The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus (45 page)

It may be noted that in the 38 pages Bagatti devotes to this locus, the word “tomb” appears nowhere except in the above citation. So, it may be understandable that Finegan, too, ignores the funerary aspect of this chamber. Finegan interprets the site as baptismal, and sees support in Vlaminck’s description of a “small circular basin or trough” with “a small round hole made to carry off the dirty water.” However, Vlaminck clearly shows that this basin (too small to serve for immersion) postdated a grave. It is very unlikely that heterodox Jews (“Jewish-Christians”) would have modified a gravesite for baptismal purposes for, in a religious context, graves were ritually unclean. Much more likely, however, is that at some subsequent period the inhabitants of Nazareth used the hillside—including some old tomb sites—in connection with agricultural work. This appears to be the case with T. 29. Clearly, the grave preceded the basin, which Vlaminck shows is intrusive. A glance at
Illus
. 21 shows that this site is very near the treading area (B) associated with the winepress (A), and we are probably dealing here with another wine-collecting vat, similar to that at (C) but smaller.

This discussion sheds some light on the history of Nazareth, in that at least some places on the hillside were first used for burial and then modified for agricultural purposes. When those modifications took place is not entirely clear. This funerary-agricultural sequence will be observed again when we consider the nearby graves o/p.

A few years after Vlaminck’s work, Fr. Viaud noted
Tomb 29 with curiosity, described it, identified it on plans of the Church, and proposed a number of theories to explain this unexpected grave either under or immediately next to the house where the Virgin Mary grew up. The Frenchman writes:   

Tomb. – If we now go back down to the
Chapel of the Angel
by the same southern staircase, we find ourselves facing, in the northern side, a tomb (fig. 42). For one going down by the western staircase, it is on the left.
[639]

Viaud was particularly interested in who had been buried there. Only a very holy person, his reasoning went, would have been interred in such hallowed ground. Viaud proposed that it was St. Joseph, the husband of Mary. This theory was not new. Already in 1172 CE the grave was described by Theodoric as that of St. Joseph.
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After considering this possibility, however, Fr. Viaud demurs. He notes that this tomb cannot be from a time when the house was inhabited, nor when Jews were living in the vicinity, due to purity laws regarding contact with the dead:

     [T]his tomb, of course, cannot go back to the time when the house was still inhabited, nor even to a time when the Jewish element completely occupied the area.

     However, one fact is evident: a tomb existed next to this house, and it was taken into account in the early treatment of this part of the dwelling that we today call the Chapel of the Angel.

     The memory of some personage, considered saintly and venerable, was therefore attached to this tomb.
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Viaud struggles with this problem of an unidentified grave at the very heart of the Church of the Annunciation,  one “which apparently was ruined and deformed at a very ancient time.”
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In order to deal with the Jewish taboo against living in the vicinity of tombs, he suggests a novel explanation towards the end of his book:

Now we know that Jesus left Nazareth practically at the beginning of his ministry, and moved with his Holy Mother to
Capernaum. If one considers that this house of the Holy Virgin was situated opposite the village—which in all probability was established in the region of the spring—can one not suppose that it was henceforth considered outside the town, and therefore no hindrance remained to placing a tomb there?

So, once again the question arises: whose tomb is this? Of saint Joseph, the fiancé of Mary, say the
Abbot Daniel
and the monk Theodoric. We find the echo of this tradition once again in P. Martinov who, in 1360, still maintained: “On the other side of the Jordan, where the archangel announced the birth of the Son to the Virgin in Nazareth, one sees the tomb of Joseph, the husband of Mary.”
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According to this theory, then, the Holy Family moved to Capernaum when Jesus was about thirty years of age (his home is Capernaum at Mk 2:1 and 15).
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When Joseph died his body was then returned to his home village and buried in the old homestead, which was no longer considered part of the village and was (presumably) vacant.

Of course, we must leave aside the southern (Judean) tradition that Joseph’s paternal village was not Nazareth but Bethlehem (Mt 2:22; Lk 2:3–4). We also note that the site of the tomb, being the place of the Annunciation, was not Joseph’s home at all but the home of Mary before her marriage. Why his corpse would be transported thirty-five kilometers and buried inside the house not even of his wife, but of her parents, seems odd. To my knowledge Viaud’s suggestion is not found again in the Nazareth literature.

In one of his first articles on Nazareth, Bagatti sought to put an end to such pious (and dangerous) speculation. He wrote in 1937 that this tomb dated to Byzantine times and, for corroboration, invoked the nearby mosaics which date to the fifth century:
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  “The mosaics are of the same era as the stonework, since the rocks have no other floor than they.”

But a couple of years later Fr. Kopp objected, unwilling to jettison the cherished notion that St. Joseph was buried at this spot. In 1939 he wrote that this grotto had a particularly ancient significance:

However, the cave
had a special meaning even before the building of the wall and the laying of the mosaics. For of the fragments of the six layers of plaster on the eastern wall of the inner niche, two were between the wall and the mosaic; their greater age is thus demonstrated.”
^[646]

According to Kopp, the mosaic was laid between the second and third layers of plaster. In turn, the first layer of plaster must have been laid after the tomb was dug, and also after the grotto ceased being used as a grave. This scenario (which is, in fact, correct) is compatible with a dating of the original grave to Roman times. In addition, Kopp rejected the possibility that the grotto was domestic:

Was this rock cave
the grave of a saintly person? Hüffer
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would like to consider it part of the dwelling of Mary, and thus interprets it as an integral part [
Bauglied
] of the Basilica which received veneration and distinction through crosses, inscriptions, and mosaics. However, the grotto—even though it has meanwhile been enlarged—is too small and primitive to be a dwelling space [
Wohnraum
].
^[648]

To the end of his career Kopp cleaved to the idea that St. Joseph could have been buried here. In his 1963 book,
The
Holy Places of the Gospels
, he asks:

Was this the grave of St. Joseph, as some have supposed? Did the people of Nazareth continue for a time to use the silos, the presses, and the cisterns
of the rock, although they no longer dwelt there, so that he could have been buried there according to Jewish lay? That would explain how this cave
tomb came to have such a close relationship to the grotto of the Annunciation.
^[649]

Similar to other suggestions of Kopp, this is a curious and complicated scenario with several steps: the house (of Mary’s parents, we recall) becomes vacant. The Nazarenes (inexplicably) begin using the premises for agricultural work. Joseph dies and is buried at the old (now vacant) homestead among winepresses and the like.

Bagatti was also exercised by the presence of this grave. Before the Second World War the dating of kokh tombs was still largely unknown, and in 1937 the Italian pronounced that T. 29 was of the kokhim type, unaware that in so doing he was dating it to Roman times: “
Il loculo era quindi scavato a forno
,” he wrote. Translated, this reads: “The loculus [
an alternative name for
kokh
] was therefore dug
[in the form of
] an oven.” “Oven” is the Italian’s common if quaint term for kokh, used frequently in Bagatti’s writings. In the same article, the Italian proposed that the interred person might have been a fourth century noble, Count Joseph of Tiberias:

In conclusion, it is to be understood that the date of alteration of the grotto by the construction of a wall and of the mosaic—[
as evidenced
] in the construction technique and in the mosaic iconography—points to the fifth century.

The opinion, then, that the examined tomb belonged to Count Joseph of Tiberias
is not contradicted by archeology, since such a tomb may very well go back to the fourth century.
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Kopp expanded on this theory in 1939:

Bagatti maintains that a grave originally existed here “of the baking-oven type” [
nach Art eines Backofens
], that is, that it was a kokim… Archaeologically, it appears to him properly possible [
mit Recht möglich
] only that Joseph of Tiberias found his final resting place in this tomb. This hypothesis was much popularized by Klameth.
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He maintains that Joseph built the first church on this site and thus his body was brought here: “Certainly, this would have represented the most handsome thanks for this benefactor of the Church.” Later, obscurity intervened and people substituted St. Joseph for him because both bore the same name.
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In later writings Bagatti mutes references to kokhim under the Church of the Annunciation. In fact, in his 1969 book (Italian edition 1967) the archaeologist entirely ignores the fact that T. 29 was once a grave. The three decades between Kopp’s 1938 article and his tome produced more exact knowledge of ancient Jewish burial customs, including the fact that the kokhim tomb was the typical form of Jewish burial in Roman times.

This explains the changing Catholic posture regarding kokh tombs between the 30s and the 60s of the last century. In 1937–39, both Bagatti and Kopp identified tomb 29 as a kokh tomb, and Kopp considered the nearby tomb complex which we have already considered (T. 27) “a typical kokhim tomb.”
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By the 1960s, however, Kopp no longer uses the word “kokhim” in relation to tombs in the venerated area, and Bagatti no longer calls tomb 29 “
a forno
” and objects vehemently to the characterization of T. 27 as kokhim, as we have seen. Of course, his subsequent objection does not remove the fact that several tombs in the immediate vicinity are known with certainty to be kokhim. They include Tomb 72 (30 meters south of the CA), Tombs 73a and b under the Sisters of Nazareth Convent (75 meters to the west) and, of course, Tombs 27 and 29 under the CA itself.

The era of kokh tombs in Palestine extended into the fourth and perhaps even the fifth century after Christ. Thus, it is theoretically possible that the fourth century Count Joseph of Tiberias
was
buried in T. 29.
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This man was a Christian convert from Judaism, allegedly commissioned by Emperor Constantine to construct churches in Palestine, including in Nazareth. Of course, were he buried at Nazareth, we have no record of the interment. But if this were the case, it would remove some of the difficulties presented by T. 29 as far as the tradition is concerned. A case (unlikely though it is) could be made that Jewish purity taboos would not apply, for the Count—having built a church at Nazareth—would have been buried on Christian property, not Jewish (we recall that the town was Jewish until VII CE). Also, the problem of contemporaneity with the relatives of Christ is removed—the tomb dates much later. Finally, the fact that it is kokhim in form does not present a problem, for the type was used into Byzantine times.

We shall consider the Count’s story more closely in Chapter 6, as well as the theory that he built the first church in Nazareth. The Count was, however, not the only “later” candidate proposed for T. 29. Just outside the tomb is a mosaic in the floor bearing an epigraph in Greek letters:  “Gift of Conon, deacon of Jerusalem.”
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This deacon probably lived in the fifth century (the date of the mosaic).
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In his 1969 book, Bagatti links this deacon with another Conon who allegedly lived in the third century. However, the earlier Conon was legendary.
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He is known only from a very late source, a tenth-century manuscript.
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It relates that this Conon was a Christian martyr killed in Asia Minor in the reign of Decius (about  250 CE). At his trial, he claimed to be a relative of Jesus. This medieval claim allows Bagatti to suppose that the martyr had lived in Nazareth, and even at the very house which once was Mary’s—namely, the spot under discussion.
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James Strange also follows this line of reasoning: “In the 3d century the Christian martyr Conon from Nazareth of the family of Jesus was killed in Asia Minor (Bagatti 1969:16).”