Jesus Archaeology # 4 Exploring 1st Century Nazareth in the Time of Jesus What's the Evidence?

hello everyone this is number four in my ongoing series on YouTube that I've call for short Jesus archaeology and what I mean by that designation title of the series is I want to take the textual evidence that we have primarily the New Testament but also other texts as well in some cases and take a look at it in the light of the material evidence the archaeology of Jesus and I think you can call that Jesus archae ology for short now that would include sites that would include artifacts things that have been found I've begun to talk about some of that but also the lay of the land what we call Landscape archaeology if you read in the gospels that Jesus travels from point A to point B you need to be on the ground to really understand that one of the things that I've done in my what 74 trips to the Holy Land research filming leading tours just studying on my own many many trips many many travels in Jordan in the land of Israel today the Holy Land Egypt east side west side of the Jordan River is to try to do what I call tracking Jesus and by that you literally walk the paths and you go on the ground and in the case of archaeology under the ground to see what you can say about the the material record that we have today after almost 2,000 years so today I want to talk about Nazareth the city or the town or really I'm going to call it the Hamlet the little Hamlet of Nazareth today when you go to the Holy Land Nazareth is the largest Arab City in what's called today the West Bank but in the time of Jesus it was a tiny little suburb of of a much larger City that most have never heard of called yafia and that in turn was on the outskirts of the major urban center of all the Galilee called sephus or seori so if you didn't watch the previous lecture on sephus you can go back and hear that and this one will have even a broader context so I'm going to share my screen right away and get started we've got a lot to cover here okay I'm going to begin with the map that I used before here's sephus you see my cursor right there moving that's the urban Capital this is just four miles to the southeast I've walked it many times it takes just over an hour to walk and you go down the hills and into a valley and this is yafa or yafia which actually is the major city south Nazareth is just a hamlet or suburb of yafia which I almost never hear any anybody talking about so we're trying to get the lay of the land and if you get the lay of the land here as you can see you're going to have to talk about sephus and then yafia outside of sephus and then Nazareth as the little Hamlet now when you travel to the holy land today Nazareth is the largest Arab City in the Galilee but it wasn't that way in the time of Jesus so let's start with some texts I realize many you may not read Greek but you can probably make some of these letters out certainly the noon so we have three terms here that are used in the New Testament Nazareth Nazarene which would be somebody from Nazareth and sometimes that's spelled nazaran so it would almost be like saying New York a New Yorker and a New York I or something along those lines here are the terms used in the Greek New Testament they're all very similar similar translated in these various ways and they all have a context now Mark 1:9 is our first and earliest mention of Nazareth in terms of a first century mention in the New Testament in those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee it's a place clearly and was baptized by John in the Jordan River so we can track Jesus if I go back on the map here he went down into the Jes Valley and then it's literally just a slot on down and John is baptizing just at the end of this jesel Valley where it empties out into the Jordan Valley and up and down along the Jordan River so Matthew 2:23 and he talking about Joseph went and lived or dwelt in a city called Nazareth that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled he shall be called a Nazarene another there's somebody from Nazareth now we don't know exactly what prophet he has in mind because there's no Messianic prophecy saying he will be called a Nazarene but I'm going to show you one that I think he must be referring to that is the author of Matthew now according to Matthew Joseph and Mary leave Egypt after the birth of Jesus when they've had to flee from the persecution of Herod the Great and they waited in Egypt until died now Mark and Luke don't know anything about this of course Mark doesn't even have the birth of Jesus but he has Jesus in Nazareth when you begin the story but the way Matthew has it is he becomes a Nazarene because Joseph picked this city out I think that's probably unlikely because in Luke we have a different account and I think Luke is more reliable here for various reasons so an angel is sent from God but the geography unto a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin betro to a man whose name was Joseph of the House of David and the virgin's name was Mary and then when they returned from Jerusalem after the birth of Jesus they performed everything according to the law and they returned to Galilee to their own City Nazareth I think that makes more sense given all of our records that Mary is from sephus that's what I presented last time and she marries a man Joseph who is from Nazareth and when she's told that she's going to have this child according to Luke uh she's in Nazareth and they go back to Nazareth Luke chapter 4 he came to Nazareth where he'd been brought up so throughout the gospels you get Jesus from Nazareth Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus the Nazarene so again the New Yorker the guy of New York the guy from New York now here's where people get confused in Hebrew there's a word neter so here's the n Sound noon and here's the TZ sound that's called aadi and then the here's the n Sound with Nazir and instead you've got a Zion they might sound somewhat the same but you can see they don't look the same no one writing NZ would accidentally write neter they also have different vowels so what is a Nazir these are verbs aeter has to do with a branch coming forth and a Nazir has to do with the verb to separate as we'll explain so the word Nazar is TZ it's it's this word netzer in Hebrew at least so Isaiah 11:1 there will come forth the Shute from the the stump of Jesse now Jesse is David's father so this is the davidic Messianic line it's cut off after the Babylonian exile there're No More Kings of the davidic line Allowed by the Babylonians the Persians the Greeks or the Romans but then from that stump comes a neter that's the word a branch that will grow out of the roots of that stump of Jesse so what it's saying is that although the line of David is going to be cut off someday a branch will Sprout forth there's another word Branch that's used in Zachariah and Jeremiah it is seak very similar meaning but here it is neter very clearly in Hebrew that I think is what Matthew is referring to that he's going to be called a branch or a nerite so we're talking here about a branch dividian a Messianic title that was picked up in 1993 and earlier by David KES who became leader of a group that sometimes called itself the branch devidians and I was involved in that Waco crisis you can look on my YouTube channel as well as my blog and I have a lot of material on that but you see where the name comes from in terms of uh David Kish picking that up now Nazir is something entirely different that has to do with separating it's a different idea this is a branch springing forth this is separating they're not connected in any way even though in English people get mixed up numbers 6 verse two say to the people of Israel whether a man or a woman wants to make a special vow the vow of a separated one to separate there's the verb himself to the Lord and if you remember you can look it up Numbers Chapter 6 the person who does this male or female declares a time for how long they're going to do it and then they abstain from certain kinds of ritual defilement touching dead bodies going to funerals having any kind of grapes or alcohol not even touching unfermented grapes also growing their hair on their body all of their body hair without cutting it so it's a of austerity and dedication for a certain reason that you would make in Israel today I've met a couple of nazers who have taken the Nazarite vow it's still done rarely but still done in Judaism today John the baptizer is said to be great before the Lord and He will drink no wine or strong drink and be filled with the Holy Spirit now everybody assumes that he is is a Nazir from his mother's womb and that's possible but notice it doesn't say that he's a Nazir and the other Nazir that everybody knows is Samson in the Hebrew Bible in the Book of Judges and it very clearly says in that text that he is to be a Nazir which means he's to follow this entire ritual of separating himself from all kinds of defilements and growing his hair in so forth so whether John the Baptist did that or not it's become part of the movies he's always shown as this wild and crazy guy with long hair and kind of screaming at the top of his lungs he might not have been that way at all if you think about it but he's not drinking alcohol well James the brother of Jesus didn't drink alcohol according to our early text and Jesus apparently did drink alcohol or this is usually usually wine in Luke 7:33 Jesus comments on that and this is from the Q Source one of our earliest traditions of Jesus material John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine now notice it doesn't say meat he's not even eating bread what we learn from other texts particularly from Josephus and here you have to go to a slavonic version of Josephus but won't eat anything that doesn't grow naturally he's eating what is usually translated from the Greek text Locust and wild honey but Locust could well mean a plant a honey cake that grows in the desert it has to do with the translation from Hebrew to Greek according to the ebionites he's not even eating Locust these insects he's just eating a kind of a honey wafer that grows on plants in the desert and of course he's not drinking wine now Jesus referred to here as a son of man has come eating and drinking meaning he drinks wine of course he eats to live but it doesn't say meat he eats bread and he drinks wine and he's accused of being a glutton and a drunkard a friend of sinners okay so those are the two terms now one of the ways we now know and this is the archaeology was this little fragment there's several fragments but we want to talk about this one right here three little fragments that were found at cesaria 1962 and here you have you can tell that is the noon that s the r and the Tav neter and it's nerit it refers to the city of Nazareth and here's a translation it's talking about the Priestly courses if you remember in the book of Chronicles different priests would serve different terms of time and there were these 24 Priestly courses and they would serve probably for two weeks of the year so that you didn't have the priests are scattered throughout the land of Israel so anciently in the Hebrew Bible these courses of the priests are preserved and so the 18th course which is called haes is actually in Nazareth and now this shows us how to spell the town this is the town of Nazareth and we have other references to that as well so here's the picture I used before this is modern Nazareth spilling over into the baate nofa valley and this is the hill upon which sephus was built so go back and watch that video now even if you go to the 1830s this is the famous artist Roberts this is what Nazareth looked like notice it's not the huge Metropolis it's actually set among the hills of what we now call Modern Nazareth if you've ever been to Nazareth you know it's this gigantic Metropolis with up and down valleys and Hills snaking around very congested very populated but in the 1830s just maybe 200 years ago it's just a little village and this is REM here's a mosque and then you have the Church of the enunciation remembering the the Christian memory of Mary having the appearance of the angel Gabriel I would love to go back in time and to walk these streets of Nazareth and can you imagine doing some of the archaeology here people say there's no archaeological evidence for Nazareth well because Nazareth is this huge Megapolis today and there's little chance of doing much digging anymore but uh can you imagine in the 19th century if you'd excavated here this is a bit later this is in the 1860s you can see how it's beginning to grow but it's still about the same and here are the hills to the North and the west and this would be the hill of sephus that would be 1860s very rural again you could do all kinds of archaeology I wish I live back then in some ways now here we go to the 1920s it's still a small little Hamlet any of this could have been excavated this could be excavated this could be excavated and today that's no longer very easy to do but we're going to see some evidence for some archaeology now Nazareth Village that I'm going to show you in a minute is right here on this Hillside just above the Central City and and the central city or town really let's call it a town not a city of ancient Nazareth the little Hamlet was just right here and there's a water source here that's why it's here in the Little Valley you got all of these hills around but there's a water source in the valley and this becomes Branch town naret okay today look at that look at the difference okay see this right here this is the modern Church of the enunciation one of the most beautiful churches in the holy land and in this photo from 1920s it's not even built yet but it's going to be built here you can see some evidence of the church here and if you go back to Roberts you can see the front of it here so let's go on and look at that so when people talk about the archaeology of Nazareth I mean you could go up and dig in this area but this is the concentrated area of anything to do with Jesus growing up in Nazareth here's a closeup of that church of the enunciation and here are those buildings on the hill and this is Nazareth Village Nazareth Village is an attempt to reconstruct what this might have been up here where there's more room to build and it's an amazing thing I take groups there all the time to look at it and they try to do everything as I'll explain when we get to it based on how things have been built and done in the first century so it's pretty fabulous to visit most Pilgrims go to the church it's built over the traditional House of Mary and Joseph and this would be the place according to Luke where the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary now Ken dark has really done some marvelous work on Nazareth and he's particularly worked on an excavation under a church and he has looked at Roman Byzantine and crusader ruins and down in this lower level here this is the entrance and threshold going into first century remains of a house and their other first century parts of the house right here and I've been there I've looked at it extensively you can see I've gone down through it and uh spent time with the sisters that have helped me greatly to understand it and then I have both of Ken dart's books highly recommend these I have them on my bookshelf if you go to james.com up at the top you'll see bookshelf you can get the links to these books so I'm basing what I'm saying on a lot of the work that Ken dark has done okay here's the Church of the anunciation right here and we're going to look at a first century house that has been excavated right here and also this the sisters of Nazareth where we also have a first century excavation I remember in graduate school I was reading about archaeology I hadn't done any yet this was at the University of Chicago and the basic idea back in those days that we were taught is there are no first century synagogues that have ever been found so anything about synagogues is completely fictitious and imposed later on the text by the gospel writers making them very late and derivative and also that there are no archaeological remains uh from the first century in what is historically called Nazareth leading some people to say well there probably wasn't even a city or town called Nazareth here's another map where you can kind of uh Place yourself so here's that Basilica with the great dome right across the street is the Maran Center where you have one excavation that's the first one we'll look at briefly and the other is under the Church of the sisters of the Nazareth Covenant now here's the one across the street from the church as you can clearly see so if you go to Nazareth and you'll see all the Magnificent sites inside the church walk out cross the street and go to the Maran Center here's when it was being excavated these are the ruins of a first century house I'm not saying it's the house of Mary and Joseph I don't know whose house it was but it absolutely is a first century house it's been securely dated and you can see that you're down to first century Nazareth so all those doubts about well there was no first century Nazareth they're just not the case today there's a visitor center you can walk around and you can see some of the ruins and I've been allowed to go down into some of these ruins and there's a bell sistern and other amazing things that have been found and then there artifacts that they'll show you so this first century house is very important now you say well why haven't more things been found well you if you excavated here which is now sacred territory part of the grounds of the church what do you think you're going to find you're going to find more of the village of first century Nazareth here's a building a modern building right next door there's a flaf shop right there I remember because we ate lunch there uh what are you going to go under their shop and dig well if you did more of first century Nazareth this is not the only structure obviously and if you go back to our map notice how close this is to this so this has been Doug and this has been Doug and what do you find first century remains now the sisters of Nazareth this is the entrance to their Church you see a traditional statue of Joseph and Mary and little Jesus and but you got to go down under the church to see the excavations and there is a picture that I took with my own camera fabulous picture and you can see the meter Mark and this is a first century level and you can go down into the chambers of the house and then it's built up so that you have bedrock and you have Byzantine and crusader ruins so this was revered and finally a church on top in the Byzantine and crusader Peri period if any place has a chance of being at least what they thought was the house of Mary because of the Byzantine church and the Crusader Church above it this would probably be it if you get those two books by Ken Dart he talks about those so what did it look like uh this is bal's painting uh here's his website be sure and give him credit archaeologyillustrated.com look look at all of his amazing color portraits he's an archaeological artist and the hillside he has remember that Hillside going up and then the little village and he's imagining it probably having what 100 200 it's a little Hamlet and you got a road coming in and these are more Hills of Nazareth all populated today with that congestion and sephus would be possibly this here I'm not sure if he represented the hill exactly Beyond but it's to the north so this gives you an idea of what it might have been like in the first century just imagining with some Fields it's an agricultural rural village where Joseph applied his trade in the previous video on sephus I presented the possibility that Joseph and the boys growing up were making their way to sephus every morning and it's an hour and a half walk or so from the village and working in the stonemason industry as that amazing capital of here at antibus was re being built so if you'll permit me a bit of speculative Romanticism here as Jesus is growing up in this tiny little village remember what it says in the gospels can anything good come out of Nazareth that's just a little Hamlet what is Nazareth well it's a branch town and probably call that because the families that populate this Village of the lineage of David I don't know that all were but there's a lot of close relationships between families in these Villages where people marry other people from the same Clan so I like to imagine Jesus growing up here here's the road north to sephus but all of these Hills I imagine him wandering and praying and thinking about his mission and also working in the Building Trades so when I look at that picture that's what I think about now here's Nazareth Village isn't this fabulous there's the synagogue there's one of the houses here's inside one of the houses you can actually see the thatch roof everything in Nazareth Village is built as it would have been in the first century based upon archaeological findings in other words they don't use fiberglass and Modern Nails and screw SCS and braces and so forth uh the idea is to be as authentic as possible and they've created a working village where they grow crops there's a stone cutting area where they cut stones out of the Bedrock um you got the animals running around it's a fabulous place to go here I am in the reconstructed synagogue uh reading from the Gospel of Luke 4 which tells of Jesus going up into this synagogue stepping up to the bench and taking up the scroll of Isaiah and finding the chapter we call 61 and reading it to the congregation who sit on benches around the edges and this is how all of our first century synagogues look if you go with me to one of my tours we'll go to several synagogues authentic synagogues from the first century that have these features including one at migdal and now there's another one that's been found and one at Mada and those two in particular are very very similar to this now I've heard people say for years that there's no precipice at Nazareth so if you go with me I'll take you out on the precipice of Nazareth if you remember the story in Luke 4 the crowd takes Jesus to the brow of the city and they're going to cast him off into the valley below and this is called today the precipice the tourists go there and believe me if if you get close and look down it's dizzy now here I want to introduce something else let's go back to yafa or yafia don't confuse it with the port city of yafa today or Jaffa that's down by Tel Aviv uh the city where Jonah sail from this is in so here you've got sephus the ba nofa Valley that goes all the way to the Sea of Galilee by the way when Jesus would travel to the Sea of Galilee maybe to visit Mary Magdalene or to finally go to Capernaum he would simply walk down this Valley comes out right here and I'm going to show you later a whole presentation on this area of the arbell and the cliffs overlooking migdal there's migdall and then Capernaum and Guin these are all very important in the archaeology of Jesus but back to sephus so here's sephus so Jesus is walking hour and a half every morning maybe 4:30 5 o' if it's like our digs you need to be at work by six by sunrise and he's working in the Building Trades with Joseph and his brothers and then back to Nazareth at night but what about yafa what is yafa read Josephus look up yafa in Josephus or yafia as it's called today in Hebrew and you're going to see that Josephus who says he stayed there describes it as a wall town so I'd like to call this a town or a village this is a city and this is a little Hamlet nestled in those Hills that we saw because there's a water source you see the idea this is all beginning to make sense now can you see off of today well you can see the hill where the center of the city was and yes there were some excavations there over the years but it's so congested now with modern buildings that you can't get much of a sense of what it was but if you read josephus's inscription it's very clear here's uh version of it that gets you a little closer here we have sephoria which which is another name for sephus and here you have Nazareth you see how it's nestled between those Hills easy to get to sephus from because it's on the North side and there you have yafa so yafa sprawls around this way almost taking in the hamlet of Nazareth here is a a closeup view of this would be the Hamlet of Nazareth and it's basically a 40 minute walk walk to yafa because it is kind of rugged terrain and all of this now is modern Nazareth so when you drive into modern Nazareth it's very complex with all these side streets and so farth you're completely lost but if you back off and look more at the ancient site you can begin to get a view or even if you look at those 19th century photographs so let's talk a little bit about Branch toown Isaiah 11 vers1 most likely if it is a little village with the 100 200 people living there as I said these Clans are intermingled and mixed and Jesus then is called the guy from Nazareth which is becomes then for him a very specific designation they're not going to be many people of prominence that are coming from Nazareth but Jesus becomes very popular popular in a similar way John the baptizer I think is from a little village called inum where I've spent years of my life Excavating just outside of anaram and I'll cover that probably next time because I kind of want to bottle this somewhat sequentially in terms of the chronology so we need to do the birth of John the Baptist as well and we'll get to that and a cave that's been discovered there that may very well be linked to the historical first century John the Baptist it's very exciting anyway so we got this little village or Hamlet but it's linked to the town of yafa and the town of yafa in turn with the little Hamlet or Village of Nazareth is linked to sephus very closely geographically so this is going to transform our whole understanding of Jesus I think I mean did he walked walk into yafa did he know yafa if it's a wall town if there's significant buildings there he could have also worked there and had friends there so he didn't just grow up out in the middle of nowhere and it's also just adjacent to mount Taber which is a major landmark in the Galilee and you can see on that map as I pointed out how you can walk down to the Sea of G so it's very strategically located and I want you to think like that when you think of the historical Jesus I'm going to argue that the headquarters Jesus sets up at kafar Capernaum as it's called today in English is a strategic move as he begins to calculate and lay out his strategy for bringing about the kingdom of God I want to mention my book The Jesus Dynasty again tickly in connection with this series because most of the sites and the points that I make in this series on archaeology and it has dozens of illustrations going through all of this material now this series is going to go much further than the book but the book is a foundation so if you haven't gotten the book I highly recommend that you get it and you can use it as you read along and study the things that were covering in this series so take care everybody let's go next to the home of John the Baptist and let's dig around and survey and walk around and see what we can figure out about the lovely Village of anaram which is west of the city of Jerusalem [Music] today

Channel: James Tabor

Views: 13,255

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Id: I24yM_9gWoM

Length: 34min 57sec (2097 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2024