Nazareth

Nazareth is absent from the Hebrew Bible, from Josephus and from the early rabbinic writings, and the gospel of John preserves a line that sounds like a local joke at its expense, asking whether anything good can come out of the place. The archaeology matches the silence: a small agricultural settlement in the Galilean hills, with rock cut tombs, cisterns, storage pits, wine and olive presses, and dwellings of the courtyard type, one of which has been excavated beneath a convent in the town centre. A few hundred people at most lived there in the first century.

That obscurity is part of why the name stuck to Jesus as an identifier. He is called the Nazarene in the gospels, and the term became the ordinary Jewish and later Arabic word for Christians. The exact derivation of the Greek forms has been argued over for a century without settlement.

Two pieces of evidence bear on the town's later history. A marble slab of uncertain provenance, acquired in Nazareth in the nineteenth century and now in Paris, carries a Greek edict against disturbing tombs; it has often been linked to Christian claims about an empty tomb, and a recent isotope study of the marble points to an origin on the island of Kos, which weakens the connection to Judaea. A Hebrew inscription found at Caesarea lists the priestly courses and their settlements after the destruction of the temple, and names Nazareth as the home of one of them, which is the earliest non Christian mention of the place.

Nazareth venerates the annunciation twice, in two churches, on the strength of two different texts. The Latin Basilica of the Annunciation, completed in 1969, stands over Byzantine and Crusader predecessors and encloses a grotto understood as part of the house of Mary. Graffiti scratched by early pilgrims were found in the excavations beneath it, including a Greek invocation that has been read as a salutation of Mary and is among the oldest such inscriptions anywhere. The upper church is hung with images of the Virgin donated by Catholic communities from every continent, each in its own national idiom, which makes the building an inadvertent museum of how one figure is imagined differently around the world.

The Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Gabriel stands over the town's spring. Its tradition follows the second century Protoevangelium of James, in which the angel first addresses Mary while she is drawing water and only afterwards speaks to her indoors. Pilgrims drink from the spring inside the church, and Mary's Well downhill is fed from the same source.

Modern Nazareth is the largest Arab city in Israel, with a Muslim majority and a substantial Christian minority of several denominations, and the two populations share a small and crowded old town. A dispute in the late 1990s over a proposed mosque on ground beside the basilica, at the tomb of a nephew of Saladin, drew international attention before the government removed the foundations in 2002. The Jewish town of Nof HaGalil, built on the ridge above from the 1950s, is administratively separate.