The village sits in a bowl of limestone hills on the southern edge of Lower Galilee, where the high country drops away to the great plain of Jezreel. From the ridge above it the view runs south across the plain to the hills of Samaria, east to the rounded dome of Tabor, and on a clear day west to the long dark line of Carmel running out toward the sea. Four miles to the north lay Sepphoris, the capital Herod's son rebuilt in the years of Jesus's youth. The road between them was a morning's walk.
No ancient writer before the gospels thought the village worth naming. That silence has made Nazareth the subject of one of the longest quarrels in the study of the Way, and since the quarrel bears directly on the meaning of the name Nazarene, the fellowship sets it out here.
The Silence
Nazareth does not appear in the Hebrew scriptures, which name dozens of towns in the territory of Zebulun where it lies. It does not appear in the historian, who commanded the Jewish forces in Galilee at the start of the war with Rome, fortified its towns, and listed many of them by name. It does not appear in the early rabbinic writings. The first mention outside the Christian books comes centuries later.
From this silence some have argued that there was no Nazareth in the first century at all: that the gospel writers, finding their teacher called the Nazarene and no longer knowing why, invented a hometown to explain the name, or that a later settlement took the name from the gospels. Versions of this argument are popular, and the fellowship has been asked about it more than once. A few students once wrote to us within the same month, each convinced of it by the same book. One of the keepers spent a winter with the evidence on their behalf.
The Stone and the Spade
Here is what that winter found.
In the nineteen-sixties, excavators at Caesarea on the coast found fragments of a Hebrew inscription listing the twenty-four courses of priests and the Galilean towns where each settled after the temple fell. One course is listed at Nazareth, and the name is spelled with the Hebrew letter that gives it the consonants of netzer, the branch. The stone is later than the gospels, but it is a Jewish record, made by people with no interest in the Christian story, and it treats Nazareth as a known Jewish village fit to receive a family of priests.
And the spade has been busy. Excavations in and around the modern town have uncovered the cuttings of houses set partly into the rock, cisterns and storage pits, terraces and wine presses, tombs of the kind Jews of the period cut for their dead, and fragments of vessels carved from soft stone. Stone vessels matter: a household careful of purity preferred them, because stone, unlike clay, was held not to take impurity, which is why the six jars at Cana were stone. In this century the remains of a modest dwelling of the early Roman period were found near the great church in the center of town. The picture that emerges is of a small village, a few hundred people at most, farming the slopes, devout in the way of Galilean Jews of the time, and of no importance to anyone who wrote books.
That last point answers the silence. The historian names the towns he fortified and the towns that resisted, not every hamlet in the hills. A place of a few hundred farmers can go unmentioned for centuries and still be there. The fellowship holds that Nazareth existed when Jesus lived, and that it was small, pious, and obscure.
Obscurity in the Gospels
The gospels themselves are honest about the obscurity. When Philip tells Nathanael that they have found the one of whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael answers, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip does not argue. He says, come and see. In Mark the villagers who had known him from boyhood take offense at him: is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? A prophet, he answers, is not without honor except in his own country. In Luke they try to throw him from the brow of the hill on which their town was built.
No one inventing a hometown for a messiah would have chosen a village with no history and no prophecy attached to it, and then shown its people rejecting him. Writers who needed a messiah from Bethlehem, the city of David, produced one. Nazareth looks like a fact they had to explain, not a fiction they found useful.
The gospels also say that Jesus left it. Matthew says he left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the lake, and later calls Capernaum his own city. Most of the ministry happens there and in the fishing towns around it. Those who argue that Jesus never lived in Nazareth point to this, and they are right that Capernaum was his adult home. But a man may be named for the village he grew up in and live his working life elsewhere. Most people who have ever left home have done exactly that.
The Tradition of the Village
The tradition received by the fellowship says more. In it, Nazareth was a settlement of the northern branch of the Essenes, a village of Nazarene families near their holy mountain, and the name of the village came from the name of the people, not the other way round. Some versions say the families lived in the village and went up to Carmel for the holy days; some say Nazareth was not a town at all but a cluster of Essene households that only later grew into one.
The fellowship cannot confirm this, and we must say plainly that the archaeology does not suggest it. What has been found at Nazareth looks like an ordinary Jewish village of the hills, not a community set apart. The stone vessels show care for purity, but so do the stone vessels found in towns all over Galilee and Judea in that age; the care was general, not sectarian. There is no common hall, no cluster of ritual baths beyond the ordinary, no cemetery laid out like the one by the Dead Sea. And Carmel, though visible from the ridge, is a long day's walk away across the plain.
What we can say is that the tradition is not absurd. A village whose name echoed the branch of Isaiah, in a region where the hope of Jesse's shoot was alive, might well have been settled or favored by families who carried that hope. The descendants of David were not all in Bethlehem. The James page tells of the relatives of the Lord who, in a later century, were said to come from villages called Nazara and Kokaba, and who kept the family's genealogy. Whether those relatives were heirs of an older Nazarene settlement, or simply the descendants of a carpenter's family who stayed home, no one now can say.
Both Things True
The quarrel over Nazareth is usually set up as a choice: either Jesus was called the Nazarene because he came from Nazareth, or the name means something deeper and the village is a cover story. The fellowship thinks this is a false choice. The Name page argues that the name began with the village and gathered meaning as it went. A real village called Branch, in the hills where the Branch was awaited, is a gift to any evangelist with an ear for Hebrew. He did not need to invent it. He needed only to notice it.
And there is a teaching in the village for the student. The Way was not born in the temple city or on the holy mountain or at the famous settlement by the sea of salt. It was born in a place so small that its neighbors laughed at it, among farmers who could not imagine that one of their own was anyone. The Lection says the kingdom is as near as the next breath, and as hidden. So was Nazareth. Come and see.