Rene Salm, The Myth
of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus. America n Atheist
Press, 2008.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
In
all the discussion of faith and history such as that in Van A. Harvey’s
classic The Historian and the Believer, archaeology inevitably
comes to the fore as the source from which surprises threaten to emerge.
What might upset faith’s apple cart? Many things might (including
genetic research, as Mormons recently found out the hard way), not to
mention the critical study of historical documents, but believers are
adept at fending off evidence of that kind. For really rigorous thought
experiments one usually imagines the delver’s spade turning up some
gross inconvenience such as the bones of Jesus or the bone box of his
brother. And yet it is the entire absence of archaeological
evidence that has wrought great devastation to the credibility of the
Bible (not to mention the Koran!). Old Testament minimalism has torn
from our grasp the once-firm hold we thought we had on the historical
character of ancient Israelite narrative. Who’d have guessed Davidic
Jerusalem was only a crossroads with a gas pump? Solomon’s temple little
more than a Vegas wedding chapel (if even that)? And now we have to ask
ourselves: Can any good news come out of Nazareth? That all depends on
where one stands, but Rene Salm has shown that we have an utter void of
archaeological vestiges of the Galilean home town of Jesus. At least
there was no such town in the early part of the first century. The area
had indeed been inhabited in the Iron and Bronze Ages, but by the time
of Jesus it had been empty and windswept for some eight hundred years.
It began to be repopulated about the middle of the first century
CE, twenty years after Jesus’ ostensible death.
Salm examines every bit of
known evidence from the Nazareth Plateau. What a disparity between his
results (none of them methodologically dubious, none controversial
except in result) and the blithe generalizations of certain well-known
Bible encyclopedias and Bible archaeology handbooks. Their authors write
as if there were enough evidence not only to establish a Jesus-era
Nazareth but even to characterize it in various ways. A great deal of
the confusion inherited by these “experts” stems from the schizophrenic
researches of Roman Catholic diggers and taggers charged by Rome to find
out what they could about Nazareth. To them it seemed that Church
tradition and Gospel narrative deserved to be considered evidence equal
in importance to the yield of the ground. Their procedure was exactly
like that of B.B. Warfield and his fellow inerrantists who insisted on
giving equal weight to both the “claims” and the “phenomena” of
scripture. The result is inevitably and even intentionally skewed.
Salm’s archaeological
outcome does fit quite well with other literary considerations, namely
the entire silence of both Josephus and the Mishnah when it comes to
Nazareth. More than this, it seems to confirm a long-standing critical
theory that “Jesus the Nazorean/Nazarene” first denoted a sectarian
label, reflecting the Nazorean sect(s) catalogued by various Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim heresiologists, notably including the still-living
Mandaean (Nasorean) sect of Iraq. Jesus was considered to be a member,
or at least a pious Jew of that type (Nasoreans were itinerant
carpenters, among other things). It was only later, once a higher
Christology had begun to feel uneasy with notions such as Jesus
receiving instruction from John the Baptist or even from village tutors,
that some preferred to understand “Nazarene” to mean “of Nazareth.” And
by this time, there was a Nazareth, which the gospel writers were
only too happy to retcon, or retroject, into the first century BCE.
One fears Rene Salm will
prove as welcome amid the conventional “Nazareth” apologists as Jesus
was among the Nazarene synagogue congregation in the gospels. But for
others, it must now become apparent that we must bracket the gospel
stories till we can independently reconstruct an account of Christian
origins from the evidence on the ground—or the lack of it. New Testament
minimalism: full speed ahead!