Conclusion

In the preceding seven posts we’ve looked at some problems attending Dark’s work at the Sisters of Nazareth convent site. One might say in review that the archaeologist is wrong in things both big and little. The big things are: (1) no evidence of an onsite dwelling (either model courtyard house or quarryworker’s hut) as shown in my 2015 book; (2) no tenable argument from superposition that the tomb cut into “rubble” which in turn cut into the dwelling —and thus no tenable argument that the alleged dwelling preceded the tombs; (3) no evidence the SoN tombs date to I CE and not later; and (4) no evidence of a quarrying phase.

In addition, Dark is often wrong on the facts. I give a couple of examples here:

(a) The archaeologist dates the tunnels and hiding places on the Nebi Sa’in hillside to the First Jewish Revolt (they date to the Second Revolt — MoN Illus. 5.5 & p. 270) and relies on this argument to propose an earlier date for a range of structures on the hillside (2023:44).

(b) He writes in one passage: “After the canonical Gospels (those conventionally used in the Christian Bible), Nazareth is mentioned next in the second-century apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and the third-century Protoevangelium of James” (2023:24). In fact, Nazareth appears in neither of these works.

(c) He claims the existence and authenticity of “Late Hellenistic pottery” and even “Hellenistic coins” found by Alexandre at the Mary’s Well site in northern Nazareth. However, I argued in detail that these claims are unsupported by the evidence (NG Chp. 11). The alleged Hellenistic coins do not exist (they are abraded and entirely “unreadable”) and — perhaps most importantly — they were found in water channels built in Middle Roman times.

Many more examples could be provided where the archaeologist is simply flat wrong.

Dark maintains that Nazareth was a “substantial Early Roman community,” an agricultural settlement with “high-status burials” (2023:37, 42, 44). In his last book of 2023 he offers an eminently-quotable summation of his views:

          This overview of the existing sources of evidence for the first-century settlement at Nazareth shows that there is sufficient written and archaeological evidence to confirm that there was certainly a settlement of this date in the centre of modern Nazareth.Archaeology shows that the origins of this settlement lay in the Late Hellenistic period. (See Figure 2.5.)
          There is also evidence for continuity between the first-century settlement and its fourth-century counterpart. Unless the fourth-century inhabitants of Nazareth were ignorant of the name of their settlement in earlier generations, it seems reasonable to assume on this basis that the fourth-century settlement stood on approximately the same site as its first-century counterpart. That is, the first-century settlement we can see through archaeology in the centre of modern Nazareth is the Nazareth referred to in the Gospels. (2023:50)

          Finds of pottery and lamps, therefore, support the interpretation that someone was living at the [SoN] site in the Late Hellenistic period and early first century AD. There is no archaeological reason to doubt that this site could have been in continuous use from the second century BC until the period of the First Jewish Revolt. (2023:45)

If only the foregoing were true! The pottery and lamps are non-diagnostic (being found in museum boxes), Hellenistic evidence nowhere exists… In any case, readers familiar with my Nazareth writings will recognize that the foregoing aligns with the view of the late James Strange, who formulated what I call the “Hellenistic Renaissance Myth” (MoN Chp. Three).

The archaeologist’s interpretations have changed across publications, with the introduction of new conceptions (a quarrying phase; Tomb 3; shifting point of contact at M4; model courtyard house vs. quarryworker’s hut; etc). All this appears to reflect a changing analytical framework.

Dark’s chronological theories regarding kokhim, rolling stones, etc., rob his arguments of force every step of the way. His ideas are non-traditional—the importation of Jerusalem tomb chronology, the proposal that rolling stones changed size ca. 100 CE, that Jews would hew tombs under an abandoned dwelling, etc… My impression is that the archaeologist’s Nazareth work lies outside his area of specialization (which is the archaeology of post-Roman Britain) as witnessed, for example, by his repeated mis-spelling of arcosolia (Dark often writes acrosolia) and his supposition that a rolling stone of 0.8 m diameter is “large.”

My work has convincingly shown that no “house from the time of Jesus” existed at the SoN site. More broadly, over the last thirty years I have attempted to establish that no settlement existed in the Nazareth basin at the turn of the era. Despite a number of tendentious books and articles published in the last two decades by Israeli, American, and British scholars, the declaration first made in my 2008 book still stands firm in 2026: “Not a single post-Iron Age artifact, tomb, or structure at Nazareth dates with certainty before 100 CE” (MoN 165, 205).

Of course, Nazareth archaeology is but one part of a larger issue now coming to the fore in Christian studies: the recognition that “evidence” for traditional views of Christian beginnings is lacking. As scholars grapple with this very timely problem — one that threatens to rupture the academy — I am confident they will increasingly come to recognize that Nazareth did not exist in the “time of Jesus.”

← Previous