Nazareth in History.

There is often a kind of condescension in relation to those times 2000 years ago, thinking that our days are far more advanced. We tend to consider people who lived at that time as primitives who lived in huts without sanitation. This is not at all the civilization that archeology reveals in Galilee, and especially Nazareth. People were certainly less rich than today, had fewer luxuries, but all they had was very neat and very beautiful. The buildings, roads, and houses found at the time of the first century confirm this.

Olivier Bonnassies
Founder of the Mary of Nazareth Association
“Everything is neat, everything is actually in stone, everything is really well done, so it is a very accomplished civilization. There had been centuries of evolution, centuries of revelation of God to his people, before Christ was given to the world. It was at the height of a civilization and not in a slum.”

Olivier Bonnassies
Founder of the Mary of Nazareth Association
So we must imagine Nazareth and all Galilee like a place which was – as the Bible says – a land flowing with milk and honey; for his part, Flavius Josephus said that the Galilee was absolutely lush and there was not a small piece of land that was not cultivated, which did not produce an abundance of fruit or other plants. So, it is entirely consistent with what is found in the archeology, and, therefore, we have to imagine the country of Mary completely different from what we see today (…)

Stephen Pfann
President, University of the Holy Land, Jerusalem
The suspicion of many of us archeologists is true. And that is that
the remains that have been found elsewhere in Nazareth on the hill, that are lacking walls do not mean that the people of Nazareth were living in caves, as many have said up till now. It becomes clear that they
lived in homes with roofs and with houses, with walls, cisterns and
silos, just like we find in many surrounding villages that have been
better preserved in this area that is contemporary with the time of Jesus.