The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus (15 page)

He begins his review of the evidence with the following passage:

The oldest known human life in the region of Nazareth is attested by the skull found in 1934 by R. Neuville in a cave about one and one-half miles southeast of the city, a skull which may be older than that of Neanderthal man. In Nazareth itself a complex of burial caves was found in the upper city in 1963, in which there was pottery of the first part of the Middle Bronze Age
(RB 70 [1963], p. 563; 72 [1965], p. 547).
Down in the area of the Latin Church of the Annunciation
there was certainly an ancient village of long continuance
. Archeological investigation in and around this church was conducted by B. Vlaminck in 1895, by Prosper Viaud
in 1907–1909, and particularly by Bellarmino Bagatti
in 1955 when the previously standing eighteenth-century (1730) church was demolished to make way for a new building. The area under and around the church, as well as at the Church of St. Joseph
not far away, was plainly that of an agricultural village. There were numerous grottoes, silos
for grain, cisterns
for water and oil, presses for raisins and olives, and millstones.
While the silos are of a type found at Tell Abu Matar as early as the Chalcolithic Age
(IEJ 5 [1955], p. 23),
the earliest
pottery found in them here at Nazareth is of Iron
II (900–600 BC).
^[168]
   [Emphasis added.]

This passage contains two overarching errors. The first localizes the ancient village in the venerated area. The second implies the doctrine of continuous habitation, which I shall deal with here.
^[169]
Finegan’s statement that “there was certainly an ancient village of long continuance” follows mention of the Middle Bronze Age. The most obvious (though not necessary) implication of this vague declaration is continuation of settlement since Bronze Age times.

Finegan’s final sentence is curious. He is referring to silos 22 and 57, the only silos at Nazareth containing Iron Age pottery.
^[170]
Of course, since the
earliest
pottery found in those silos is of Iron II, then the reader supposes that pottery from later eras was also found in them, leading to the doctrine of continuous habitation.

In fact, the earliest pottery found in those silos was not Iron II but Iron I (1200–1000), and two artefacts found in them may date back even further. The sentence reads much better without the word “earliest,”
but it is that word which implies the doctrine of continuous habitation
. Finegan’s statement is false on two levels: on the literal level (regarding the earliest pottery), and on the implied level (regarding continuous habitation). Both major errors in this sentence can be laid at the feet of the single word, “earliest.”

The insertion of an inappropriate word is little more than a trick. It turns the underlying statement into a falsehood, one that only an expert is able to detect. The average reader, whether scholar or layperson, will be carried along with the general meaning, one which now leads directly to the false doctrine of continuous habitation.

In this context, the insertion of a misleading but useful word is not unique to Finegan, but occurs even in Bagatti’s writings. We recall the Italian’s 1960 article:

The ancient village
. On the slope of the hill, between the Church of St. Joseph
and that of the Annunciation, abundant and characteristic remains have been found which permit the localization of the ancient village,
already existing in Iron II.

The operative word here is “already” (
déjà
). It is inappropriate and intrusive – Bagatti’s statement is correct without it (the village did exist in Iron II). “Already” serves the same purpose as Finegan’s “earliest”: it changes the complexion of the phrase in a way that directly leads to the doctrine of continuous habitation. This is casuistry. It is literary sleight-of-hand.

The resemblance between the Bagatti and Finegan passages is no coincidence. We can prove direct borrowing through an inadvertent slip of the pen. In his 1960 article, Bagatti (through a French translator) writes:

On a pu identifier des silos
servant à emmagasiner les réserves, des citernes pour l’eau ou le vin, des pressoirs pour le raisin et les olives, des meules de moulin, des grottes et des débris de maçonnerie.
^[171]

Finegan has retained these elements and their general order, as we see from his text: “…silos for grain, cisterns for water and oil, presses for raisins and olives, and millstones.” But the American has mistakenly substituted “raisins” for the French word
raisin
, which in fact means “grape.”
^[172]
After all, a press for crushing raisins (dried grapes) makes no sense. This slip proves direct borrowing by Finegan from Bagatti (obvious in any case). In the next sentence Finegan uses the extra word “earliest,”
just as Bagatti had done before him
with “
déjà
.” The implication in both cases is the doctrine of continuous habitation, and the underlying literal sense in both cases also becomes false.

The oblique, casuistic, and fundamentally dishonest masking of the hiatus by subterfuge and insinuation finds its way into a number of scholarly publications. The need has existed to make the hiatus altogether disappear from history. But how does one mask
eight hundred years
of non-evidence?

• In the article “Nazareth” from the
Encyclopedia Judaica
(1972), we read:

Archaeological evidence has shown that the area was settled as early as the Middle Bronze Age, and tombs
have been found
dating from the Iron Age
to
Hasmonean times
.
^[173]
(Emphasis added.)

As far as I know, this is the only claim in the literature specifically dating tombs to the period of the Great Hiatus. No such tombs have been found in the Nazareth basin. In Chapter One we verified that tombs date to the Bronze and Iron Ages. They come to an end with tomb 75, which appeared in the tenth century BCE.
^[174]

It is unlikely that the
Encyclopedia Judaica
would have invented the above information. Far more probable is that its statement relies on one or another assertion in Bagatti’s
Excavations
, such as the following:

Archaeological proofs of life in the place are the tombs
of the Middle Bronze period, and remains of habitations
from the Middle Iron period to our days.
^[175]

This statement of Bagatti, one of his numerous claims of continuous habitation, is demonstrably false: there are no “remains of habitations from the Middle Iron period to our days,” despite the Italian’s over-the-top claim to have “archaeological proofs” of the same. As regards habitations, their remains have not been found in the Nazareth basin dating either to the Iron Period,  nor to the periods following it, nor in fact to any pre-Byzantine eras at all.

Despite the appositeness of the above citation, it is more likely that the author of the
Encyclopedia Judaica
article was misled by another passage from
Excavations
, a seminal summation of Bagatti’s findings:

[a]

(p.29)       Chronologically we have: tombs
of the Middle Bronze Period; silos
with ceramics of the Middle Iron Period; and then,
uninterruptedly, ceramics and

[
turn two pages, reviewing a map and two photos

with ancillary data
]

(p.32)     constructions of the Hellenistic
Period
down to modern times.
^[176]

I have formatted the passage to reflect the page turns in Bagatti’s book, and call this version [a]. Here we have mention of all the elements in the
Encyclopedia Judaica
(EJ) passage: tombs, the Middle Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and Hasmonean [Hellenistic] times. The author of the EJ article has evidently misread Bagatti, and through no fault of his own. Bagatti’s statement is a linguistic minefield for a native English speaker, let alone for one who reads English as a second language. If carefully read
to the very end of the sentence
, putting all parts together, then the meaning becomes other than is apparent from a less attentive reading (see below). If one pauses at the end of page 29, as the pagination forces the reader to do, then the mind will retain the following:

“Chronologically we have… ceramics of the Middle Iron Period; and then, uninterruptedly…”

This is the doctrine of continuous habitation. The word order (the semicolon notwithstanding) invites the supposition that the ceramics begin in the Middle Iron Period and continue thereafter. Lest I be accused of imaginatively parsing semicolons, it should be noted that the problem is not merely pagination, punctuation, and word order. Once again, it is a
misplaced
word
, such as we have already become familiar with in Finegan’s “earliest” and Bagatti’s “
déjà
.” The word now is “uninterruptedly,” which does not belong where it is found. The correct reading is as follows:

[b]
                           Chronologically we have: tombs
of the Middle Bronze Period; silos
with ceramics of the Middle Iron Period; and then, constructions of the Hellenistic
Period
uninterruptedly down to modern times.

The statement is still false. I wish to make absolutely clear that
no
evidence has been found at Nazareth dating to Hellenistic times. But Bagatti and others claim such evidence (Chapter Three), and thus the above statement is entirely consistent with Bagatti’s position as regards the evidence in the ground.

Version [b] is the only reading which makes both grammatical and archaeological sense, consistent with Bagatti’s evidence. Archaeologically, “uninterruptedly” has nothing to do with the Middle Iron Period, but with much later times. It is misplaced and, yet again, changes the complexion of the sentence in a way that strongly suggests the doctrine of continuous habitation. The pagination may or may not be purely coincidental.

One can hardly fault the author of the
Encyclopedia Judaica
article for missing the subtlety of version [b] above, and for not transferring “uninterruptedly” to where it belongs. He did what a reader would do with the muddled sentence in the text, drawing one of a number of possible misinterpretations from the misleading word order, and came up with a statement that would probably have surprised even Bagatti, namely, that tombs at Nazareth date from the Iron Age to Hasmonean times. That statement occurs nowhere else.

In politics there is a term known as ‘spin’ where an issue, speech or document is interpreted in a tendentious way to serve the interests of one party or another. In religion, unfortunately, that political dimension also exists, with one major difference: the spin is doctrinal. We shall adopt a more respectful euphemism, and call it “interpretive gloss.” It infuses the Nazareth literature, not excepting Bagatti’s book,
Excavations in Nazareth.
This discussion makes clear that the curious phrasing, lack of precision, incorrect wording, and misleading syntax encountered at certain places in the literature are not entirely the results of coincidence or poor translation.

• 
The
New International Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology
(NIDBA, 1983), “Nazareth.”
^[177]
This single-page article borrows from Finegan’s influential treatment of Nazareth examined above. It begins with the same sequence of facts found in that Finegan citation, and also includes the previously-mentioned error regarding the “earliest” Iron Age pottery:

Recent archaeological evidence shows that Nazareth was inhabited long before as well as during the early Roman
period. This is evidenced by the ancient skull found near the town as well as by Middle Bronze-Age pottery from burial caves in the upper part of the city. Also, near the Church of the Annunciation
there have been  found grain silos
of the type that were as early as the Chalcolithic Age but in which the earliest
pottery was of Iron II (900–600 BC). Other pottery there consisted of a little from the Hellenistic
period, more from the Roman and most from the Byzantine period. Of the twenty-three tombs
found
c
. 450 m (500 yd.) from the church most were of the kokim type (
i.e
., horizontal shafts or niches off a central chamber) known in Palestine from
c
. 200 BC and which became the standard Jewish type. Two tombs had in them artifacts (lamps,
etc
.) to be dated from the first to fourth centuries A.D. Four tombs sealed with rolling stones typical of the late Jewish period testify to a considerable Jewish community there in the Roman period.