Where Was Jesus Born? Bethlehem, and He Grew Up in Nazareth

Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth. Both Gospels that tell of his birth, Matthew and Luke, place it in Bethlehem, King David’s town in Judea. Nazareth, a village in Galilee, was his home for most of his life, so people knew him as Jesus of Nazareth, and the name stayed with him.

The name puzzled people from the start. Philip found his friend Nathanael and told him they had found the one “of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Nathanael answered, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Philip did not argue. “Come and see,” he said (John 1:45–46). God came to us through two small places, and he took his name from the one Nathanael doubted. At the end Pilate wrote that name over the cross in Hebrew, Greek and Latin: “Jesus Of Nazareth The King Of The Jews” (John 19:19–20).

What happened in Bethlehem, and what in Nazareth?

Matthew gives the birthplace in a single line: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem” (Matthew 2:1). Luke tells how the family came to be there. When the decree of Caesar Augustus went out, “Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)” (Luke 2:4). While they were there, Mary “brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7).

Luke starts from Nazareth: Joseph and Mary live there and travel south for the census. Matthew starts from Bethlehem, where we first meet the family and where the wise men find the child in a house, and he brings them to Nazareth only after Herod’s death, when an angel calls Joseph back from Egypt and a warning in a dream turns him “into the parts of Galilee” (Matthew 2:19–22). So the two evangelists come in by different doors and stand in the same two towns. Christians have fitted their accounts together in more than one way, and the order of events is traced in how old Jesus was when the wise men came.

Why is Jesus called Jesus of Nazareth if he was born in Bethlehem?

Nazareth is where he lived, and Luke’s story of the child begins and ends there. The angel Gabriel “was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth” (Luke 1:26). After the baby was presented in the Temple, his parents “returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him” (Luke 2:39–40). After the visit to the Temple at twelve, “he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them” (Luke 2:51). Years later Luke calls it the place “where he had been brought up” (Luke 4:16).

Everyone who met the grown man placed him by that village. Mark introduces him as one who “came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan” (Mark 1:9). When he rode into Jerusalem, the crowd said, “This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee” (Matthew 21:11). In the synagogue at home his neighbours asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3), and in Jerusalem some doubted that he could be the Christ because he came from Galilee (John 7:41–42). Matthew heard Scripture in the name: Joseph “came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23). He speaks of “the prophets” and names none of them. For about thirty years the Son of God was known by the address of a village Nathanael expected nothing from, and when his work began, friends and enemies alike went on calling him by it.

The Franciscans who keep the basilica in Nazareth describe a farming village of “simple dwellings constructed around caves,” and they write, “It was in this simple environment that Joseph and Mary went about their domestic lives and Jesus spent his childhood.” Luke gives his age at the start of his ministry as “about thirty years” (Luke 3:23), and most of those years belonged to that village. The Word by whom all things were made spent his youth among those houses built around caves, known to his neighbours as the carpenter, and the Gospels pass over almost all of those years in silence.

Do historians doubt that Jesus was born in Bethlehem?

Many do. Matthew and Luke tell very different birth stories, with a star and Herod in one and shepherds and a census in the other, and both name Bethlehem. Michael Bird, writing for the Society of Biblical Literature, sums up the doubt: “many scholars conclude that Jesus was probably born in Nazareth rather than in Bethlehem.” They argue that the Gospel writers “may have made up the story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem as a way of interpreting Mic 5:2 in hindsight,” and many find an empire-wide census that sent everyone back to their home towns hard to believe.

Helen Bond, who teaches Christian origins at the University of Edinburgh, points to the silence of the other witnesses. Paul’s letters and Mark’s Gospel never mention Bethlehem, and John lets Nathanael’s scorn for Nazareth pass without a word about it. She grants that this “does not prove that the tradition has no factual basis,” and judges that “it seems more likely that the story was developed within early Christian circles to connect Jesus with the Davidic Messiah.”

If the doubt has unsettled you, Bird also gives the other side. “Bethlehem did not figure widely in Jewish messianic hopes,” he writes, so there was “no absolute necessity” to invent it in order to call Jesus the Messiah. Mark and Paul, who “do not seem to know of any tradition about Jesus born in Bethlehem,” still believed he was the Messiah. And though a census of the whole empire is unlikely, “the need to return to ancestral lands to claim property or to register for taxation was not unprecedented.” The prophet Micah had named David’s town centuries before, a promise traced in why Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

No record outside the Gospels settles the question either way, though a few have looked elsewhere: the Israeli archaeologist Aviram Oshri told NPR in 2012 that Jesus was born in the other Bethlehem, the one Joshua lists among the towns of Zebulun in Galilee (Joshua 19:15), about seven kilometres from Nazareth. What we have is the witness of Matthew and Luke. They share almost nothing else in their birth stories, no star in Luke, no shepherds in Matthew, and they reach Bethlehem from opposite ends of the country, yet both set the birth in David’s town. We read them as the first Christians did, trusting two witnesses whose stories are so unlike each other, and the faith they hand on never rested on a census record. It rested on the man from Nazareth, and Philip’s answer to every doubt about him is still the same.

How far is Nazareth from Bethlehem?

About 90 miles, or some 145 kilometres, by the usual route, according to a 1995 account of the journey in the Tampa Bay Times: south along the flat land beside the Jordan River, then west over the hills around Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The archaeologist James F. Strange, who led excavations at Sepphoris near Nazareth, told the paper, “In antiquity, the most we find people traveling is 20 miles a day,” and he thought a couple so near the birth would have managed about ten. At that pace the journey would take about nine days.

Luke gives none of these details, and says only that Joseph went “To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child” (Luke 2:5), and that “while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered” (Luke 2:6). Nine days on the road at the end of a pregnancy is a great deal to ask of a mother, and Luke gives it half a verse. He lets the journey stand in the words “great with child”, and the Son of God made it before he was born.

Was Jesus born in Israel?

He was born in the land of Israel, and that is Matthew’s own name for it. When Herod died, the angel told Joseph, “Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel” (Matthew 2:20). In Jesus’ day Bethlehem lay in Judea, under Herod’s rule, and Nazareth lay in Galilee. Today Bethlehem is a Palestinian city in the West Bank, about 9 to 10 km (5 to 6 miles) south of Jerusalem, and Nazareth is a city in northern Israel. Herod’s kingdom is long gone and the land has had many rulers since, but “the land of Israel” is what the angel called it when he sent the child home.

What stands in Bethlehem and Nazareth today?

In Bethlehem the Church of the Nativity, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012, covers the cave that Christians have honoured as the birthplace since at least the second century, and Christians have worshipped on that spot since the fourth century; how the cave came to be known is told with the manger and the cave.

In Nazareth the Basilica of the Annunciation, consecrated on 23 March 1969, covers the grotto where tradition places the angel’s visit to Mary. The altar in the grotto bears the Latin words “Verbum caro hic factum est”: “HERE the word became flesh.” Bethlehem keeps the night he was born. Nazareth keeps the day the Word took flesh, and the long ordinary years that followed.

We call him by the name his neighbours used, and when we bring him our own doubts, as Nathanael did, the answer is still Philip’s: come and see. On Easter morning the young man in white at the tomb used the village name for the Lord of life: “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here” (Mark 16:5–6).

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