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Bethlehem

Jesus was born in Bethlehem so that a supposed prophecy could be fulfilled. When one looks at the prophecy Mt 2:6,

And you Bethlehem, land of Judah, art by no means least among the princes of Judah: for from you shall come forth a governor, who shall be shepherd of my people Israel.

one finds a mangled version of Micah 5:2, a reference to the Davidic line of kings (and David was from Bethlehem, 1 Sam 17:12).

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, which are little to be among the thousands of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one that is to be ruler in Israel.

Notice how Bethlehem for Micah is truly small, but for Matthew it is by no means least. And where the "princes" came from is anyone's guess. Once again we have an old testament phrase which had been in circulation separate from its context and its meaning had changed.

Comparing the two nativity stories, about the only thing they agree on is the location, Bethlehem, each using the fractured citation from Micah a starting point and separately developing their own birth account. There is no indication that Bethlehem was not the home of Joseph and Mary. We only have the fact that the birth happens after the angelic visit, no census, no long journey, no manger. Joseph gets an angelic visit in a dream in Matthew, Mary gets a real angel in Luke. We have been to ready to simply combine the two stories, but one is almost completely different from the other.

Matthew's family hears that the baby was in danger so they head off to Egypt to avoid the danger and to fulfil another prophecy, while Luke's has Jesus presented in church as all good families should present their babies, and then they go back to Nazareth. Matthew 2:23 has the family going to Nazareth for the first time to settle there (to fulfil another prophecy -- that no-one has found the source for).

Nazareth

So, our model family is now in Nazareth (mainly Nazaret in Greek). Strangely there is no archaeological evidence that there was a town of Nazareth as early as the beginning of the first century. Why Nazareth? Well at the end of the Matthean introduction to his rewrite of the Marcan material, we get the prophecy (already mentioned), "He will be called a Nazorean." Naturally, "Nazorean" has nothing to do with Nazareth. Someone from Nazareth should be a Nazaretene or a Nazaretaean, though no adjective has been attested from ancient times. One could turn to the ramblings of Robert Eisenman for wads of material on the Nazoreans, but suffice it to say, that there is no linguistic connection between "Nazorean" and "Nazareth" except for certain phonetic similarities.

Mark's gospel only knows Nazareth at one point, 1:9, as Jesus is on his way to see John the Baptist. All the other times the word appears in English it is actually "Nazarene", which again has nothing to do with Nazareth. The Matthean parallel to Mk 1:9 has no "Nazareth". Luke has a different source at this point, so the one mention of Nazareth in Mark gets no support from the other versions. Interestingly though, Mark seems to think that Capernaum and not Nazareth is the home of Jesus (2:1). (There is no word for home in Greek, it's always house, oikos, but in combination with the preposition eis, it is always translated as "home".) It would seem that the reference to Nazareth in Mk 1:9 should be held with suspicion for Mark knows no Nazareth home of Jesus and Nazareth only appears once in the text, so we therefore still need to answer the question, "why Nazareth?"

When the first rewrite of Mark was performed by the Matthean scribe(s), the term "Nazarene" mustn't have had any sense, for none of them survived into the rewritten version, though, as in Mark's version of Peter's denials there is a reference to the Nazarene, one finds a mention of the Nazorean in Matthew, though not in the same place. It would seem then that "Nazarene" was removed when Matthew was first written. However, both Matt 4:13 and Luke 4:16 attest to the name "Nazara" (and not Nazareth as the texts are invariably translated), which can be formed from "Nazarene" if one assumes that "Nazarene" is a gentilic reference stating where a person is from. However, no-one knows what the term "Nazarene" really means, no town of Nazara has ever been found, and we cannot assume that Nazara and Nazareth are the same, though both appearances have been emended to Nazareth in later editions. From Nazara we eventually arrive at Nazareth, which in Matthew only appears in non-Marcan materials. (Luke, copying from Mark, sometimes changes Nazarene to Nazareth and sometimes omits it.)

A later revision of Matthew uses the form "Nazorean" as an adjective regarding Jesus. We have to wait until Justin to get a historical reference to the name "Nazareth".

(If "Nazorean" comes from the Hebrew it may be derived through a scribal error, to nazir (Nazirite): in the Dead Sea Scrolls one often finds confusion between the YOD (which provides an "i"), a short downward stroke, and a WAW (which provides an omega in Greek), a long downward stroke, for there is no consistency between the length of the stroke used, so confusion is only natural. "Nazarene" is from a different source, which is apparently the Hebrew word netzer or "watcher" from the idea of being vigilant, and could underlie Mark 13:32-37, which talks about "keeping alert", as though the term has special significance. It is common, however, in ancient thought to relate similar sounding words, so connections between "Nazorean" with its implications and "Nazarene" with its implications seem only likely.)

Capernaum

In a later rewriting of Matthew, because Mark has Jesus's home in Capernaum, the scribe inserts a verse about Jesus moving from Nazareth to Capernaum (4:13) in order to juggle the two traditions. Luke simply rejects the idea that Capernaum was where Jesus lived. In fact, Luke doesn't mention Capernaum as the place where Jesus healed the paralytic.

A natural reading of Mark 6:1 talking of Jesus's hometown in the context of 2:1, where Capernaum was mentioned to be Jesus's home, would be to to read hometown (patris, fatherland), as Capernaum. Matthew has copied "hometown" from the Marcan source, but Lucan scribe, interpreting Mark using his own presuppostions, specifically sets the story in Nazareth.

John of course knows almost nothing about Nazareth (except for the one-liner from Nathaniel, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?") and has the Galilean fishermen meat Jesus in Judea after he had seen John the Baptist. It is then that he decides to go to Galilee. In the other three places in John where one finds Nazareth in English, the Greek has "Nazorean", even on the cross we read, not "Jesus of Nazareth", but "Jesus Nazorean".

We arrive at the point that we cannot trust the story regarding Bethlehem, nor can we trust the story about Nazareth. But then can we trust Capernaum, "Village of Nahum (= comfort)"? The only thing going for it is that it is in the earliest layer of traditions regarding Jesus's home, yet John doesn't know about that home either. In 2:12 he has Jesus, his mother, his brothers and his disciples merely visit the place, without any indication of it having any significance.

One thing is clear, "Jesus of Nazareth" is not in the earliest layers of the Jesus traditions, nor was it written on the cross. We find other terms, "Nazarene" and "Nazorean", which were in use before "Nazareth", but the full range of significance of these terms has not come down to us.

Amos

[ April 16, 2002: Message edited by: Amos ]</p>