Nazareth, The City Jesus Grew Up In Series

(Slide of the Jezreel Valley from our hotel)

You could see the Jezreel valley from the dining room AND from our bedroom balcony. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

(slide of Nazareth as it may have looked when Jesus was young).

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but His family had to flee from Herod the Great to Egypt. When Herod died… they returned to Nazareth where Joseph plied his trade as a carpenter. For the next 25 years or so, Jesus played and worked and lived in Nazareth and was forever identified (even after leaving Nazareth) as “Jesus of Nazareth”. In Mark 10:47 we read that when a blind man in Jericho heard that “Jesus of Nazareth” was there he cried out for Jesus to heal him.

Thus Nazareth was a pivotal town in the life of Christ.

ILLUS: Back in the 1990s, a Doctor in a Nazareth Hospital began to be distressed that the city of Nazareth that Jesus’ knew was quickly being buried by the present day construction. With a discovery of an ancient winepress on the hospital land Dr. Bishara developed the idea of creating a visitor’s center reflecting the village in Jesus’ day. He spoke with wealthy and well connected donors (including President Jimmy Carter) and arranged for funds to build a visitors’ center that would reflect how life might have been back then. They built a synagogue, an olive press building, a couple of houses and employed actors to represent carpenters, women making yarn, weavers of tapestries, and shepherds.

(Slide of the terraced land)

In the process of developing the land, they have uncovered an ancient terraced farm from the days of Jesus with a watch tower in one corner (just like Jesus spoke of in Matthew 21:33). Each of these terraced plots of land was farmed by different farmers. There would have been a path running down the hillside so that each farmer could reach his plot without treading on his neighbors “field”. But these terraced lands were filled with partially submerged rocks where the soil would only be a couple inches deep. There would also be thistles that would grow up along with the crop.

This was the type of farming Jesus described in his parable of the 4 soils. A farmer would have scattered his seed and some of it would have fallen on the path, some on the thin cover of soil above the rocks and others amongst thistles. But some would have fallen on good ground.

The guide at the Nazareth village noted that he had played on this land as a child and that it would be logical to assume Jesus had played there in his youth as well.

(Slides of an olive press)

As I noted earlier, one of the archeological discoveries at the Nazareth Village center was that of an olive press. As you can see in this picture, the press consisted of a huge circular bowl with a huge round rock sitting on its edge resting inside that bowl. The round rock had a beam through it that could be hooked up to a donkey (like the one in this picture). The donkey would roll the rock around the bowl and the olives would be crushed.