around the same date). But he does not say that. He says it’s likely first century—and thus could indeed be post-war (he is explicit at B&I, where he more prolixly says these tombs “date to the first century but there is no reason to assign any of them to the first half of that century”).

Similarly, critics might “skip over” the fact that Dark makes a distinction between “large” (far more expensive) rollstones (which are all pre-100) and small ones (which were abundant in later periods but nowhere found at Nazareth). Indeed, the tomb in question may have been cut for one of the priests resettled there after the first war. And again, statistically, to have such a tomb there entails decades, probably at least a generation (about half a century), of prior town flourishing. So even if against the odds this was the last such tomb built, in exactly the year 100, that still makes it more likely than not that Nazareth had been there since at least 50 AD. And once you are admitting Nazareth predates the War, insisting it only “just” got established “right” after Jesus is supposed to have lived there is playing a high-wire act of coincidences—and on no evidence, just a desire for the result. It can’t be argued that there is no evidence of Herodian occupation “except” for all the evidence of Herodian occupation, simply because you “desire” all that evidence to be post-Herodian. That becomes a circular argument.

Generally, Dark often makes clear the difference between his facts (which are usually correct) and his inferences from them (which are usually decent, but sometimes weak, and occasionally even daft—like I caught with his thoughts about trade), but any critical reader can spot this on their own when it happens. And really, when everything Dark presents is considered and critically read, the conclusion in my original study remains even more firmly the case now (OHJ, p. 258n8):

Arguments like “Nazareth or Capernaum didn’t exist in the time of Jesus, therefore Jesus didn’t exist” are fallacious (with respect to minimal historicity) even if their premises are true; and their premises can rarely be proven anyway.

As to the fallacy: on a hypothesis of myth, all locations were necessarily invented for Jesus (whether using actually existing locations or not), which can be just as likely on a (minimal) theory of historicity (i.e., on which most of Jesus’ story is still just as mythical); ergo, even if Nazareth didn’t exist (or in fact even if it did), this is just as likely if Jesus existed as if he didn’t, or near enough as to make no notable difference (this argument only ceases to be fallacious if the ‘invented’ elements are too extensive to explain as a product of mythic development over a historical person, which for Jesus is not the case [see OHJ, Ch. 6].

As to the premises, see “Capernaum,” in The Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land (rev. ed. 2001), pp. 111-14; likewise in the same volume, “Nazareth,” pp. 362-63.

I would now update that to include Dark’s new book. To new evidence and analyses even I didn’t know he adds many things I did know but you might not (e.g. “there were purpose-built synagogues in first-century Galilee,” of stone or wood or even tent, and no reason to doubt Nazareth had one: p. 137); and many things I’ve said before that you might have missed (e.g. possibly Joseph “was a carpenter, but a tekton could also be a stoneworker involved in construction,” p. 137; although, of course, that can also be a metaphor for the Maker, or even the hero Odysseus: OHJ, pp. 440–42).

A Brief Pause on Rene Salm

In OHJ I also mentioned my discussing in Proving History (see below) and the debate in Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 26 (2008), pp. 95-135, which was initiated by René Salm over the contents of Stephen Pfann, Ross Voss and Yehudah Rapuano’s study in the previous volume, “Surveys and Excavations at the Nazareth Village Farm (1997-2002): Final Report,” Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 25 (2007), pp. 19-79. The 2008 volume also contains a critical review of Salm’s book by Dark. All of which is the official stuff, though Salm also gets pilloried online (example, example, example). You’ll find some excess trust in him at Vridar, where in critiquing prior work by Dark I see too much reliance on the assertions of Salm, whom I find personally shady and untrustworthy. Vridar’s critiques are also a decade out of date, while Dark now relies mainly on work published since 2020. Dark describes (often critically) prior work, even his own. But the culmination now effectively answers Salm’s critiques.

But in case you didn’t know, René Salm is an amateur who has advanced often contradictory and overreaching critiques of Nazareth archaeology, up to and including outright conspiracy theories. For example, to “get rid” of the Caesarea inscription he promotes the conspiracy theory of Enrico Tuccinardi (yes, that Tuccinardi) accusing Jerry Vardaman of forging it. This kind of desperate and bizarre apologetics is alone discrediting of Salm’s reliability (and Tuccinardi’s). Vardaman could not have forged this—he was working with an entire team in the field on its discovery, and there is no evidence anything about the original find is fake. Moreover, Vardaman was conspicuously not a forger. When he worked on this dig he had not yet gone insane—that occurred decades later, and even then his madness resulted in him seeing things on coins and inscriptions that weren’t there, not forging inscriptions on them (I thoroughly cover the Vardaman madness in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). We also already knew Nazareth was in Jewish legend one of the places priests were settled from a 7th century poem that the Caesarea inscription only confirms (and indeed that poem says this happened when the temple was destroyed, not seventy years later, again confirming when these relocations happened and why). And that fact is itself confirmed by another inscription (and yet others, as described by Grey, pp. 317–26) that only lost the part mentioning Nazareth but verify the poem and Caesarea inscription. So trying to insist the Caesarea inscription is fake is too crank to credit.

Still, because Christians are always dodgy to some degree, Salm of course often has valid points mixed in with his fallacies and conspiracy theories (and this is even acknowledged by Dark’s editorial introduction to that 2008 issue of BAIAS). Salm catches errors and biases in several archaeological studies of Nazareth (the more so the older they are). But when you sift through his claims that hold up and that don’t, his conclusions don’t survive. And this largely shows up in the results of Dark’s new summary, where he works from revised and critically evaluated evidence rather than the often exaggerated or fudged claims of previous archaeologists, in fact calling them out. The folly of Salm is to mix in valid points with equally exaggerated and biased claims, replacing his opponents’ fallacies with his own. So we have two sides at war over interpretations of the evidence, and both are dodgy. So you need some way to cut away all the bullshit on both sides and compare the cases that remain. I think Dark has more or less done that.

Not that Dark is immune to biases and fallacies. His fawning attempts at the end of this book to leave it “possible” that a house claimed to belong to the family of Jesus is the actual house that belonged to the family of Jesus are ridiculous and embarrassing. As is his persistent avoidance of even mentioning that the best explanation for a lot of legends is that Christians are liars (as starkly on p. 156). These things totally warrant your suspicion. But his errors are not of fact but logic. And he is actually honest about that. And it is from the evidence (not any of his reasoning contrary to it) that the overall conclusions I stated above are as well established as can be expected for the site. So Salm is just a crank gainsaying everything and like a broken clock just being right twice a day.

But Contra Dark, Jesus Did Not Hail from Nazareth

Although the town definitely existed for Jesus to hail from, he definitely did not hail from it. And the reason we can know this is that the evidence stacks up rather strongly that he was never originally known as a “Nazarene,” but as a “Nazorian,” which does not mean someone from Nazareth. That those words sounded similar only inspired later fictionalists to assign him that town, to allegorize secret lore (a point I’ll get to) and simultaneously to make him fulfill prophecy—as Matthew 2:23 explicitly says, citing a now-lost passage (on Christians having different scriptures then than we do now, see OHJ, pp. 88–92; Luke 24:19 might also be alluding to this). Indeed, that the messiah had to hail from some town in Galilee was already fixed by Isaiah 9. In fact, it was fixed to the specific area of Capernaum. Which is why Matthew believed it was “by the sea” where “the land of Zebulun and Naphtali” met its nexus at Capernaum, and thus Capernaum was predicted to be the home of the messiah. So Mark conspicuously puts him there, and Matthew has him move there.

The idea of Jesus coming from Nazareth first appears in Mark—it’s not in Paul, Hebrews, 1 Clement, 1 Peter, or any other plausibly pre-war document. In fact, it might actually have only first appeared in Matthew. Because only one verse in Mark ever mentions or connects Jesus to a town named Nazareth (1:9) and it is identical to the corresponding verse in Matthew (3:13) but for adding the single uninflected town-name Nazaret. It is unlikely Matthew would have dropped that name when he copied this verse, so there’s a good chance that’s how his copy of Mark read: without the town’s name (which is a lot more likely than Zindler’s thesis, that the entire verse was interpolated, in Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus).

There are other oddities in the textual and manuscript record that increase those odds, as there are a lot of features of our text of Mark that appear to have been added to Mark after Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source—including blunder. For example, Mark supposedly got Tyrian geography wrong, but it’s more likely he got it right and it was garbled in transmission, while Mark’s original text was preserved in Matthew and Luke (see How Textual Criticism Can Help or (Sorry) Hurt Your Cause). Likewise, several manuscripts of Matthew identify Barabbas as also having the name Jesus, and Origen reports a tendency to scrub that from Gospel manuscripts (OHJ, pp. 402–07), but since Mark invented the deliberate parallelism between Barabbas and Jesus (Ibid.), warranting their sharing the name, it’s more likely Mark set the name of Jesus for him, then it was scrubbed, and we just don’t have examples of this because, unlike for Matthew, we have so few manuscripts of the relevant part of Mark (or Mark was scrubbed before the anti-Marcionite edition was published, and Matthew, who preserved the original readings of Mark, after).

As I wrote in OHJ, p 401 (n. 34):

Nazōraios (Mt. 2.23; Acts 24.5) simply has no grammatical connection to Nazara, Nazaret or Nazareth, and does not in fact form the word ‘Nazarene’. Nazōraios would instead form in English ‘Nazorian’; and if it referred to a town of origin at all (and there is no particular reason to believe it originally did), it would indicate an inhabitant of Nazōrai (‘Nazors’), by analogy to ‘Athenian’ (Athēnaios), meaning ‘from Athens’ (Athēnai). ‘Nazors’ is not ‘Nazareth’, or indeed any known town. It should be clear that Nazōr– and Nazar– are completely different roots; and –eth and –ai are completely different terminations. The original meaning was probably not a town of origin but an attribute or label (a name with a secret meaning, as I show in Proving History some Christians in fact believed).

This lack of connection between the terms is actually an argument for the historicity of Nazareth (at least when the Gospels were written), as there is no other explanation why Nazōraios would generate an assignment to Nazareth other than that there was an actual Nazareth and that sounded close enough (otherwise, if the evangelists were inventing the town, they would have named it Nazōrai). Conversely, this also argues that Jesus did not come from Nazareth, as otherwise there is no good explanation why he was called a Nazorian (Mt. 26.71; Lk. 18.37; Jn 18.5-7 and 19.19) and his followers Nazorians, other than that this was a term originally unconnected with Nazareth and therefore preceded the assignment of that town to Jesus (it’s not as if Matthew, e.g., needed to find scriptural confirmation that he originated in Nazareth; Mark didn’t, and neither did Luke or John). Otherwise Jesus would have been called a Nazaretos (‘Nazarethan’) or a Nazaranos (‘Nazaran’).

Mark created the loosely similar word, Nazarēnos [‘Nazarene’] for this purpose, unless that was a later scribal modification. And we have reason to believe it was, because Mk 10.47 originally agreed with the other Gospels in saying Nazōraios (e.g. in Codex Sinaiticus); Mk 14.67 may have (e.g. Codex Koridethi and Codex Sangallensis 48); as might Mk 16.6 (e.g. Codex Sangallensis 48 and Codex Regius); and there is significant confusion in the mss. as to the spelling in Mk 1.24, as also in those other three verses, leaving all cases accounted for—for Mk 1.24 alone Swanson identifies no less than five different variant spellings; cf. Reuben Swanson, New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings Arranged in Horizontal Lines against Codex Vaticanus: Mark (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), p. 15.

Matthew knows no other spelling than Nazōraios (and he was using Mark as a source). John also knows no other spelling than Nazōraios. Luke uses Nazarēnos only twice, only one of which is a lift from Mark (Lk. 4.34, redacting Mk 1.24), the other introduced in a story unique to Luke (Lk. 24.19), but elsewhere, in another lift from Mark, he uses Nazōraios (Lk. 18.37, redacting Mk 10.47), and this spelling can’t have come from Matthew, who does not use the word at all in his redaction of the same story (in Mt. 20.29-34). It therefore must have come from Mark, which argues that Mark originally wrote Nazōraios.

Notably, in Luke’s one lift from Mark that reads Nazarēnos, the manuscripts again don’t agree on the spelling (some seven variants are known, including spellings similar to Nazōraios); and in his one unique use, a great many mss. in fact read Nazōraios. See Reuben Swanson, New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings Arranged in Horizontal Lines against Codex Vaticanus: Luke (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 73, 317 and 411. It would appear that Nazarēnos was a later scribal invention and might never have been in the Gospels of Mark or Luke originally.

Adding to all this, J. Andrew Doole, in “Revisiting Jesus’s House,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 48.3 (2026), 593–610, argues all the references in Mark to Jesus’s home or hometown refer to Capernaum, not Nazareth, and that is indeed how the text reads even if the word Nazaret was in verse 1:9—and as just noted, it might not have been. Doole reads this as signaling that Jesus changed residence (as Matthew explicitly formulates this). But if Nazaret was not in Mark’s original text of 1:9, then Mark may never have imagined the connection at all, and just always meant Capernaum. It would then be Matthew who added the Nazareth connection and then did some two-stepping to get that to fit in with Mark’s Capernaum story as well as the alternative Bethlehem prophecy, thus fabricating a harmonization of three hometowns that began in Mark as only one: Capernaum. We can’t prove this. But there is enough data for suspicion. And the other examples (only some of which I have mentioned) make it even more credible.

But whether that’s the case or not doesn’t matter for the real point, which is that Jesus began as a Nazorian—which was only later mythologized as being from Nazareth (whether by Mark or Matthew). And a Nazorian (nazôraios) is simply not a Nazarene (nazarênos). So assigning him to the town came later. It is therefore not where he grew up. He might never have even been there. And it is important to emphasize here that this can have no relevance to whether Jesus existed. Because he was mythically assigned to Nazareth regardless of whether he did. So even if Nazareth was an invented town it can’t evince Jesus didn’t exist. This renders the whole debate over the existence of Nazareth pointless to mythicism. But alas.

What Is a Nazorian?

In fact the Christians as a whole were originally called Nazorians. Which therefore cannot mean inhabitants of Nazareth. We know this not only according to lore preserved in Acts 24:5 (cf. (OHJ, p 400), but also the fact that the originating sect of Christianity, which remained Torah-observant, continued to be so-named for centuries (as reported by Epiphanius; cf. OHJ, Chapter 8, §1; with discussion now in Obsolete Paradigm, pp. 58–61; although of related interest is my deep dive in How Not to Act Like a Crank: On Evaluating Pliny’s Alleged Mention of Nazareth). Yet Christians neither came from nor were ever based at Nazareth. So the word clearly meant something else. And we know that even more because it never could mean “from Nazareth” anyway. It’s spelled incorrectly for that sense.

But Jesus is also consistently so-named throughout Matthew and John. The alternative spelling of nazarênos (Nazarene) appears only a few times in Mark, and fewer times in Luke, who otherwise consistently follows Matthew’s “Nazorian” instead. That appears to be later scribal editing (as explained above). Originally, Matthew consistently just assumed Nazorian sounded enough like Nazareth to assume the one could fulfill the other, so he went all-in on having Jesus hail from there. The messiah had to come from Galilee. Nazareth is in Galilee. Presto! Nazorian now “means” Nazarene. And a hometown is invented (again, whether Mark first came up with this and Matthew just ran with it, it’s the same outcome—Matthew does often add references to scripture that Mark left out yet clearly intended).

I covered this already in Proving History (pp. 142-45):

For Christians to call themselves Nazarenes because their founder was from Nazareth would make no more sense than Platonists calling themselves Athenians because their founder was from Athens. It’s even worse than that, really, because they were not calling themselves (or even Jesus) Nazarenes, but Nazorians, which is analogous to Platonists calling themselves Athonians; or even more analogously (and thus even more inexplicably), Athonenes. Contrary to the usual claim that Matthew must have made this up, there is no way Matthew would invent a scriptural reference. It would defeat the purpose to cite a scripture that didn’t exist in order to prove Jesus fulfilled scripture—even in general, much less to a well-informed Jewish readership, as Matthew’s readership was intended to be. Moreover, even if he wanted to invent a scripture, he would not invent this: because the ‘scripture’ he ‘quotes’ here does not in fact fit the name of the town of Nazareth; if Matthew were inventing, he would invent a correctly matching word.

Ancient Christians thought the word related in some sense to the protection of sacred truths. In “Tacitus’ Fragment 2: The Anti-Roman Movement of the Christiani and the Nazoreans,” Vigiliae Christianae 54, no. 3 (2000): 233–47, Eric Laupot makes a plausible case that the term was originally derived from Isaiah 11:1 to mean “Branchers” (like the Branch Davidians) as the name of the Christian movement (as followers of a prophesied Davidic messiah), which was retroactively made into Jesus’ hometown (either allusively or in error). An equally plausible alternative comes from Christophe Lemardelé, who has since concluded that the “Nazorian’s” original cultic meaning most likely was in some sense of ‘the guardian’ or ‘the keeper’, perhaps of sacred truths or secrets or souls, as I had myself argued (see Christophe Lemardelé, “The Hebrew word [NAZIR] in Greek: From the Septuagint to the Christian Authors,” Semitica et Classica 8 (2015), 1–6).

J.S. Kennard argues a different but also plausible alternative in “Was Capernaum the Home of Jesus?” Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946), pp. 131–41, and “Nazorean and Nazareth,” Journal of Biblical Literature 66 (1947), pp. 79–81 (responding to W.F. Albright’s reply in “The Names Nazareth and Nazoraean,” Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946), pp. 397–401), Kennard proposes that it was a cultic title derived from the Nazirites (“the separated” or “the consecrated,” see Nazir and Nazar) described in Numbers 6 and Judges 13:5 (and the Mishnah tractate Nazir). As he points out, a Nazirite vow was most typically of limited duration (a fixed number of days), consecrating oneself to God by certain rituals—most prominently, abstaining from wine (which Jesus indeed vows to do: Mark 14:25; Matthew 26:29), although Kennard argues the Christians adopted the term to designate a new notion of separation or holiness reflected in the Baptist cult (similar in function to the title “Essene”).

But might it have meant something more specific? Because to all this, we know the Gospel of Phillip (cf. 66:14, 56:12, 62:8, 62:15) seems only to know the word as an epithet of “Truth” and not a geographical moniker. This is confirmed by Irenaeus (in Against All Heresies 1.21.3), who believed as early as the late second century that “Jesus Nazaria” meant “Savior of Truth” in Hebrew or Aramaic. Although we do not know of any such word in those languages, more likely Irenaeus or his source telephone-gamed the actual derivation from something else, like natsar, as perhaps “keeper of secrets” (i.e., the mysteries; perhaps by derivation from, e.g., Isaiah 48:6 and 42:6), which Christians proclaimed (and thus equated with) “the truth.” Lemardelé’s findings (indeed even some of Laupot’s and Kennard’s) actually add support to this. So it may be the triangulated reality: Jesus Natsar, “Guardian of the Truth.” The equation or conversion of this to a town would be a common esoteric literary practice: see Susan Levin, “Platonic Eponymy and the Literary Tradition,” Phoenix 50 (1996), pp. 197–207 and (in respect to Nazareth) Robert Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (Prometheus 2000), pp. 51–54.

Conclusion

We can state with confidence that Nazareth existed in the early first century and was a town of some standing and income. The evidence presented by Dark and Avi-Yonah and Alexandre and others are so immensely improbable on any other conclusion that there is just no appreciable probability otherwise. However, contra Dark, we can state with almost as much confidence that Jesus did not come from there. The evidence that Jesus was actually originally known as the Nazorian (and his original Torah-observant sect the Nazorians), which was only later connected to a near-enough sounding town, to fulfill scripture (both that he should be a Nazorian and from Galilee), is likewise very improbable on any other conclusion. Supporting that may even have been the knowledge (available to Mark and certainly Matthew) that after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. priests were honorably settled there, thus lending the town renown as one of the seats of the priesthood, with which Jesus was often symbolically (e.g. in Hebrews; and by the time of Luke, literally) connected, making it a solid mythic choice to settle him in.

The elitist attitude that hailing from Nazareth was too lowly an origin for a full-blown messiah is found reflected only a hundred years later in the Gospel of John (1:46), and there in a way intended to mock its elitism rather than its aptness (see my discussion in Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 2, “Who Would Follow a Man from Galilee?”). Clearly Nazareth was not disreputable if priests were happy to be settled there, and evidently in adequate comfort. And the entire Christian gospel emphasized how great things come from humble beginnings, turning upside down the expectations of the snobbish elite. The least, after all, shall be first. And the savior had to be humbled to the very lowest to obtain victory (Philippians 2:5–10). So there was no embarrassment at the assignment. To the contrary, contriving a middle class origin for Jesus was entirely expected in any Christian myth of him. And choosing a town that fit prophecy, placing him in Galilee and as a “Nazorian,” requires no elaborate explanation.