Archaelogy

Let’s make our way to the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the largest church in the Middle East, where we’ll find multiple layers of archaeology that tell quite a story.

The modern church to which visitors are taken in the heart of the city has been standing there since 1960. Before that an older church of the same name stood on the same site from 1730-1954. Before that the site featured a Crusader church, dating to approximately 1100, until a Muslim, Egyptian sultan destroyed it in 1263. Before the Crusader church a Byzantine church stood there from the early fifth century until 1009.

And finally, under all these archaeological layers a synagogue/church has been discovered that dates to the second century and in which archaeologists have found columns, capitals, bases, cornices, decorated stones, one wall, a mosaic floor with symbols of crosses, a crown, and letters from the name of Christ, demonstrating that the church’s second-century, Jewish worshippers believed that Jesus was both their King and Messiah. Archaeologists also found plaster inscriptions at the second-century level, one of which read “Jesus.”

However, I haven’t even told you the best part. Under the second-century synagogue archaeologists found a first-century house with cisterns, caverns and finally a Jewish ritual bath, known as a mikveh, that had been later incorporated into the baptismal of the second-century synagogue. In other words, the people of Nazareth built a synagogue over a house. But whose house?

Another one of the plaster inscriptions found in the synagogue yields the fuller story, for it reads, “Rejoice, Mary!” Jewish Christians living shortly after the time of Jesus clearly believed this house to be none other than that of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the inscription just noted was likely intended to reflect the very words of the angel Gabriel to Mary in Luke 1:28, 30, “Rejoice … Mary, for you have found favor with God.”

—Daniel McCabe