REVIEW BY ANDREW SELKIRK
Let’s do some biblical archaeology. Nazareth is not well known. Bethlehem, where the Bible tells us that Jesus was born, has a magnificent basilica; Jerusalem has the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; but Nazareth, which was his hometown, where he was brought up, is less celebrated. There is the Church of the Annunciation, where the Angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to a son, but otherwise few surviving testaments to Nazareth’s biblical past are known. However, in his new book, The Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth, Ken Dark thinks he may possibly have discovered the actual cave-house where Jesus was brought up.
Ken Dark, who is Professor of Archaeology at Reading, has spent much of his career studying Constantinople. However, for his next venture, he wanted to explore the impact of Byzantine pilgrimage on a small town in the eastern empire. He applied to the Israel Antiquities Authority, who gave him a list of possible sites, which included Nazareth. This aroused his interest, so he determined to investigate to see if there was any trace of Byzantine 5th-century pilgrimage. What he found proved rather more interesting.
But how do you set about exploring a new site? The answer is by field walking in the vicinity. Today, Nazareth is a city, and there is also another ancient settlement at Sepphoris to the north, but the area between them was ideal for field walking. The results were interesting: towards Sepphoris there was a lot of Roman-style pottery, but towards Nazareth, Roman-style pottery dies out: it would seem that the communities closer to Nazareth observed Jewish purity laws and were deliberately not using impure Roman-style pottery. In other words, Jesus was brought up in a settlement that was conspicuously Jewish, rejecting any Roman influence, even pottery.
Lascaux IV