Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Bart Ehrman (books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

Moreover, there is the additional evidence, which we will see momentarily, that Nazareth did in fact exist as a small Jewish town in the days of Jesus.

G. A. Wells advances a different argument to much the same end. In his view the key to understanding the nonexistence of Nazareth lies in the four occasions in which Mark indicates that Jesus was a “Nazarene” (1:24; 10:47; 14:67; 16:6). According to Wells, Mark misunderstood what this meant. What it originally meant was that Jesus belonged to a pre-Christian Jewish sect called the Nazarenes, who were similar to certain Old Testament figures (like strong-man Samson) called Nazirites, who took vows to be specially set apart for God (they couldn’t touch corpses, drink wine, or cut their hair). Mark didn’t know this, though, and wrongly assumed that the term Nazarene must have indicated Jesus’s place of origin, and so Mark made up “Nazareth” as his hometown.10

Once again one looks in vain for any evidence or clear logic to support this view. Why would Mark invent a town that didn’t exist to explain how Jesus could be a Nazarene, when what the term originally meant was that he was a Nazirite? Moreover, Mark must have known the Old Testament. He does quote it on a number of occasions. Why wouldn’t he know what a Nazirite was? And if the sectarians that Jesus associated with were Nazirites, why did they call themselves Nazarenes (a word that is not etymologically related)? Moreover, it should be stressed that there are multiple traditions about Nazareth (Mark, M, L, John). Nazareth was not invented by Mark.

One of the things that these two examples show is that modern scholars seem to have no clue what Nazarene means or where the name of the town Nazareth could have come from if it is not original. So how can we posit some kind of ancient Christian motivation to invent Nazareth if we have no idea what led Christians to do so or even what the root of the term really meant? The problem is compounded by the fact, already mentioned, that Nazareth did exist in the days of Jesus, in the location that Mark and the other Gospels suggest it did.

The most recent critic to dispute the existence of Nazareth is René Salm, who has devoted an entire book to the question, called The Myth of Nazareth.11 Salm sees this issue as highly significant and relevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus: “Upon that determination [that is, on the existence of Nazareth] depends a great deal, perhaps even the entire edifice of Christendom.”12 Like so many mythicists before him, Salm emphasizes what scholars have long known: Nazareth is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in the writings of Josephus, or in the Talmud. It first shows up in the Gospels. Salm is also impressed by the fact that the early generations of Christians did not seek out the place but rather ignored it and seemed not to know where it was (this is actually hard to show; how would we know this about “every” early Christian, unless all of them left us writings and told us everything they knew and did?).

Salm’s basic argument is that Nazareth did exist in more ancient times and through the Bronze Age. But then there was a hiatus. It ceased to exist and did not exist in Jesus’s day. Based on archaeological evidence, especially the tombs found in the area, Salm claims that the town came to be reinhabited sometime between the two Jewish revolts (between 70 CE and 132 CE), as Jews who resettled following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans relocated in northern climes. Salm, like Zindler, wants to insist that Mark did not indicate that Jesus came from Nazareth: Mark 1:9, for him, is a later insertion.

Salm himself is not an archaeologist: he is not trained in the highly technical field of archaeology and gives no indication that he has even ever been on an archaeological dig. He certainly never has worked at the site of Nazareth. Still, he bases almost his entire case on archaeological reports about the town of Nazareth. In particular, he is impressed by the fact that the kind of rock-cut tombs that have been uncovered there—called kokh tombs, otherwise known as locula tombs—were not in use in Galilee the middle of the first century and thus do not date to the days of Jesus. And so the town did not exist then.

This is a highly problematic claim. It is hard to understand why tombs in Nazareth that can be dated to the days after Jesus indicate that there was no town there during the days of Jesus. That is to say, just because later habitation can be established in Nazareth, how does that show that the town was not inhabited earlier? Moreover, Salm fails to stress one of the most important points about these special rock-cut tombs: they were expensive to make, and only the wealthiest families could afford them.13 There is nothing in any of our records to suggest that Nazareth had any wealthy families in the days of Jesus. And so no one in town would have been able to purchase a kokh tomb. So what does the fact that none were found from the days of Jesus indicate? Precisely nothing. The tombs that poor people used in Palestine were shallow graves, not built into rock like kokh tombs. These poor-person graves almost never survive for archaeologists to find.

I should also point out that these kokh tombs from later times were discovered on the hillside of the traditional site of Nazareth. Salm, however, claims that the hillside would have been uninhabitable in Jesus’s day so that, in his opinion, the village that eventually came into existence (in the years after 70 CE) would have been located on the valley floor, less than a kilometer away. He also points out that archaeologists have never dug at that site.

This view creates insurmountable problems for his thesis. For