Where is Nazareth?

On the map

Nazareth sits in a bowl of limestone hills in Lower Galilee, about 350 meters above sea level, on the last ridge before the land drops south into the wide Jezreel Valley. The Sea of Galilee lies about 25 kilometers to the east, the coast at Haifa some 30 kilometers to the northwest, and Mount Tabor rises 9 kilometers away. Cana, today’s Kafr Kanna, is about 7 kilometers off, and Sepphoris, the city Herod Antipas rebuilt, about 6. Jerusalem lies a little over 100 kilometers south as the crow flies; by the roads, Luke’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem was about 150.

Is Nazareth in Israel?

Yes. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, but Nazareth has been inside Israel since 1948. It surrendered to Israeli troops on July 16, 1948, during Operation Dekel, after little fighting, and most of its Arab residents stayed. Today about 76,000 people live there, roughly two-thirds Muslim and one-third Christian. It is the largest city in Israel’s Northern District and is often called the Arab capital of Israel. On the hills next door, Nazareth Illit, a Jewish town founded in 1957, renamed itself Nof HaGalil in 2019.

A village no one had heard of

Nazareth appears nowhere in the Hebrew Bible, nor in Josephus, who commanded in Galilee and names many of its towns, nor in the early rabbinic writings. Its first mention outside Christian texts is a marble fragment from a synagogue at Caesarea, found in 1962 and dated to about AD 300, which lists the priestly families and names Nazareth as the home of one of them. Archaeologists put the first-century village at about 400 people: small houses, cisterns and storage pits cut into the rock. In 2009 Yardenna Alexandre excavated the first house of that period found there, near the Basilica of the Annunciation. No wonder a man from Cana scoffed.

Nathanael said to him, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”

Jesus of Nazareth

Whatever they say about Bethlehem, all four Gospels agree that Jesus came from here. Mark calls him Jesus “from Nazareth of Galilee” (Mark 1:9). Matthew brings the family here after Egypt and sees a prophecy in it, that “he will be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23), words found in no prophet in that form; many scholars hear a pun on netzer, the “branch” from Jesse’s roots in Isaiah 11:1. Luke sets Jesus’s first sermon in the village synagogue, and it ends badly.

They rose up, threw him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill that their city was built on, that they might throw him off the cliff.

Pilgrims are shown Mount Precipice, a cliff southeast of town above the Jezreel Valley. The name stuck to his followers. Acts calls them “the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5), and Christians are still Notzrim in Hebrew and Nasara in Arabic.

The town today

Modern Nazareth is a busy city of markets, traffic and church bells. The Basilica of the Annunciation, completed in 1969 over the grotto where Catholic tradition places Gabriel’s visit to Mary, is often called the largest church in the Middle East. A short walk north, the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Gabriel stands by the spring known as Mary’s Well, a rival site for the same scene.