Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

The Nazareth Decree

A fascinating document comprising some 20 lines of rather poor Greek inscribed on a simple slab of white marble was discovered in Nazareth in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This document reads:

“Ordinance of Caesar. It is my pleasure that graves and tombs remain undisturbed in perpetuity for those who have made them for the cult of their ancestors, or children, or members of their house. If, however, any man gives information that another has either demolished them, or has in any other way extracted the buried, or has maliciously transferred them to other places in order to wrong them, or has displaced the sealing or other stones, against such a one I order that a trial be instituted, as in respect of the gods, so in regard to the cult of mortals. For it shall be much more obligatory to honor the buried. Let it be absolutely forbidden for anyone to disturb them. In the case of contravention I desire that the offender be sentenced to capital punishment on charge of violation of sepulture.”

In order to understand the full significance of this text we need to be able to make a very close approximation to the date by means of the style of writing. According to this text, the inscription is to be dated to about AD 50. The most likely emperor under whom such a decree was issued was Claudius (AD 41–54). He is known to have taken an interest in the regulation of Jewish affairs in other lands.

The secular historian Suetonius, in his biography of Claudius, made reference to riots that broke out within the Jewish community “at the instigation of Chrestus,” that is Christ, as the name appears misspelled in the text (Life of Claudius 25.4). We may conjecture that Christian Jews in Rome who preached Jesus to their fellows provoked riots in that city. Claudius seems to have expelled all the Jews from Rome (Acts 18:2). Another copy of a letter of Claudius was found among papyri in Egypt in 1920, dating to AD 41. It forbade the Alexandrian Jews “to bring or invite other Jews to come by sea from Syria. If they do not abstain from this conduct, I shall proceed against them for fomenting a malady common to the world.”

Against this background we may propose an explanation of the Nazareth Decree. The early Christians were proclaiming that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. The rabbis of the time claimed that “his disciples came and stole away the body” (Mt 28:13). Whatever the truth of the matter from the viewpoint of Claudius, he did not wish to encourage theories about the disappearance of bodies from tombs. The Nazareth Decree thus becomes a strong pointer to the resurrection of Christ, which was at that time upsetting the Roman world. So Claudius took steps to curb the spread of these disturbing ideas.