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NAZARETH
Village in the Roman province of Galilee, the home of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Always small and isolated, Nazareth is not mentioned in the OT, the Apocrypha, intertestamental Jewish writings, or the histories of Josephus. The town lies just north of the plain of Esdraelon in the limestone hills of the southern Lebanon range. It is situated on three sides of a hill. This location forms a sheltered valley with a moderate climate favorable to fruits and wildflowers. Trade routes and roads passed near Nazareth, but the village itself was not on any main road. Nazareth is about 15 miles (24.1 kilometers) west of the Sea of Galilee and 20 miles (32.2 kilometers) east of the Mediterranean. Jerusalem lies about 70 miles (112.6 kilometers) south. Archaeological remains indicate that the ancient town was higher on the western hill than the present village (cf. Lk 4:29). In the time of Christ, Nazareth, along with the entire region of south Galilee, lay outside the mainstream of Jewish life, providing the background for Nathanael’s wry remark to Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46).
Nazareth is first mentioned in the NT as the home of Mary and Joseph (Lk 1:26-27). Sometime after Jesus was born at his parents’ ancestral town of Bethlehem (about 80 miles, or 128.7 kilometers, to the south), Mary and Joseph returned to Nazareth (Mt 2:23; Lk 2:39). Jesus grew up there (Lk 2:39-40, 51), leaving the village to be baptized by John in the Jordan River (Mk 1:9). When John was arrested, Jesus moved to Capernaum (Mt 4:13). Though Jesus was often identified by his boyhood city as “Jesus of Nazareth” (see Mk 10:47; Jn 18:5, 7; Acts 2:22), the NT records only one subsequent visit by Jesus to Nazareth. On this occasion, Jesus preached in the synagogue and was rejected by the townspeople (Lk 4:16-30; cf. Mt 13:54-58; Mk 6:1-6). Jesus’ followers were also derisively called “Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5).
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.
Nazareth remained a Jewish city until the time of the emperor Constantine (d. AD 327), when it became a sacred place for Christian pilgrims. A large basilica was built in Nazareth about AD 600. Arabs and Crusaders alternately controlled the village until 1517, when it fell to the Turks, who forced all Christians to leave. Christians returned in 1620, and the town became an important Christian center.
See also Nazarene.