This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday.

Monday School.

STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday” but by all means feel free to call it by its new nickname “The Rainbow After The Big Blow” whenever you’re pressed for time.

Today’s Lesson: What’s The Deal With Nazareth?

Nazareth, the Bible tells us, is where Jesus came from. That’s why you’ll sometimes hear people say “Jesus of Nazareth.”

In fact, the Bible mentions Nazareth about 29 times. Those references appear only in the four Gospels and Acts, however, and are pretty much evenly distributed among them.

The people who wrote the Old Testament apparently never heard of it.

Paul apparently never heard of it.

The rabbinic literature of the Jews never mentions it.

In fact, outside the authors of the four Gospels and Acts, virtually no one seems to have ever heard of a first century Nazareth.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, its alleged holy places aren’t mentioned until after Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in 313 CE.

Odd, isn’t it?

At least two scholars say it’s not really odd at all once you realize that Nazareth didn’t exist at the time Jesus is alleged to have lived there.

According to William Harwood’s Mythology’s Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus, “The earlier writer, Mark, not having Matthew’s addiction to prophecy-fulfillment at any price, made no mention of Bethlehem. He declared instead that Ieous came from the dispersion (nazareth) of Galilaia (MARK 1:9)…. Mark’s declaration that Jesus came from the dispersion (nazareth), meaning the worldwide community of Jews outside Judaea (equivalent to diaspora), was misinterpreted by Matthew and Luke to mean that he came from a city called Nazareth. Matthew compounded his error by having Joseph and Mary settle in Nazareth to fulfill a prophecy that the messiah was to be called a nazirite (Greek: nazoraios; Hebrew: naziyr; MATT. 2:23). In fact the term nazirite, or nazoraios, had nothing to do with any city of Nazareth, since no such place existed until the fifth century CE when one was built by a Christian Emperor to whom the nonexistence of Jesus’ alleged hometown was an embarrassment.” (p. 258, 260).

According to a lecture author Frank Zindler gave back in 1993 and which was reprinted in the Winter 1996-1997 issue of American Atheist magazine, Nazareth is not mentioned by any ancient historian or geographer until hundreds of years after Jesus is alleged to have lived there. The Talmud mentions 63 other Galilean towns, but not Nazareth. Josephus – who was intimately familiar with Galilee (a region about the size of Rhode Island) – mentions 45 towns and villages there but not Nazareth. One of those cities he mentions (Japha) is just a mile from present-day Nazareth.

According to Zindler, several other things make it very difficult to take the Gospels seriously when they discuss Nazareth. Luke 4:16-30 claims that Jesus preached in Nazareth and really pissed the people off. Indeed, they were so pissed off that they rushed to grab him and throw him off the cliff of the hill the town was built on. The town we know now as Nazareth, however, has only recently extended up to any hilltop. For much of its existence, it has pretty much been limited to a valley floor and the lower part of an adjacent hill. Archaeological excavations reveal the hilltop to have been devoid of buildings prior to the 20th century. No lofty cliff heights exist that might led to death or injury. The required penalty for the sort of blasphemy that had enraged the crowd was death by stoning, in any case – not being thrown from a cliff.

And what else do archaeological excavations reveal? Virtually no buildings anywhere in Nazareth older than the last half of the third century – and there is no reason to believe that the people who lived in those buildings called their community “Nazareth.” According to Zindler, “Before the second or third century C.E. … the site now occupied by Nazareth was a necropolis, a city of the dead [probably for the nearby settlement of Japha]. The hillside underlying part of the present city is riddled with tombs and natural caves which for over a thousand years were used for burials. Since Jewish law prohibited cemeteries from being in the midst of inhabited sites, we can be quite sure that there was no Jewish city at the present site in the days when a supposedly Jewish Jesus is supposed to have been running loose there.”

Might some other nearby locale harbor the “real” Nazareth? Not likely. Early Church Father Origen (circa 182-254 CE) lived just 30 miles away from present-day Nazareth but apparently never succeeded in finding it there or anywhere else despite his attempts to investigate and solve various Bible problems like this. He ended up arguing for a “mystical” interpretation of the Gospels rather than a literal one.

Despite all these problems, visitors today can book a trip to Nazareth and “see” Joseph’s carpenter shop, the room where Mary received the angel Gabriel, the kitchen she cooked in, and even her birthplace. When they’re done in Nazareth, they can go see her other birthplaces in Sepphoris and Jerusalem, too. It seems tourists really get a lot for their money in the Holy Land!

Like Harwood, Zindler argues that “Nazareth” really began as something else entirely but the ignorant authors of the Gospels mistook it for a place.

And for good measure, Zindler shows that Capernaum, Bethany, and several other New Testament places are about as real as Oz once you subject them to serious analysis.

Once again, it seems the more one examines the Bible, the less plausible all those old Sunday School stories about Jesus become….