show_no_mercy

Look at the subtle sleight of hand I bolded. "[D]ated to the first century", eh? It would be more accurate to say late first century. What if Nazareth didn't exist in the early 1st century, but was settled by Jews in the late first century?

There was a hugely significant event that happened in the late 1st century that mixed everything up. What you wrote seems to imply that every settlement, every landmark, every town, etc. was static from 1 CE to 99 CE. That's a 100 year window with no wars, displacements, evacuations, resettlements, etc.

Nazareth being Jesus' hometown might be a post-2nd temple retrojection into late 2nd temple Galilee.

ApostateAbe

Right. The improbable thing is that the town would begin to exist only after the story. 100.000% of all the other times towns are founded, they are referenced in written accounts and stories and myths only afterward. That is because there isn't much of a reason to found such a town. The Salm theory sort of requires secret conspirators (those who founded the town), unknown motivation and continually successful secrecy. But, really, you can explain all the evidence by Nazareth having been just a small hamlet with a few families, and that fits a very-well-known historical pattern. I can understand why mythical-Nazareth theory finds the most support among advocates of the mythical-Jesus theory. If the gospels named an existing town that wasn't referenced in any other historical documents, then that is sort of hard to explain with the theory that the gospel accounts originated as completely made-up. Otherwise, the mythical-Nazareth theory seems outright ridiculous.

ApostateAbe

OK, that didn't occur to me, but I figure that, if accounts composed in 70 CE refer to a man from Nazareth who died in 30 CE, then chances are that Nazareth existed all over the first century. But I don't know what your particular hypothesis is about early Christianity. Sorry about that.

dog-on

Isaiah 11:1

spamandham

There are two possibilities for this, neither of which is even slightly implausible:

1. The town of Nazareth *did* exist when the story was written. Although the story is set in the early 1st century, it is not believed to have been written in the early first century. Authors make anachronistic mistakes like that all the time.

2. The story was not originally intended to portray a historical person, or it was written by someone who simply didn't know that Nazarene implied a member of a sect rather than a resident of a city called Nazareth. Later, a town by that name was founded as a result of the pre-existence of the Gospel story. Looking at the names of cities in the US, we can see a penchant for naming cities after other cities, real or imagined. Why would we assume the ancients would not do the same?

http://www.atlantisfl.gov/Pages/index

Try putting "Shangri-la" into google, and see how many real places there are with that name...and the story was invented less than 100 years ago.

The following city was named after the Biblical Nazareth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazareth,_Texas

I think it would be difficult to find a well known place (real or mythical) that does not have later real world places named after it.

Even particularly nasty mythical places have real world places named after them: http://www.hell2u.com/

ApostateAbe

I think that is a good rebuttal, and it brings a little more likelihood to the Nazareth-myth theory. Another guy I argued with thought that the city of Metropolis in Illinois is a good comparison, because he thought it was named after the Metropolis in the Superman comic books (turns out it wasn't). The Nazareth in Texas is a much better comparison, because it really was named after the Nazareth in the gospels. A shared name is only the first step. The Nazareth in Israel shares the name, location (Galilee), adjacent history (300 CE), and local belief of the Nazareth in the gospels. If you find me a city like that, then you are much closer to closing the case. And when you have positive evidence, like an historical accusation of deception, then you have closed the case. Remember, you are competing with a theory that already fits all the evidence we have.

Toto

I think this argument has been answered. There was a lot of destruction in the area, then after 70 CE, it was resettled. The new settlers have to pick a name for their town.

No it doesn't. It just requires a normal about of lost information and confusion, and later Christians trying to fit the geography to the gospel accounts.

Except that a small hamlet with a few families does not match the gospel stories.

There is a link in one of the old threads to a site that compares the actual geography of modern Nazareth to the descriptions in the gospels, and concludes that the town described there is actually a neighboring area.

This doesn't follow at all. Richard Carrier, who has come to support the mythicist hypothesis, supports a historical Nazareth. The two questions are completely separate. There could have been a historical Nazareth and a mythical Jesus, or the gospels could have a historical core based on a real Jesus, but the mythical town of Nazareth was just an embellishment.

ApostateAbe

So the hypothesis goes like this: Christians in the cities were uprooted, so they sought out Nazareth, but they couldn't find it, so they founded a new town and called it Nazareth. That would require that they accept that Nazareth didn't exist and the cult lied to them. Maybe they thought Nazareth could have been abandoned and they settled in a ghost town? That could be. Or maybe they settled an old town and renamed it Nazareth--a little more unlikely, in my judgment, since it would require Christians coming into conflict with established Jewish residents.

So how does that compare to the theory that Nazareth was just a small hamlet? It conflicts with the gospel statements that Nazareth was a city, not a village, but I really wouldn't expect that Greek-writing Christians to know how big or small Nazareth was, since it was only important as an identifier of Jesus, and "polis" (city) was just a default term for a population of native residents.

I would love to see that page on the geographical study.

show_no_mercy

IIRC, Jews were kicked out of the area following the failure of the Bar-Kochba revolt (the areas of Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee were renamed Palestine). That would make sense of no Christian writer knowing anything of any town called "Nazareth" until after our first witness to a narrative gospel c. 140 CE.

ApostateAbe

The crushing of the Bar-Kochba revolt banished the Jews from the city of Jerusalem, but not from Galilee, which was only a rural province of no concern to the Romans.