Nazareth in the time of Jesus: what archaeology and the Gospels tell us

According to the archaeologists of the Custody of the Holy Land, Nazareth in the time of Jesus was a small farming village in Galilee: simple houses built against caves in the soft limestone, grain silos, cisterns, presses for oil and wine.¹ Nobody knows exactly how many people lived there; Opus Dei speaks of about a hundred.² This is where Jesus grew up and, as Pope Benedict XVI said in Nazareth, “learned the Hebrew tongue”.³

A village missing from the Old Testament

Nazareth does not appear in the Old Testament. It is missing from the list of the towns of Zebulun (Jos 19:10–15), and the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus does not name it either. The name first appears in the Gospels.¹ The NABRE note on Joshua 19 adds that the site of the later city lay within Zebulun’s borders.⁴ Outside the Bible, the name turns up on an inscription found in 1962 in the synagogue of Caesarea Maritima: it lists a priestly family living in Nazareth and, according to the Custody of the Holy Land, attests the village from the 2nd century.¹

Luke calls it a town: the angel Gabriel is sent “to a town of Galilee called Nazareth” (Lk 1:26).⁵ Saint Jerome linked the Hebrew name with “to flower”, but it can also mean “to keep watch”.¹ The Catholic Encyclopedia derives it from the Hebrew neser (“a shoot”; NABRE: “bud”), a word from Isaiah 11:1, where “a bud shall blossom” from the roots of Jesse; the Vulgate renders it flos (“flower”).⁶⁷

Matthew 2:23 is harder to explain: “He shall be called a Nazorean.” The NABRE note says that Jesus’ residence in Nazareth was firmly established and that Matthew sees it as part of God’s foreannounced plan. The town itself is not mentioned in the Old Testament, and no such prophecy can be found there; Matthew may have seen a connection with words that sound like its name, such as nēser, the “bud” of Isaiah 11:1, or nāzîr, one consecrated to God, as Samson was (Jgs 13:5, 7).⁸⁹ The Catholic Encyclopedia follows Saint Jerome: because Matthew speaks of “the prophets” in the plural, he means the general prophecy that the Messiah would be despised.¹⁰ Nathanael’s question fits: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46).¹¹

How big was Nazareth?

The old village ran north to south across the hill where the Basilica of the Annunciation, the Franciscan friary and the Church of St. Joseph stand today. Its edges to the north, south and west are known from tombs, because the dead were buried outside the village.¹ Opus Dei speaks of about a hundred inhabitants, most of them farmers²; Catholic News Service called it “a small village” in 2009.¹²

Still, Nazareth was not insignificant. It was large enough for its own synagogue (Lk 4:16)¹³¹, and an old Jewish tradition names it as a home for priests who went up to Jerusalem by turns to serve in the Temple.⁷ Josephus, who does not mention Nazareth, counted 204 villages and 15 fortified cities in Galilee.¹⁴

Living by the cave: houses, silos, presses

The Franciscan excavations show a farming village that was already lived in during Iron Age II (about 900 to 600 B.C.). The houses made use of caves cut into the soft limestone. Above or in front of them stood one or more masonry rooms, perhaps an upper floor as well. People worked, cooked and stored food in the caves, and animals were sometimes kept there too.¹

• Grain silos: pear-shaped pits in the rock with a round opening closed by a stone, up to 6½ feet (2 m) deep. They lay on several levels, joined by passages that made storing easier and ventilated the grain.¹
• Cisterns collected rainwater.¹
• Presses for olives and grapes with cellars for oil and wine, and millstones.¹¹⁶
• At least four homes in the dig: the archaeologist Eugenio Alliata OFM traced how silos and water basins were connected and found at least four separate areas, probably four dwellings. Each had to provide its own water.¹

Next to the basilica you can see such a house: a cave with a small room in front of it. Inside the cave are an oven in the northwest corner, silo openings in the floor, handles carved into the rock and a manger, so the cave was at times a stable. To the right and left of the entrance to the Grotto of the Annunciation lie two large grain containers from the time of Jesus and just after; they show that the grotto belonged to the old village.¹

Water from the spring

North of the village was a spring, today called Mary’s Well. The Catholic Encyclopedia thinks it was the chief reason people settled here.⁷ The fountain on the road to Cana was fed by this spring, which rises about 525 feet (160 m) further north; for centuries the women of the town fetched their water there.¹

Tombs at the edge of the village

In 1923 a rock-cut tomb of the kokh type with thirteen burial niches was found south of today’s sanctuary. The Roman-period oil lamps and cooking pots in the Custody’s museum come from its grave goods.¹⁶ Under the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth lies a tomb with a round rolling stone in front of its entrance, like the tomb the Gospels describe for Jesus (Mk 15:46).¹¹⁷

The house found in 2009

On December 21, 2009, the Israel Antiquities Authority presented the walls of a first-century house, the first of its kind in Nazareth. It was found during building work for the International Marian Center next to the Basilica of the Annunciation. The archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre described it as small and modest, most likely typical of the dwellings in Nazareth at that time: two rooms and a courtyard. She said it was the first house found from the Jewish village of Nazareth.¹⁸ In the courtyard was a rock-hewn cistern for rainwater, and most finds were fragments of pottery from the first and second centuries.¹² The Custody dates the house to the Herodian period; it resembles the houses from the Franciscan excavations.¹⁶

From 2006 the British archaeologist Ken Dark studied a house beneath the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth, partly cut into a limestone hillside. He believes it was a home from the time of Jesus¹⁹ and links it with the “Church of the Nutrition”, where in Byzantine times people saw the house in which Jesus grew up.²⁰ The Custody, however, places that church at today’s Church of St. Joseph.¹ Dark’s reading is not a settled finding.

What was found beneath the basilica

When the Custody decided in 1954 to build a new basilica over the Grotto of the Annunciation, the old church was pulled down in March 1955. From April to June 1955, more than 120 local workers under Fr. Bellarmino Bagatti OFM and Fr. Gaetano Pierri uncovered an area of about 300 by 200 feet (90 by 60 m) north of the grotto.¹ Bagatti published the results in two volumes, in 1967 and 1984.¹

• The village itself: in the south the dig found remains of ancient Nazareth, including the house to which the venerated grotto belongs. This shows that the village existed in the time of Jesus.¹
• “Hail, Mary”: on the plaster of a column base from a building older than the Byzantine churches, someone scratched ΧΕ ΜΑΡΙΑ. ΧΕ is read as an abbreviation of Χαῖρε, the angel’s greeting in Luke (Lk 1:28: “Hail, favored one!”).²¹⁵ The Custody’s sources date it differently: before 324²² or before the middle of the 5th century.²¹
• The deacon Conon: a mosaic at the entrance to a neighboring grotto names a deacon Conon from Jerusalem as donor. He bore the same name as the martyr Conon, who under Emperor Decius (249–251) testified in court that he came from Nazareth and was descended from the family of the Messiah.¹
• Unbroken veneration: above the grotto were remains of the first place of prayer. According to the Custody, they show that the memory of this place was kept without a break.¹

Daily life: work, synagogue, the city next door

Joseph was a tekton: the people of Nazareth ask, “Is he not the carpenter’s son?” (Mt 13:55)²⁶, and Jesus himself is called “the carpenter” (Mk 6:3); the NABRE note adds that no other Gospel calls Jesus a carpenter.²⁷ The Greek word means a craftsman in general and a carpenter in particular. St. Justin Martyr already vouches for “carpenter” in the 2nd century, and tradition follows him.²⁸ The Catholic writer Michael Hesemann points out that timber was rare in the Holy Land and a tekton often worked as a house builder.²⁹

The Catechism calls these years “a daily life spent without evident greatness, a life of manual labour”; his religious life was that of “a Jew obedient to the law of God, a life in the community” (CCC 531).³⁰

In the synagogue of Nazareth Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah (Lk 4:16–30). The building shown today in the souk as the “synagogue” is a hall from the Crusader period. The Custody says plainly that it is not the synagogue of the Gospel; the tradition is strong, though, and pilgrims read this passage there.¹ The brow of the hill from which the crowd meant “to hurl him down headlong” (Lk 4:29)¹³ has been placed by tradition since the Middle Ages on a hill about 1,300 feet (397 m) high, some 1.2 miles (2 km) southeast of the town, today called Mount Precipice.¹²⁵

Close by lay Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. According to the Custody, Herod Antipas rebuilt it between A.D. 10 and 20, and it cannot be ruled out that men from Nazareth worked on it too.¹⁶ Michael Hesemann gives the distance as four miles (about 6 km).²⁹

Nazareth today

The present Basilica of the Annunciation was designed by the Italian architect Giovanni Muzio and built by masons and stonecutters from Nazareth. It is 180 feet (55 m) high and measures 213 by 89 feet (65 by 27 m). It was consecrated on Sunday, March 23, 1969, after eight years of work, and solemnly opened on the Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25.¹

Pope St. Paul VI came to Nazareth on January 5, 1964, while the basilica was still being built.²³ The Catechism quotes his words: “The home of Nazareth is the school where we begin to understand the life of Jesus – the school of the Gospel” (CCC 533).³⁰ St. John Paul II celebrated Mass in the basilica on March 25, 2000²⁴, Benedict XVI on Mount Precipice on May 14, 2009.²⁵

Today Nazareth is a city of 75,704 people (2024).¹⁵ The Latin parish at the Basilica of the Annunciation has about 5,000 faithful; the city also has Maronite and Melkite communities of the Eastern Catholic Churches.¹ More places of the Gospels are on our map of places; how people lived then is in Daily life.

Bible references and short quotations from the New American Bible, Revised Edition. Where archaeologists interpret, we say so; the tradition of the Church is given as the Custody of the Holy Land describes it.

Frequently asked questions

How big was Nazareth in the time of Jesus?

A small farming village, according to the archaeologists of the Custody; Opus Dei speaks of about a hundred people. The Franciscan excavations show cave houses, grain silos, cisterns and presses for oil and wine.

Is Nazareth mentioned in the Old Testament?

No. The NABRE note on Matthew 2:23 says that the town of Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament; it is missing from the list of Zebulun’s towns in Joshua 19.

Where is the Annunciation remembered in Nazareth?

In the Grotto of the Annunciation beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation. The excavations show that the grotto belonged to a dwelling of the ancient village.