Looking for detailed information of daily life in ancient Nazareth.
What would the town be like? What would be people’s daily routines? Daily rituals? What did people eat? How did people speak? etc.
Similar to this, but in greater details.
Thank you all in advance for your help.
If you’re refering to Nazareth at the time of Jesus, I should meniton that it is disputed whether or not Nazareth had already been founded at the time of Jesus (Jesus of Nazareth being in this case a corruption of “Jesus the Nazarene”) So, accurate infos about a possibly unexistant place will probably be scarce.
Thanks for the help, clairobscur. That’s a very interesting point… Never even considered that the place might not even exist…
Any idea where Jesus would be from if not Nazareth? Somewhere in Galilee?
How about general farming village at the time though?
Mainly looking for pointer as to where I could find such information.
Wikipedia has some useful background.
“Nazareth is not mentioned in Jewish ancient texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, nor in Josephus. References to Jewish or Judaean settlement in the area do not occur until three hundred years after Christ’s crucifixion. In 1962 a Hebrew inscription found in Caesarea, dating to the late 3rd or early 4th century, mentions Nazareth as one of the places in which the priestly divisions were residing after the Great Jewish Revolt. From the three fragments that have been found, it is possible to show that the inscription was a complete list of the twenty-four priestly courses (cf. 1 Chronicles 24:7-19; Nehemiah 24:1-21), with each course (or family) assigned its proper order and the name of each town or village in Galilee where it settled.”
Do a search on ancient life in daily lsrael. These are just the first few useful links.
http://www.womenintheancientworld.com/daily_life_in_israel_at_the_time_of_christ.htm
They just opened for Uriah Heap in Bulgaria, so I’m guessing Nazareth wasn’t all that great…
I don’t mean to cast aspersions, but aldiboronti is quoting material out of context. That very same article says that Nazareth did exist back then.
So it definitely existed, and later in the article they cite evidence that it had a Jewish population around the time of Christ. However, it is possible that Jews were a minority there until after the time of the Jewish Revolt.
Firstly, I linked to the full Wikipedia article, which rather defeats the purpose if my idea was to quote selectively to bolster an argument.
Secondly, if my intention had been to cast doubt on the existence of Nazareth I would certainly have quoted from some of the skeptical articles that Wikipedia itself links to. (Which, as it happens, raise valid points about the objectivity of some of the archaeological work on the site.)
Such was not my intention.
Just as well you cast no aspersions. They would have fallen by the wayside.
(On a more neutral note, I’d have to say that Exapno Mapcase answered the original question far more effectively than either of us.)
The are many references to Nazareth itself as a proper noun, not just that Jesus was a Nazarene.
• Mark 1:9 At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
• Matthew 2:23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: “He will be called a Nazarene.”
• Matthew 4:13 Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali—
• Matthew 21:11 The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”
• Luke 1:26 In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee
• Luke 2:4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
That the bible refers to a town called Nazareth is not in question. The question is, are there other sources that would verify that there was a place with that name at that time.
This is more of the circular reasoning that answers any questions about the validity of information in the New Testament by pointing to the New Testament as an authoritative source.
clairobscur wrote
As if the word Nazareth was inferred only indirectly — and incorrectly (“a corruption”) — from “the Nazarene”. I am establishing that we get the word Nazareth directly, not from a “corruption” of anything. Understand now?
You can visit a village in the area built like a Williamsburg that can give you an idea.
But Nazareth was different than the rest of “the small farming villages” in Galilee. It was on the outskirts of Sephoris. You could see Sephoris from the highest hills at Nazareth - it was about an hour or so walk away. It might have been, after Jerusalem, the largest city in the traditional boundaries of Palestine (if not iit was top 4). It had water works and an amphitheater likely built when Jesus was a teenager. Its residents by and large sided with the Romans in the revolt of 66.
In 4 BC either right before Jesus was born or right after - Herod the Great died after ruling Galilee for 44 years. At his death Jewish-Galilean Nationalists arose a and briefly seized Sepphoris from Herod’s son Antipas. Almost immediately Roman troops north razed Sepphoris and sold this new generation of Jewish-nationalist rebels into slavery. What that meant for Nazareth [almost literally] a spear throw away was … (realizing we are in SDGQ) trouble - at the very least.
Whether you translate tekton (what Joseph was) as Carpenter, Builder, Mason, Artisan or Day Laborer – likely he (and probably) Jesus worked quite a bit in Sephoris… sort of shooting the traditional idea of Jesus and Joseph building chairs and fixing plows for the ~200-400 Nazerians.
No, I don’t think so. The gospels were all written in the first century AD. They expliclity refer to a town named Nazareth. This rules out the possibility that Nazareth did not exist in the first century AD, unless we argue
(a) that the gospel writers foretold the subsequent foundation of a town of that name, and decided to include it in their gospels, which is frivolous, or
(b) that the scholarly consensus is wrong, and the gospels were in fact written much later than we suppose.
And we can go further. If Nazareth had been a very recent foundation at the time of the Gospel of Matthew, say, a large part of Matthew’s readership would have been aware of this, so Matthew would hardly have chosen it as the location of Jesus’s childhood.
So it seems likely that both the authors of the gospels, and their intended readership, accepted that Nazareth existed as a settlement in the early first century. And, if they accepted that, it was probably true.
You can argue that “Jesus the Nazarene” may not in fact have come from Nazareth, and the gospel location of his youth in this place is an error, or a fcition. But it seems much harder to argue that Nazareth did not exist at all.
The site currently identified as Nazareth dates from the 2nd Century CE. The fact that there has always been “human habitation” in the area means nothing. There is no solid evidence that a village called Nazareth existed in the 1st Century CE and the site which does exist does not match the physical description in the Gospels (it doesn’t have a synagogue or a cliff).
The other Gospels are not independent of Mark. If the name originated with Mark (the first Gospel written and which all three of the others show knowledge if not abject dependency) based on a misunderstanding of the appellation, “Jesus the Nazarene,” then it would mean little that the other Gospels assumed it was a real town. The authors did not have a very thorough awareness of Palestinian geography and Mark is especially bad. Nazareth would not be the only place name which he invented (if he invented it).
It isn’t true that Matthew’s audience would have any awareness of whether the place existed or not. They were Greek Gentiles, not Palestinian Jews.
Normally, yes, I would consider that a fair assessment. You’re probably right in this instance. However, since the references are to prophecies that were supposed to have been fulfilled by someone from Nazareth, the claims are inevitable whether or not a community of that name existed at the right time. Few people even at the time of writing would know whether an actual village was occupied a century previous, but they would know of occupation in the general area, which would have sufficed for the purpose. All I am saying is that the mere mention of the name as support is suspect, since its mention had an ulterior motive.
On preview, I see that DtC has similar comments.
First, thank you all again for your help.
Actually this is very interesting… I have read a bit more but encountered a problem.
There seemed to be 2 documented revolts around that time in Sepphoris.
One was right after Herod’s death in 4 BC.
The other was in response to Quirinius census in 6 AD.
Both were lead by Judas of Galilee, son of Hezekiah…
So, were there actually 2 revolts? or was it only one? People were simply confused by Josephus’ account?
If there was only one, when do you think it happened?
These were two Judas’ and two distinct revolts.
In 4 BCE, king Herod the Great died. Immediately, there were several revolts against the rule of his successors.
*There was Judas, the son of that Hezekiah who had been head of the robbers. (This Hezekiah had been a very strong man, and had with great difficulty been caught by Herod.) Judas, having gotten together a multitude of men of a profligate character about Sepphoris in Galilee, made an assault upon the palace there, and seized upon all the weapons that were laid up in it, and with them armed every one of those that were with him, and carried away what money was left there. He became terrible to all men, by tearing and rending those that came near him; and all this in order to raise himself, and out of an ambitious desire of the royal dignity, for he hoped to obtain that as the reward not of his virtuous skill in war, but of his extravagance in doing injuries. *
[Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 17.271-272]
That is all Josephus says and does not tell us what happened to this Judas. That is all he says about Sephoris at this time. But it wasn’t just Judas who rose up there were several simultaneous revolts. One of the rebels was Simon of Peraea a former servant of Herods seems to have been the most credible (Tacitus and Josephus both mention him). At the same time a Shepherd named Athronges and his brothers (who probably made Messianic claims) led another uprising. Not surpringly, the Roman’s had to intervene and the governor of Syria, Publius Quinctilius Varus probably sent three of the four Syrian legions (which was a lot of manpower – this was major military operation. At least 2000 people were crucified – if Judas lived at all he lived out his days low-key incognito.
Then in 6 AD largely because Herod’s son Herod Archelaus was a hideously incompetent ruler of Judea, he was exiled and Judea was made a Roman province. At that point Judas the Galilean leads yet another revolt (in 6 A.D.) Josephus tells us this Judas is the founder of the Zealots [Jewish Antiquities 18.23]. He was from the Galilean town of Gamala and worked in concert with a Pharisee. Josephus pretty much flat out blames him and the Zealots ideology for the revolt in 66. This Judas makes a cameo in the Acts of the Apostles
*After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. *