Nazareth is absent from the Hebrew Bible, from Josephus and from the early rabbinic writings, and the gospel of John preserves a line that sounds like a local joke at its expense, asking whether anything good can come out of the place. The archaeology matches the silence: a small agricultural settlement in the Galilean hills, with rock cut tombs, cisterns, storage pits, wine and olive presses, and dwellings of the courtyard type, one of which has been excavated beneath a convent in the town centre. A few hundred people at most lived there in the first century.
That obscurity is part of why the name stuck to Jesus as an identifier. He is called the Nazarene in the gospels, and the term became the ordinary Jewish and later Arabic word for Christians. The exact derivation of the Greek forms has been argued over for a century without settlement.
Two pieces of evidence bear on the town's later history. A marble slab of uncertain provenance, acquired in Nazareth in the nineteenth century and now in Paris, carries a Greek edict against disturbing tombs; it has often been linked to Christian claims about an empty tomb, and a recent isotope study of the marble points to an origin on the island of Kos, which weakens the connection to Judaea. A Hebrew inscription found at Caesarea lists the priestly courses and their settlements after the destruction of the temple, and names Nazareth as the home of one of them, which is the earliest non Christian mention of the place.