This book reveals what archaeology can add to historical evidence about the Galilean village in which, according to St Luke, the Angel Gabriel foretold the coming of Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ken Dark focuses on the 19th-century convent of an order of nuns called the Sisters of Nazareth, which stood over what they believed to be earlier ecclesiastical buildings, and possibly the tomb of St Joseph or the house in which Jesus grew up. To bear out this theory, the Mother Superior, Marie Giraud, initiated one of the first archaeological projects ever directed by a woman. The nuns undertook the excavation, which was difficult and dangerous – roofs collapsed and a pocket of methane gas exploded. By 1913 they had made some exciting discoveries.
Beneath the convent, which is almost adjacent to the Church of the Annunciation in the present city centre, they found remnants of a Byzantine cave cathedral. Probably constructed around 500 AD, and a shrine for Christian devotees for centuries afterwards, it had been embellished with white marble capitals on top of granite columns. It had three apses and a crypt, and its walls and floors were decorated with mosaics, some coated with gold. Also exhumed were artefacts such as coins, lamps, glass beads and sherds of pottery. Deposits of ash and alluvial clay indicated that it had been ravaged by fire and flood, but there were signs of Crusader restoration, including a chapel hung with the spurs of a medieval knight.
During the First World War, Turkish troops occupied the convent, damaging the fabric and looting its museum. Subsequently, the leading Catholic archaeologist of the day, Fr Bellarmino Bagatti, denied that the nuns – amateurs as well as females – had unearthed a key religious edifice. It took another priest, the Jesuit Henri Senès, to controvert Bagatti. Senès was motivated by his conviction that the convent hid the home of the Christ Child and his own excavations were destructive as well as productive. He was a serious scholar and by no means entirely guided by faith. In fact, more digging uncovered cisterns, storage pits, rock-cut Jewish tombs and the relics of a fourth-century cave church. Nearby were the ruins of a first-century dwelling. Was this the abode, first described by a pilgrim called Egeria in about 380 AD, of Mary and Joseph?
Dark, who investigated the site using modern archaeological techniques, says it is impossible to tell. He pays tribute to the courage and perseverance of the nuns in Nazareth, but he never relies on the evidence of things not seen. His is a rigorously scientific quest and all the better for that since it presents us with an authentic picture of Nazareth at the time of Christ. In the process, Dark demolishes the “mythicists” who claim that it was an “invented town” which had no existence until the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in about 70 AD. Oddly, he does not refer to the most notorious of these sceptics, René Salm, whose book The Myth of Nazareth was published by the American Atheist Press in 2008.
What Dark does establish is that the Nazareth of the Gospels was a large village or small town on the site of today’s city. Its inhabitants kept animals for meat and milk. They grew wheat, olives and grapes, quarried stone and practised crafts such as wool-spinning and carpentry. Family groups lived above subsistence level and the community was exclusively Jewish. It attached importance to ritual purity, refusing to use cooking pots and lamps made by non-Jews and holding aloof from its more cosmopolitan neighbours in Sepphoris.
Dark provides a valuable context for the New Testament story. He writes for the general reader and his account is well illustrated with pictures and diagrams. Occasionally it is hard to follow as successive structures appear along with differing interpretations of their significance. The book would benefit from a fuller index and a timeline summarising what was disinterred, when, where and by whom. Nevertheless this is a fine study of a place revered by Christian pilgrims at least since the death of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, whose famous last words, probably apocryphal, were rendered by Swinburne: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean.”
Dr Piers Brendon is an Emeritus Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.