Jesus Christ's Childhood Home Discovered.

Jesus’s House Identified, Except That Whether He Was Born There, Or Ever Lived There, Is “Impossible To Say”

Archaeologists working in Nazareth — Jesus’ hometown — in modern-day Israel have identified a house dating to the first century that was regarded as the place where Jesus was brought up by Mary and Joseph.

I had to read that confusing, equivocating sentence a few times — in context — to understand what it means. Follow along:

[The house] was first uncovered in the 1880s, by nuns at the Sisters of Nazareth convent, but it wasn’t until 2006 that archaeologists led by Ken Dark, a professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, dated the house to the first century, and identified it as the place where people, who lived centuries after Jesus’ time, believed Jesus was brought up.

Whether Jesus actually lived in the house in real life is unknown, but Dark says that it is possible.

“Was this the house where Jesus grew up? It is impossible to say on archaeological grounds,” Dark wrote in an article published in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review. “On the other hand, there is no good archaeological reason why such an identification should be discounted.”

The Reading University archaeologist said that an ancient text described precisely how it was located between two tombs and below a church.

Clerics from the Crusader period and the Byzantine era also put the ruins in the cellar of their churches, suggesting that it was of great significance and needed to be protected.

Also, it’s impossible to confirm that, according to local lore, a stupendous treasure lies buried somewhere in the bay I live on. But neither can it be disproven.

Holy site: An exterior view of the house believed to be where Jesus lived as a young boy

Should Dr Dark’s analysis be correct, it will solve a mystery which has baffled Christians for centuries.

They believe that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth when the angel Gabriel revealed that Mary would give birth to the son of God, a baby to be named Jesus.

According to Dr Dark, the house is located beneath the Sisters of Nazareth Convent which is across the road from Church of Annunciation in Nazareth.

He describes it as having been cut out of a limestone hillside and having a series of rooms and a stairway.

One of the original doorways has survived, as has part of the original chalk floor.

Overall the design was typical of early Roman settlements in the Galilee, Dr Dark says.

The house was first identified as a site ofspecial significance in the 1880s after the chance discovery of an ancient cistern at the convent, after which the nuns ordered an excavation.

But come on: Only two ruined houses from the 1st century C.E. are known to exist in Nazareth. One of those just happens to be the Savior’s childhood home?

It looks for all the world as if Dark and his team, perhaps spurred on by media eager for a sensational story, worked backwards from a preconceived result.

If that’s true, I can understand it – up to a point. When, consciously or not, you have a picture of a unicorn in mind, and someone shows you a piece of paper with six or seven seemingly random dots, you just might see a unicorn-shaped pattern. But more dots are needed, and if, after they emerge, the image turns out to be a platypus, or a tree, or a hat, the media will yawn and find something else to cover. Funding may well dry up.

Jesuit priest Henri Senes carried out more work in 1936 and then Dr Dark’s team followed up in 2006, discovering broken cooking pots, a spindle whorl and limestone artifacts.

The limestone items suggest a Jewish family lived there as Jews believed that limestone could not be impure.

Dr Dark also found that subsequent generations after the first century took great care to look after the site.

In the article he wrote: ‘Great efforts had been made to encompass the remains of this building within the vaulted cellars of both the Byzantine and Crusader churches, so that it was thereafter protected.

‘Both the tombs and the house were decorated with mosaics in the Byzantine period, suggesting that they were of special importance, and possibly venerated’.

The key piece of evidence linking the site to Jesus is pilgrim text called ‘De Locus Sanctis’ written in 670 AD by abbot Adomnàn of Iona, the island off the West coast of Scotland.

It was supposedly based on a pilgrimage made to Nazareth made by the Frankish bishop Arculf and talks about a church ‘where once there was the house in which the Lord was nourished in his infancy.

In the article Dr Dark says that the text describes two churches in Nazareth, one of which was the Church of Annunciation.

He writes: ‘The other stood nearby and was built near a vault that also contained a spring and the remains of two tombs.

‘Between these two tombs was the house in which Jesus was raised. From this is derived the more recent name for the church that Adomnàn described’.

The Sisters of Nazareth Convent matches this because there is evidence of a large Byzantine church with a spring and two tombs in its crypt, Dr Dark writes.

The house he believes was Jesus’ boyhood home stands in between the two tombs which also matches with Adomnàn’s account.

Dr Dark, a specialist in first century and Christian archaeology, writes: ‘Was this the house where Jesus grew up? It is impossible to say on archaeological grounds.

‘On the other hand, there is no good archaeological reason why such an identification should be discounted’.

The last attempt to identify the house where Jesus grew up was in 2009 when archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority found another 1st century home they believed had been occupied by a Jewish family.

However they were only able to say that Jesus may have lived near to the site as they did not have the link to the ancient texts that Professor Dark found.