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What sort of place was first-century Nazareth?

It is often said that Nazareth was just a small village when Jesus was growing up. Historians and archaeologists have reached this interpretation for two reasons. First, as first-century Nazareth is rarely mentioned in written sources, it must have been very small and insignificant. Second, the approximate perimeter of the first-century settlement can be established by plotting the rock-cut Jewish tombs on a map. First-century Jews almost never lived on former cemeteries because of the rules of Jewish religious law.

In fact, both those grounds for establishing the limits of first-century Nazareth are erroneous. Nazareth was seldom mentioned at any time in the first millennium AD—even when it was plainly an important place, for example the seat of a Byzantine bishop, as discussed in Chapter 2.

Likewise, we can’t use the distribution of Roman-period tombs to give us the outline of a first-century Nazareth. All the Roman-period tombs in Nazareth are of types which could date from the mid-first century onwards. This has been used by so-called ‘mythicists’—people who believe that both Jesus and Nazareth were fictitious—to claim that Jesus’ Nazareth never existed at all. They are certainly wrong: there is, as we have seen in previous chapters, plenty of archaeological evidence for early-first century Nazareth. But it does man that none of the tombs need date from the first three decades of the first century.

What is more, in first-century Jewish religious law there was no prohibition on constructing a tomb on a disused settlement. It was just living on, or in, a cemetery that was forbidden. So later tombs could be built on land that was once inside the occupied area of a settlement.

That is, neither of the two standard arguments that Nazareth was just a small village in the first century is sustainable. This is far from saying that Nazareth was a teeming metropolis at the time. In order to establish how big a place it was, it is better to look at the distribution of structures and finds associated with settlement—houses, storage spaces, and agricultural faculties—and then compare them to other contemporary settlements of early first-century date in Galilee. (See Figures 6.2 and 6.3.)

When we do this, an alternative picture merges. The settlement evidence, outlined in Chapter 2 and at the Sisters of Nazareth site, suggests that a substantial area of what is today central Nazareth was occupied in the first-century. This extends from the Sisters of Nazareth site to the eastern side of the present Church of the Annunciation compound, and from the White Mosque in the north to immediately south of the Church of the Annunciation.

Reconstructed in this way, first-century Nazareth looks like more a hamlet. It encompassed an area equivalent to much of central Nazareth today. Even this could be underestimating its extent, because most of the area outside those limits has never been archaeologically excavated.

It is also instructive to compare what we know of first-century Nazareth’s archaeology with the nearest first-century settlement, Yafi’a. Although often neglected in historical or archaeological discussions of Nazareth, Yafi’a is about 3 kilometres to the south-west of Nazareth—much closer than Sepphoris. It has a strikingly similar set of archaeological attributes to those found in Nazareth, including similar storage pits, tombs, and portable objects such as pottery.

Unlike Nazareth, Yafi’a is attested by Josephus as a town which was a centre of Jewish resistance against the Roman army in the First Jewish Revolt. What exactly a town means in this context is—as we saw for Nazareth, hard to say, but plainly Yafi’a was more than a small village.

There has been many excavations in Yafi’a, and these have found a lot of evidence for the Early Roman-period settlement. This evidence includes a three-story underground complex of ten storage pits, houses, quarrying, and tombs. The settlement at Yafi’a probably only began at the end of the second century BC or at the start of the first century AD. A series of hiding places date from the First Jewish Revolt itself, although no trace has been found of the double wall which Josephus says was built by its defenders.

From even this brief summary of the archaeological evidence from Yafi’a, the similarity with Nazareth is obvious. This leads us to a startling conclusion: there is no reason to doubt that first-century Nazareth is in archaeological terms a similar settlement to first-century Yafi’a.

Josephus never mentions Nazareth, but this is easily explained. The rebels weren’t fighting the Romans at every single settlement in Galilee. They may have decided to make a stand at Yafi’a because it was located on a steep-wised hill and highly defensible, whereas nearby Nazareth wasn’t.

If Nazareth and Yafi’a were the same sort of places in the first century, what type of settlement do they represent? There is nothing to indicate that either place was a major Roman town such as Sepphoris. But there is a form of settlement, common throughout the Roman Empire, of which both Yafi’a and Nazareth could be examples.

These settlements lacked public buildings, although they may have had a religious focus such as a temple, synagogue, or church. However, they provided a series of functions serving the needs of surrounding farms, such as craftworking or crop processing, and may have had traditional markets.

In the Western Roman provinces, archaeologists call this type of settlement either ‘small towns’ or vici. In what were the Eastern provinces, they call the same type of settlements ‘large villages’. Whatever they are called, the settlement form is similar, and they were extremely common throughout the Roman world.

This interpretation would explain all the archaeological attributes of both Yafi’a and Nazareth. It would also explain the Roman-period pattern of settlements which my own survey of the valley detected. This suggested two patterns of small settlements, probably farms, one of which was focused on Sepphoris, the other on Nazareth.

This has been outlined in Chapter 2 of this book, but to recapitulate. All the objects used by people in the settlements near Nazareth—and in Nazareth itself—were produced by Jews. Those settlements close to Sepphoris had objects produced by Jews and non-Jews, reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Roman-period urban society at Sopphoris.

This strongly suggests that those people who lived near, and in, Nazareth emphasized their own Jewish culture and identity. They seem to have actively resisted the market forces and cultural imperialism of the Roman province. In fact, Nazareth, Sepphoris, and Nahal Zippori may form the most clear-cut example of local people resisting Roman imperial culture anywhere in the Roman Empire.

This itself implies that Nazareth was more than just an insignificant hamlet. It was in some sense a focus for Jewish communities in the valley, in opposition to pro-Roman Sepphoris. This may be seen also in economic terms, with communities which avoided contact with Sepphoris and its culture using Nazareth as a centre for the local economy.

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