Recently visited the site of ancient Nazareth. Most people stop in at the Church of the Annunciation, which is built over the supposed spot where the angel met Mary and announced the coming of the Messiah. There is also a shrine at the spot where Joseph’s house was presumed to be, about a hundred yards away. Then they get on the bus and move on to somewhere else.

I wanted a more authentic experience and arranged for locals to open the gates into the archaeological site under the plaza between the two churches. Here we came face to face with a startling reality. Archaeology has found evidence for at most one dwelling in first century Nazareth, but there is evidence for numerous inhabited caves and we got to see at least two of those, just outside the Church of the Annunciation. While we don’t know for certain which of these caves was the place where Jesus grew up, there is no question that we were on the spot of some of Jesus’ neighbors.

Since all of Nazareth back then spanned at most a couple hundred meters, scholars estimate that Nazareth in the time of Jesus was made up of at most 480 total people. Jesus lived in a small, isolated village so insignificant that it left very little evidence of its existence in any formal constructed sense. Jesus truly "humbled himself" in coming to this earth (Phil 2:6-8).

Recently a "Jesus boat" was found at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee. It was dated to the very time of Christ and showed the kind of boat that typical fishermen used at the time. So we are getting a strong sense of the environment and landscape that Jesus would have experienced long, long ago.