Snapshots
                            Jesus through the Historical Lens

               Nazareth – the ‘sticks’, the ‘hood’, the city?

Let’s zoom the lens back in time once more and take a quick shot of the town of Nazareth, the place where Jesus grew up. Will we find a small rural town out in the middle of nowhere? Or is it something else? Well, let’s see what ‘the hood’ of Jesus’ formative years was really like.

Picture a rural community of about five hundred people. Adobe homes, local market, a meeting place for a synagogue and Sabbath worship. Now walk barely fifteen feet beyond the houses and find the town circled by farms and vineyards. Sounds like what you expected, right? Let’s take that first snapshot. But, wait. Let’s open up the view lens wider and take another shot.

Just three miles north, a pleasant walk through the farms and vineyards, begins the sprawling, elegant, sophisticated Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris.  Herod the Great’s son, Herod Antipas began transforming the small town of Sepphoris, the birthplace of Jesus’ mom Mary, into a virtual showplace. He started this ambitious project when Jesus was just a baby and by the time Jesus was grown it was not only one of the capital cities of the Galilee, but touted as the “Jewel of the Galilee” with requisite Roman aquaducts, baths and amphitheatre, and just ‘around the corner’ from Nazareth.

Here was a city populated by moneyed Jews who were pro-Roman. The population included besides Jews, Romans, Greeks and various peoples from as far west as Egypt and beyond, and as far to the east as Persia and India.  In fact, get this! The Romans had been importing silk from China for at least a hundred years already.  The Silk Road was constantly being trampled. And Sepphoris was a crossroads through which much of this trade passed. How many languages where spoken? Definitely Greek, the language of trade, and also Aramaic, the common language of the surrounding Jewish population.  Hebrew was fluently spoken in the synagogue by all Jews. The Roman rich and the Roman soldier would have spoken Latin. And then there would have been a smattering of all the other languages represented in this vibrant cosmopolitan city. In order to be able to function in the family business Jesus, like any member of this extended community had to have spoken and perhaps written at the very least Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, with a little bit of Latin thrown in. 

     The years of on-going building brought artisans into Sepphoris by the hundreds.  This workforce was not made up of moneyed Jews, nor were they pro-Roman. This disgruntled group lived apart, outside the city, but within walking distance -- in towns just like Nazareth. Here our lens shows up the great divide, both financial and political. Just a mere three miles across farms and vineyards and we find to the south poor workers and farm laborers, and there just to the north ‘within shouting distance’ lived the land owners, the tax collectors and the ‘rich and famous’.  You can almost hear the complaints and grumbling in the south carrying over the fields into the homes of the snobs and conquerors to the north.

     Jesus and his family lived as artisans, probably carpenters, to the south in Nazareth and commuted six days a week for years helping build the ‘Jewel of the Galilee’.  Carpenters would have been in great demand with guaranteed work for a lifetime. Joseph was well positioned to provide for his family and bring his sons into the family business.  And every evening they walked home to their village after being subservient to the citizens of Sepphoris all day.

    So what was Nazareth like, the small village where Jesus grew up?  Here was a bedroom suburb filled with the poor workers and farm laborers who supplied the needs of the rich and hated and the conquerors and collaborators next to a major Greco-Roman city and world crossroads. In other words, Nazareth was a small village of family, friends, spiritual support, and a hotbed of political unrest.