Why did Jesus grow up in Nazareth if he was born in Bethlehem?

Two Gospels, one village

The question comes from reading Matthew and Luke side by side. Both put the birth in Bethlehem and the childhood in Nazareth, but they connect the two places differently, as why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem explains. In Luke the family lives in Nazareth from the start: Gabriel is sent “to a city of Galilee named Nazareth” (Luke 1:26), and after the birth they simply go home.

When they had accomplished all things that were according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth.

Matthew never says where the family lived before the birth. After the flight to Egypt, an angel tells Joseph that Herod is dead and sends him back to the land of Israel. Then comes the reason for the detour.

But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in the place of his father, Herod, he was afraid to go there. Being warned in a dream, he withdrew into the region of Galilee

Archelaus, the son Joseph feared

When Herod the Great died in 4 BC, Rome divided his kingdom among three sons. Archelaus got Judea, Samaria and Idumea, the land of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Augustus gave him the title ethnarch, not king, and promised the crown only if he proved worthy (Josephus, Antiquities 17.317). He never did.

His rule began in blood. At the first Passover after his father’s death, protesters filled the Temple courts, and his soldiers killed about three thousand people there (Antiquities 17.213–218). When he sailed to Rome to have his inheritance confirmed, a delegation of fifty Judeans went too, to ask Augustus to refuse him. Many readers hear that journey behind one of Jesus’s parables, about a nobleman who goes “into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom”:

But his citizens hated him, and sent an envoy after him, saying, ‘We don’t want this man to reign over us.’

After nine years of complaints, in AD 6, Augustus deposed Archelaus and banished him to Vienne, in Gaul. Judea passed to Roman prefects, a line that would later include Pontius Pilate.

Galilee under Antipas

Galilee went to another son, Herod Antipas, who ruled it from 4 BC to AD 39 (who Antipas was). It had its own violence at first. In the revolts after Herod’s death, Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, burned the Galilean city of Sepphoris (Antiquities 17.289). Antipas rebuilt it as the showpiece of Galilee and his first capital (Antiquities 18.27). Sepphoris lies about six kilometers from Nazareth. The Gospels never mention it, but some historians wonder whether Joseph, a builder, found work there.

“Jesus of Nazareth”

Luke sums up the years in the village in a line: the child grew strong, “being filled with wisdom” (Luke 2:40), and after the visit to the Temple at twelve, “he went down with them and came to Nazareth” (2:51). The village stuck to him. In a world without surnames, people were known by their father or their town: Joseph of Arimathea, Simon of Cyrene, Mary Magdalene from Magdala. Jesus, Yeshua, was a common name, so “of Nazareth” told people which Jesus. The Jerusalem crowds call him “Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee” (Matthew 21:11), and Pilate’s sign on the cross reads “JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS” (John 19:19).

Matthew adds one more reason: the move fulfilled the words that “he will be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23), a puzzle explored under where Nazareth is. As a grown man Jesus left the village and made Capernaum, on the lake, his home (Matthew 4:13). The name stayed with him anyway.