If there was no Nazareth. when Jesus was born. Then how can he be called Jesus of Nazareth?

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John 1: 45-46 mentions Nazareth and names it as Christ’s home.
 
DaddyGirl said:
It is said he grew up there…and many believe he was most likely born in Nazareth, too.

Did it not exist as a city before that?

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By “many” you must mean few. As 99.99% of all Christians believe Jesus was born in Bethlehem as stated in the Bible.

Or maybe you meant many liberal/secular exegetes. But it should be qualified.
 
skeptics and attackers of the faith say Nazareth never existed because it’s never mentioned outside the bible
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Skeptics said the same thing about the Sheep Gate pool from John 5, which similarly was mentioned nowhere else. They concluded that it was made up by someone unfamiliar with Jerusalem. Then they discovered it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Bethesda
 
Only about 1%-2% of what was written before the time of Christ has survived into the modern era. Think about that for a second, we are missing almost 99% of our history as a species. There are towns which historians believe existed with no more evidence than a single sentence in some random scroll, and for which we have found no physical evidence. This is normal, because time can easily erase all traces of a city. Floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other “acts of God” can wipe a city from the face of the Earth. You need look no further than Pompeii for evidence of this. The only reason we found Pompeii was because there were a few scrolls that gave a general location of them, were it not for those minute mentions, we would probably still have no idea that there was a city buried under the Earth there.

Nazareth was, in all likelihood, a very small and inconsequential city. There’s little reason it would have been written of much in the time of Christ or before. If that were the case, it’s not surprising that we have no record of it outside of the Bible. In a thousand years, there will probably be no record of half the town that exist right now in the US.

For a better understanding of why the city became lost int eh first place, consider this. As the supply and demand for various goods changes, cities can become entirely abandoned, left for nature to reclaim. (Examples) It is also possible, due to the density of certain areas in the Middle East, that Nazareth is actually below another city now, destroyed and covered over by years of demolition and new construction.construction. Seattle’s Underground is actually a very good example of this in modern times; most of the modern roads and sidewalks are elevated above what was originally the ground level. There are countless examples of this in history because it was necessary to build near natural resources, so if a city was destroyed or abandoned, but still had good resources, it was torn down and a new city was built on top of it. Fire was the most common culprit, with the new city literally being built on the ashes of the old one. This has actually resulted in a new method for looking for archaeological sites, archaeologists use topographical information to look for “bumps” in the land that indicate the existence of buried ruins.

Basically, what I’m getting at is, if a lack of actual physical evidence was enough to discount a historical belief, we’d known pretty much nothing about out history, because almost no physical evidence survives the ravages of time. People who try to use this to disprove Christ are grasping at straws, and ignoring the reality of how archaeology and historical research work.

Hope this hleps, God Bless ^^
 
Lots of physical evidence for ancient Nazareth. It was located near not one but two springs. It was probably inhabited by the Neanderthals at some point.
 
Didn’t a man try to disprove Luke and The Acts so he traveled doing archaeological work and discovered that Luke had been extremely accurate? Would Luke and all the other Gospel writers be pulling city names out of a hat?
 
latin_rite said:
Question in title.
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To be frank/blunt here, only people who rely on outdated information would actually believe this. The whole idea about Nazareth not actually existing in the 1st century is really an argument from silence - not counting the gospels and works which are dependent on it (i.e. later Christian texts), no other source (i.e. the Old Testament, Paul, Josephus, the Mishnah/Talmud) ever talks about the place. In essence, they assume that if Josephus or any other source doesn’t mention the place, it didn’t really exist. But this is really a weak argument: there are plausible reasons why Nazareth couldn’t have been named by Josephus and by the Rabbis.

But, there’s a grain of truth to the problem. We don’t know exactly where Jesus’ Nazareth is, though we do have a good guess as to its general area. The problem here is that the existence of modern Nazareth makes it impossible for ancient Nazareth - which is probably just a small insignificant hamlet - to be dug up properly. Modern Nazareth is now a huge city, occupying way more land than ancient Nazareth did. While archaeological discoveries that fit the general time period have been discovered, thus potentially disproving the accusations that there was no Nazareth in the 1st century (specifically, things like coins from the correct time period, agricultural infrastructures, a house), the way things are right now we could never really do full-scale archaeological digs. So most of Jesus’ Nazareth still lie buried somewhere beneath modern Nazareth, and it might stay that way forever, but who knows?

Another problem is that many people have apparently been misled by their ultra-reliance on the biblical texts and by the ideas of later pilgrims (who are most of the time just relying on their own guessworks). In other words, people have a preconceived notion of what they would see, which is what really misled most early archaeologists digging for sites in the Holy Land. And this is also what misleads people who attack the historicity of Bible. In other words, both camps aren’t letting the sites speak for themselves; they read their own biases and preconceived into it.
 
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