Where was Nazareth?

Question

Where was Nazareth?

Accepted Answer

Nazareth lies in the hills of Lower Galilee, in today's Israel, in a basin ringed by ridges about 24 km west-south-west of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee and about 103 km north of Jerusalem in a straight line; the town has never moved, and the modern city stands over the village of the Gospels. The village is not named in the Old Testament, in Josephus or in the early rabbis; the earliest mention outside the Gospels is Julius Africanus, in the early third century, who names Nazara among the villages of the relatives of Jesus, and the first non-Christian one is a fragment of a Hebrew synagogue inscription of about AD 300, found at Caesarea in 1962, listing the priestly courses and the Galilean villages where they settled after the Jewish revolts. Luke writes: “And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth”, and Matthew explains that Joseph “came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth”. Nathanael's question, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”, shows how little the place was known even in Galilee. Excavations under the Church of the Annunciation and nearby from the 1950s have found a small Jewish village of the Roman period: rock-cut houses, storage pits, cisterns, wine and olive presses and tombs. Luke says the crowd led Jesus “unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built”: the village stood on the slopes above the basin, and several brows are shown to visitors. Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee under Herod Antipas, lay a short walk to the north-west, and Capernaum, where Jesus later settled, is about 33 km to the north-east.