Catching up on 2009: 1st Century Nazareth House
I was away in Israel on two separate trips in December, 2009 and want to catch up on quite a few news items, books, and notices that I have not had time to post. Some of this might be old news by now but I wanted to go ahead with a series of posts, for the record, and in case some of you too have been very busy with the holidays and end-of-the-year activities.
The discovery of the 1st century CE ruins of a house in Nazareth on the grounds of the convent near the Church of the Anunciation by the Israel Antiquities Authority excavation directed by Alexandra Yardenna has been up on the IAA Web site for some time but had not yet received much attention. On December 21st a more popular press release was put out with video interviews and photos, and was picked up worldwide–just in time for Christmas. The story in HaAretz is representative of the coverage and has some good pictures and there is a nice MSNBC video report here, plus a Fox News interview with Yardenna here (you have to endure the ads at the beginning). Despite the orchestrated timing, the story is quite important for understanding Jesus and his village background, growing up just outside of Sepphoris, the major urban center of Galilee and capital of Herod Antipas. The discovery also addresses the issue, raised by a few scholars (e.g. Rene Salm and Frank Zindler), as to whether the village of Nazareth even existed in 1st century Roman Galilee. Until now no remains of living areas, preserved to this extent, had been dated solidly dated to the time of Jesus and Josephus does not mention the village in his inventory of Galilean towns.
I was filming in Nazareth in December and was able to see the area firsthand. Both the size and style of the house points to the kind of modest Jewish village typical of the time and fits well with what many of us had postulated regarding Nazareth itself, see Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus (chapter 2) and my own discussion in The Jesus Dynasty (chapter 5). Nazareth was a very small hamlet, perhaps sheltering a few dozen families, and its significance and name might well derive from its inhabitants laying claim to Davidic lineage–the Hebrew word netzer, meaning “branch,” from which the name is taken, is used in Isaiah 11 to refer to the royal house of David. The presence of stone vessels, found in the excavation, also indicate its inhabitants were observant of ritual purity laws of the Torah.
As it turns out, the drawing that the artist Balage Balogh, who was commissioned by Crossan and Reed in Excavating Jesus, and by me for illustrations in The Jesus Dynasty, seems to have captured pretty accurately how such the village might have looked in the time of Jesus. This latest discovery, along with the tombs and agricultural remains, seems to reflect a coherent picture of a rather typical 1st Jewish century village located near a natural spring in the valley surrounded on hills, with Sepphoris just to the northwest. This location also fits our early Christian tradition of Miriam, mother of Jesus, growing up in the outskirts of Sepphoris where her parents Joachim and Anna lived.
One might hope that further archaeological investigation of such a significant site might be undertaken in the future but unfortunately this excavation was a “rescue” operation in a very densely populated area surrounding the Church of the Annunciation. It appears unlikely that much more than this area will be exposed, at least in the near future.
