Matthew 1: 16 Jacob was the father of Joseph. Joseph was the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus, who is called the Messiah.
Matthew 2:1 Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem in Judea during the time when Herod was king. 11 The wise men came to the house where the child was with his mother Mary.
22 But he heard that Herod Archelaus was now king in Judea. Archelaus became king when his father Herod died. So Joseph was afraid to go there. Then, after being warned in a dream, he went away to the area of Galilee.23 He went to a town called Nazareth and lived there. This gave full meaning to what God said through the prophets. God said the Messiah would be called a Nazarene.
Luke 1:5 During the time when Herod ruled Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah.
26-27 During Elizabeth’s sixth month of pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to a virgin girl who lived in Nazareth, a town in Galilee. She was engaged to marry a man named Joseph from the family of David.26-27 During Elizabeth’s sixth month of pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to a virgin girl who lived in Nazareth, a town in Galilee. She was engaged to marry a man named Joseph from the family of David.
Luke 3: 23 When Jesus began to teach, he was about 30 years old. People thought that Jesus was Joseph’s son. Joseph was the son of Eli.
Luke 3:1 It was the 15th year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar. These men were under Caesar: Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea; Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee; Philip, Herod’s brother, the ruler of Iturea and Trachonitis; Lysanias, the ruler of Abilene.
Luke 4: 28 When the people in the Nazareth synagogue heard this, they were very angry.29 They got up and forced Jesus to go out of town. Their town was built on a hill. They took Jesus to the edge of the hill to throw him off.30 But he walked through the middle of the crowd and went away.
n English translations of the New Testament, the phrase "Jesus of Nazareth" appears seventeen times whereas the Greek has the form "Jesus the Nazarēnos" or "Jesus the Nazōraios."[18] One plausible view is that Nazōraean(Ναζωραῖος) is a normal Greek adaptation of a reconstructed, hypothetical term in Jewish Aramaic for the word later used in Rabbinical sources to refer to Jesus.
Although it is mentioned in the New Testament gospels, there are no extant non-biblical references to Nazareth until around 200 CE, when Sextus Julius Africanus, cited by Eusebius (Church History 1.7.14), speaks of Nazara as a village in Judea and locates it near an as-yet unidentified "Cochaba".[44] In the same passage Africanus writes of desposunoi – relatives of Jesus – who he claims kept the records of their descent with great care. Ken Dark describes the view that Nazareth did not exist in Jesus's time as "archaeologically unsupportable".[
James F. Strange, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Southern Florida originally calculated the population of Nazareth at the time of Christ as "roughly 1,600 to 2,000 people" but, in a subsequent publication that followed more than a decade of additional research, revised this figure down to "a maximum of about 480."
Jerome, writing in the fifth century, says Nazareth was still a viculus, a mere village, in his day. In the sixth century, however, legends about Mary began to spark interest in the site among pilgrims, who founded the Church of the Annunciation at the site of a freshwater spring, today known as St. Mary's Well.
The establishment of Nazareth Illit was conceived in the early 1950s when development towns such as Karmiel and Beit She'an were founded. There were economic and security reasons for developing a town in this region, but according to Shimon Landman, director of the Interior Ministry's Department of Minorities, the Nazareth municipal elections in 1954, in which the Israel communist party Maki became the largest faction, were a source of concern.[4]
A parcel of 1,200 dunams of land, about half formerly within the municipal boundaries of Nazareth, was allocated in 1954, relying on a law that permitted expropriations for public purposes. Protests at this action reached the Supreme Court of Israel, which in 1955 accepted (HCJ 30/55) the government's word that the sole purpose of the land was to erect government facilities. However, it had already been decided that only 109 dunams would be used for that purpose and planning for residential neighborhoods continued. The first dwellings were completed in September 1956 and the first residents moved in later that year.[5]
According to historian Geremy Forman, the director of the IDF Planning Department, Yuval Ne'eman, stated that the town would "safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and... demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation." Forman wrote that Nazareth Illit was meant to "overpower Nazareth numerically, economically, and politically."[6]
Initially the city was referred to as the "Jewish neighborhood" of Nazareth, then as Kiryat Natzeret. The name Nazareth Illit (Upper Nazareth) was adopted in 1958. In 1961, Nazareth Illit was recognized as a municipal local council.[7]
In 2019 the city decided to rename itself to Nof Hagalil (Hebrew: נוֹף הַגָּלִיל, lit. View of the Galilee).[8][9]