Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on May 26, 2017

William Hamblin

This is the interior of the Synagogue Church where Jesus may have taught.

One of the most stirring scenes in the New Testament occurs in Luke 4:16-21, which relates that Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.

"And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias (Isaiah). And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

"And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

Jesus read from what may perhaps have been a slightly different version of what we now know as Isaiah 61:1-2. As was the custom of the day in synagogues, he stood to read the biblical text and then seated himself to comment upon it.

The reaction of the audience was incredulous at first (compare Matthew 13:54-58; Mark 6:1-6). Was he not a local boy? A rather insignificant one? How had he gained such eloquence, such learning and poise? However, when, as he continued speaking, he pointed to their disbelief and compared it to stories of earlier biblical prophets, their puzzlement turned to anger. In the end, they vainly sought to throw him from a cliff near the town.

Surprisingly, until recent decades little serious archaeology had been done in Nazareth.

Although it is now the largest city in the northern district of Israel and is often regarded as the countrys Arab capital, the town is thought to have been extremely small in Jesuss day, with perhaps only a few hundred inhabitants. To the extent that it had much of an economy while Jesus was living there, employment very likely revolved around construction work in the booming city of Sepphoris, a little less than four miles away (see Sepphoris 'The ornament of the Galilee' published April 29, 2016, on deseretnews.com).

Recently, though, archaeological research has been turning up some very interesting finds in Nazareth, including a first-century home that might just possibly though unprovably be that of the young Jesus himself. After all, there were few houses in the village in his day, and this one seems to have been venerated by early Christians (see Archaeology and the boyhood of Jesus in Nazareth published March 12, 2015, on deseretnews.com).

What, though, of the synagogue in which Jesus made his dramatic announcement? Can it be located? For a town so small, a single synagogue would have been sufficient.

There is, as it happens, a traditional site. The so-called Synagogue Church is a 12th-century Crusader structure located in the area of Nazareths medieval market, just a few minutes walk from the massive modern Roman Catholic Basilica of the Annunciation and directly adjacent to the Greek Catholic Church of the Annunciation. (The Greek Catholics or Melkites own and maintain it, too.) It was built around the same time that the Crusaders replaced the original Byzantine Church of the Annunciation with their own, which was, in its turn, replaced by the beautiful structure dedicated by Pope Paul VI in 1969.

Ancient tradition maintains that the Synagogue Church stands atop the Roman-era synagogue where Jesus worshipped as a young man. In fact, in A.D. 570, the anonymous northern Italian Pilgrim of Piacenza the last western Christian writer to visit Palestine before the Muslim conquest that occurred less than a century later claimed to have seen not only the ancient synagogue itself but the original Bible from which Jesus had read, as well as the bench on which the Savior used to sit as a young man.

But is that tradition old enough? Unfortunately, the Piacenza Pilgrim enjoys a well-earned reputation for exceptional gullibility. Moreover, its very likely that the synagogue of Jesuss time was destroyed in the late 60s A.D., during the first Jewish revolt against Rome though it could have been rebuilt thereafter.

Furthermore, some have argued, the site of the Synagogue Church is outside the boundaries of the tiny ancient town of Nazareth, whereas the synagogue would almost certainly have been located within the village.

Daniel Peterson founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.

Originally posted here:

Nazareth's 'Synagogue Church' where Jesus may have worshipped as a young man - Deseret News

Category: Synagogue
Tags: