“A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
–Jesus
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Sepphoris is a forgotten city. You won’t find it in the New Testament, and until recently it was not even included on the maps of the Holy Land found in the back of many Bibles. Yet Sepphoris is a vital key for understanding Mary’s origins and background.
Sepphoris, as the capital, was the hub of trade, commerce, and government for the entire region of Galilee, located in its geographic center. It was the “city set on a hill,” as Jesus later put it, clearly visible for miles around to the dozens of smaller towns and villages clustered in the fertile and expansive Bet Netofa Valley.
Tradition has it that Jesus’s grandparents, Joachim and Anna, parents of Mary, were from Sepphoris. If so, it was there where she would have been born and raised, not in Nazareth, where she ended up. The Gospels tell us nothing of her childhood, but it seems inevitable that legends would begin to fill this blank story. The earliest is a third-century apocryphal text, the Protoevangelium of James, which imagines the young Mary being sent by her parents to the temple in Jerusalem, at age three, to be raised by the priests there as some sort of Jewish version of a vestal virgin until age twelve—when she begins her period and would be ready for marriage. During this time she received perfect food from the hand of an angel, and various other marvels are related about her exceptional holiness as the future vessel for the birth of Jesus, the divine Son of God. An elderly Joseph is chosen by lot to be her husband, in a strictly caretaker role.
This Greek text, which circulated broadly, especially in the East, was soon translated into Latin and became the basis of most Nativity traditions down into the Middle Ages. It is first mentioned by the church father Origen in the early third century. There appears to be little in the text of historical value, as it is mainly about Mary’s birth being miraculous and her virginity remaining “intact” through her childhood, and even giving birth to Jesus. This doctrine is indeed related to a traditional belief within Marian devotion. It holds that Mary remained a virgin not only before and during the conception of Jesus but also after His birth. It first appears in this apocryphal text but is defended by the major early church theologians such as Augustine and Jerome.
That we know little to nothing of Mary’s family in our New Testament Gospels underlines the point that her life was of scant interest beyond the role she played in bringing Jesus into the world.
It might be significant, however, that the Protoevangelium of James presents Mary’s father, Joachim, as “exceedingly rich,” a prominent landowner with large flocks, herds, and servants. This assertion that Mary was a child of a well-to-do family might have some historical validity since this text was composed at a time when the poverty and celibacy of the Holy Family had become associated with her nunlike virtue. And yet the author presents her as coming from an influential family in the urban capital of Galilee.
There is a passing line in one of the fragmented letters of Paul where he writes of Jesus, “Though he was rich, for our sake he became poor…” (2 Corinthians 8:9). This is usually taken as a theological statement about Jesus giving up his “pre-existent” heavenly glory as the Son of God, but in context Paul is writing to urge those who have much to share with those who have little. Also, in the various early sayings of Jesus, the idea that he and his followers have “left everything,” selling houses, lands, and possessions to give to the poor and support the communal life of the group, is a dominant one (Mark 10:17-31; Luke 12:32-34).
This is likely the case with Mary’s family as well. They are pictured in our earliest Gospel records as living in Capernaum, a fishing village on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, in the house of Peter’s family in just such a communal arrangement (Mark 2: 21, 29-31; 2:1; 3:19). And Jesus says he has nowhere he can call his own to “lay his head,” with the implication that he has taken this on voluntarily, as he urges others to do the same (Luke 9:58). If Mary is presented as “high-born” in some of our sources, as we will see in subsequent chapters, there is no good reason to dismiss the idea that she comes from a wealthy, landowning family, living in Sepphoris.
The tradition that Mary was born in nearby Sepphoris also makes geographical sense. It is first mentioned by the Italian “Piacenza Pilgrim” who visited the Holy Land in AD 570. His is one of the few detailed records about pilgrim sites of the Holy Land in late antiquity. It offers valuable descriptions of Christian sites, local customs, and the religious life in that period. Many of the places he visits and the traditions he reflects we can trace back to earlier fourth-century Byzantine times. He reports seeing the house of Mary there, associated with a cave that was said to be part of the house, as well as relics of the young virgin. There are a few earlier Byzantine remains on the grounds, including a third-century mosaic with Hebrew writing.
Sometime in the twelfth century, the Crusaders built a church there dedicated to St. Anne, Mary’s mother. Inside the ruins of the church is a “rock” about one meter high, left in place, rising from the floor, which usually indicates a holy spot—perhaps what was considered the remains of Mary’s house. Pilgrims could see the rock behind the high altar and pray before it. I have walked its ruins as well as the later Crusader Church of St. Anne, also at the site, trying to imagine Mary as a young girl growing up there with the spectacular view of the Bet Netofa Valley to the south, crammed with surrounding villages and towns, including the suburb of Nazareth, where she and Joseph would raise their children.
Mary’s possible connection to Sepphoris is what motivated me to excavate there in the 1990s. I was beginning to picture a more “urban” Mary, coming of age in a courtyard house just inside the walls of this ancient city. I have also wondered, since Joachim and Anna are never mentioned in the New Testament Gospels, what sort of interactions Jesus and his brothers and sisters might have had with their grandparents as they were growing up in nearby Nazareth.
Certainly, the larger family clan would have traveled to Jerusalem together for the various Jewish festivals, and gathered for family events and celebrations—births, weddings, funerals, and Jewish observances—during all the years in which we know nothing of Jesus, his siblings, or his parents. I am thinking that few readers of the Gospels give much thought to the idea of Jesus spending time with his grandparents while he was growing up and they were living just four miles to the north in Herod Antipas’s magnificent capital of Sepphoris. One can easily imagine the household excitement over the newborn baby Jesus—and all the children that followed. Both Joachim and Anna likely had great influence on this crop of sons and daughters that came along,
That we know little to nothing of Mary’s family in our New Testament Gospels underlines the point that her life was of scant interest beyond the role she played in bringing Jesus into the world. Anything we know about the family, including Mary’s other children, hangs on a few threads—but each of them is of enormous importance in pointing us toward recovering the lost Mary. The shared life of a large extended family, with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins likely clustered in the area, allows us to constructively place Mary in a more historical light.
It seems likely that Mary had only moved to nearby Nazareth when she became engaged to Joseph the year before (Luke 1:26; 2:39). If so, it was a move from the capital city to a smaller village on the outskirts of the urban center of the region. This move would have exposed her to a markedly different social world from that of her childhood. Both were Jewish, but one was metropolitan and the other more rural and artisanal.
Even so, Nazareth was far from an isolated backwater village. It was surrounded by a range of hills adjacent to a double-walled city called Japha, a place few have heard of unless they have read Josephus, our first-century historian, who says it was the in Galilee. I have seldom seen Japha included on maps that purport to show Galilee at the time of Jesus. Considering its size and strategic location, it is more than an insignificant omission. Josephus knew the village firsthand and had even lived there for a time. Nazareth was considered an extension of the larger village of Japha, a kind of hamlet within Japha’s city borders. Tel Yafia, the center of this ancient urban area, is just 2,700 yards, a forty-minute walk, from the traditional location of Mary’s house in the village of Nazareth. The Via Maris, the major road through Galilee, skirted the borders of Japha.
Archaeologists have identified a cultural boundary between Japha/Nazareth and Sepphoris—the former being more exclusively Jewish with the latter more multicultural and Hellenistic. Nonetheless, the whole area was prosperous and urban. But most important to our search for the real Mary is that as a young girl she would have been exposed to a diverse environment combining Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultures, high and low, in a mix that was characteristic of the multicultural region of Galilee into which she was born. And if her family was one of means, that adds significantly to how we might understand her life. Her existence in the vibrant capital city of Sepphoris brings into questions some of our traditional assumptions of Mary as an impoverished illiterate from a backwater rural village with no exposure to Greco-Roman culture. This might even account for the ways in which the Gospels portray Jesus as moving freely among the diverse economic and social strata of society, whether encountering Roman centurions or being invited to dine in wealthy homes of the time.
But back to the year of the three Messiahs. Sepphoris in flames, surrounded by the mayhem Josephus so vividly described, is a good place to pick up our story, with Mary and her family, including her parents, Anna and Joachim, in the thick of things. Total terror raged for a month or more. Anyone living in one of the dozens of surrounding villages, such as Nazareth, who was not rounded up must have cowered in fear behind closed doors or hidden in the various underground cisterns and hewn chambers beneath the ancient houses and courtyards of the Jewish villages.
This chilling reality came home to me recently when I visited Nazareth with a PBS film crew working on a documentary on the historical Jesus. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of what appears to be a first-century-AD domestic building, most likely a courtyard house under the Sisters of Nazareth Convent, three hundred feet north of the Church of the Annunciation—where Byzantine tradition locates Mary, who was engaged but not yet married to Joseph, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to her announcing her future pregnancy (Luke 1:26-33). Nazareth is later referred to as “their town,” so one might assume it was the home of Joseph (Luke 2:39). These newly uncovered remains were built up against the natural rock slope of the terrain. When the sisters acquired the place in 1881, they were told it was the site of a “great church” and had the “tomb of a saint” known as “the Just One” below. Despite some unofficial digging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site was largely forgotten until recently.
Excavations from 2006 to 2009 have identified the remains of a Byzantine church dating to the fifth century, but farther below, rock-cut structures have been dated to the period when Mary lived there. This includes a narrow doorway, intact, resting on the original floor. Fragments of an early Roman cooking pot were found there. Even though the house is long gone, I was allowed to walk through its subterranean lower levels and could vividly imagine families hiding in the storage areas.
In 2009, in a salvage excavation in Nazareth, there was yet another significant but unexpected discovery in connection with the construction of the International Marian Center, just across the street from the Church of the Annunciation. Israeli archaeologists uncovered the partial remains of another first-century AD courtyard house dating to the time of Jesus. The Marian Center now encloses it, and it is open to visitors. The house is small and modest but likely typical of the dwellings in a village like Nazareth at that time. The exposed area consists of two rooms as well as a deep, bell-shaped cistern and a hewn-out underground pit. We wanted to film an interview in the pit, so we climbed down into the narrow cistern by ladder, barely squeezing through, until we reached the bottom. The space was hardly large enough for a single family to hide.
Similar underground storage pits and cisterns are beneath the Church of the Annunciation, among ruins traditionally identified, since the Byzantine period, as Mary’s house. The archaeologists believe that these underground areas were hiding places during the Great Revolt against Rome in the 60s AD, but they were no doubt used in earlier periods of crisis and insurgency as well. Sitting in that cistern, I thought of Mary in the summer of 4 BC, hiding with Jesus, Joseph, and perhaps others of his family, as the Roman legions terrorized the countryside, rounding up all suspected of supporting this Jewish revolt for independence from Rome.
No one has yet been able to identify which specific house belonged to Mary and Joseph, but multiple nearby excavations in Nazareth have uncovered several such first-century courtyard houses that give us a glimpse of what village life might have been like.
Mary not only lived through the destruction of Sepphoris but witnessed its complete rebuilding. Following the burning and sacking of the city by the Roman general Varus and his troops, Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great who was made the ruler of Galilee by Augustus, rebuilt Sepphoris as his showcase capital. While the city remained Jewish, it reflected the Hellenistic style of a thoroughly Romanized ruler, far surpassing any earlier splendor. Antipas was determined to match his father’s massively impressive building programs, so he spared no cost or luxury for the rebuilt city.
Herod Antipas, who was raised in Rome, was well known to Augustus and his imperial court. His aristocratic tastes are reflected in his various building projects, the remains of which have been excavated. Josephus, who saw the rebuilt city in its glory, calls it the “ornament of all Galilee.” It was a fortified city with sturdy walls and limestone-paved streets beautifully laid out in a grid with its cardo maximus and decumanus maximus, the main intersection of a proper Greco-Roman polis, or city. The population of Sepphoris in the time of Mary is estimated at twenty thousand or more, which included dozens of surrounding villages that were its suburbs. It sported impressive public and administrative buildings, two markets, colonnaded streets, a theater, and the palace of Herod Antipas. We know the public buildings included an armory, archives, and the treasury for the city and the region. Major roads connected Sepphoris to the Via Maris, the major north-south roadway of the area, as well as west to the Mediterranean and east to the Sea of Galilee. Its water supply was perennially ensured with massive reservoirs cut into bedrock to the east of the hill upon which it was founded.
I took nine students to excavate at Sepphoris in the summer of 1996, and I continued to dig there for several seasons. We joined one of the teams led by the late Professor James Strange of the University of South Florida with a consortium of other universities and colleges. Strange began digging in 1983, and thirteen years later, his team was several years into uncovering the pillared upper levels of a first-century building and residential area about two meters below the current surface. More than two decades of excavations by several teams of archaeologists had exposed just a glimpse of this stunning city whose reconstruction Mary and her family would have witnessed.
Excavating any ancient site is always thrilling, and this was especially true in Sepphoris. One day we reached the level of a street and wall of a public municipal building that was constructed in the time of Jesus and would have been visited by villagers to pay taxes and handle various legal matters. Sepphoris, despite its splendor, was a Jewish city, and Antipas considered himself a Jew. Anyone living in Nazareth would have routinely visited the markets and municipal buildings of the city. Touching the ancient stones and brushing off ceramics and coins untouched for nearly two thousand years made that world come vividly alive. I remember reaching a burn layer from the destruction of the city in Mary’s time—even after two millennia, the burnt wood still retained its smell. And the colorful mosaic floors depicting gods, goddesses, and mythical beasts, flowers, fruit, and intricate geometric patterns, when dusted off and washed, were as beautiful as they were when Mary and Jesus walked upon them in sandaled feet.
We were digging on top of the hill where the city once stood, gazing out over the Bet Netofa Valley with the city of Nazareth plainly in view. Mary and her fellow villagers in Nazareth would have had a clear view of the burning city as they hid from the Roman soldiers. We would sit facing south, eating our breakfast in the field after an early morning of excavating that began at dawn. Some days my students and I would hike over to Nazareth for a late lunch when the day’s digging was done, just to get the feel of the ancient terrain—the walk takes about forty-five minutes. We were seeking to get as close as we could to the world of Jesus and his family, both by excavating the ancient city and by exploring the area on the ground. Mary, Joseph, and their family, and other locals from the villages, knew these main roads and paths that still run between the sprawling modern city of Nazareth and the ruins of Sepphoris. The valley in between has few modern structures. The traditional ruins of Mary’s house in Sepphoris are on the south side of the city, also facing Nazareth.
No one could have known that Mary’s infant son represented a more significant challenge to the stability of this troubled eastern frontier of the Roman empire than any of these revolt leaders and their followers.
After the fires had gone out, the bodies were removed from the crosses, and the dead had been buried, Herod Antipas was able to reestablish an orderly rule. He reigned with a firm hand for over forty years, a time of unprecedented prosperity and peace. Based on the archaeological record, we can reliably speak of a definite boom in the economic and social life of Galilee after the devastation of the summer of 4 BC.
Of course, Joseph, along with Jesus and his brothers, had to ply some kind of trade six days a week to support the family. The rebuilding of the city of Sepphoris that stretched over the next two decades had to have been the dominant economic engine of the whole region of Galilee.
The Gospels identify Jesus as a “carpenter” and the “son of a carpenter” (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55). Commonly, readers take this to refer to our modern notion of carpentry, but since the Greek word translated as “carpenter” is (τέκτων), and refers more generally to a skilled craftsman or artisan, it could just as well mean one who worked in stone. Our English word “architect” comes from the related Greek word for “master builder.” The Gospel traditions reflect that Jesus was familiar with the building trades, and he uses images of laying solid foundations and building with stone as metaphors for the solidly built lives of his followers (Luke 6:48-49; Matthew 16:18; Mark 12:10). This seems likely to reflect his profession as a skilled artisan.
If Jesus, Joseph, and his brothers worked in the building trades at the very time that Herod Antipas was rebuilding Sepphoris, they would have made the same walk every morning to find work in the city. Mary and her daughters, up long before sunrise, would send the men of the family off for a long day working on this or that building project. Village life for Mary and her daughters would involve long hours each day centered around the whole range of domestic tasks and duties: gardening, caring for household livestock, the market, food preparation, water carrying, weaving and sewing, hygiene and medical care, and the children’s care and education.
In modern Nazareth today one can visit Nazareth Village, which is an attempt to recreate, much like Jamestown and Williamsburg in the United States, what a first-century village would have been like, based on our textual and archaeological records. Everything has been constructed using ancient tools, methods, and materials—no plastic, fiberglass, wire, or manufactured metal hardware. There are houses with multi- generational expansions, a farm, synagogue, stone quarry, wells, crops, and livestock. I love visiting there, but what really comes home is how daily life would be, since nearly 100 percent of one’s time is spent in domestic chores and earning a living. Not so different from undeveloped village life all over our world today—before the advent of modern technology. From the hilltop of Nazareth Village one can see, in the distance to the north, the site where ancient Sepphoris once dominated the entire area. This view, for me at least, more than anything else connects the dots of our historically informed imagination.
In this scenario the so-called lost years of Jesus—up to age thirty, when the Gospels pick up the story—come into focus. Jesus is the oldest son of a large family in the building trades. When Joseph dies he will be expected to take over the family trade, so as he grows into manhood, Sepphoris would be on his horizon daily. This plays a major role in our quest to understand Mary as well as Jesus and his siblings. I am speculating here, of course, as Jesus’s “lost years” remain lost to us. But this seems to me to be a far more likely possibility than Jesus making legendary journeys to India, Egypt, or even Britain, so popular in esoteric lore.
The attempts at armed revolution in the “year of the three Messiahs,” along with the resulting chaos and violence were vivid harbingers of what was to come. The entire country was a messianic powder keg. Given her own priestly and Davidic pedigree—which we will explore in detail in the following chapters—one wonders what Mary must have thought of all that transpired. How did she view these chaotic efforts to spark a revolt, fueled by these other Davidic figures who aspired to become king of the Jews, and the carnage that resulted as the full force of Rome’s legions crushed the country? Would she have condoned the violence or the methods these would-be Messiahs used to fulfill the prophetic dreams of her people? Or would she have had an equally revolutionary outlook—yet with a different vision of how it might be carried out?
Based on what we know from Josephus, much of the Jewish population was united in wanting to see an end to Roman rule, and ideally, a native Jewish king of the lineage of David. When and how this messianic revolution would come about was up for debate and speculation, but large segments of the population, based on specific prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, believed that the time was at hand.
Mary later named two of her sons Judas and Simon—names associated with these latest messianic claimants in 4 BC, as well as the more famous Maccabean brothers Judas and Simon, who led a successful revolt for independence against the Greeks a hundred and fifty years earlier, which lasted from 165 to 163 BC. This precious one-hundred-year period of Jewish freedom from foreign rule gave the priestly family of the Maccabees a kind of legendary status. It also fired the hopes and dreams of the Jewish people who believed the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible about a coming messianic era in what were called “the last days,” when ordinary history would be brought to a close and the kingdom of God would fill the earth (Isaiah 2:2-4; 11:1-9).
It was not so much that the Maccabees, and the priestly dynasty they formed, fulfilled those prophecies in any full and complete way, but rather that they heralded what could be possible in terms of independence from foreign rule. “Maccabee” means “hammer,” and the dynasty stemming from this family is called Hasmonean, after an ancestor, Asmoneus. Maccabean coins were popular in Mary’s day, far more than the Roman “coins of the realm,” and their names were as familiar as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin are to Americans. Mary named one of her daughters Salome, after the Hasmonean mother queen Salome Alexandra, who ruled the country from 76 to 67 BC and was married, successively, to both sons of John Hyrcanus, the son of Simon the Maccabee. The names were common, but for good reason, as the Hasmonean priestly family was so revered. Of more significance, Mary herself, as we will see, was related to this priestly Hasmonean family.
The name Jesus in Hebrew is Joshua—the name of Moses’s successor, who conquered the land of Israel in ancient times and set up an independent Jewish state, expelling and defeating his enemies. The popularity of these names, especially in Galilee, a hotbed of revolt and messianic expectations, stemmed from their revolutionary connotations. Since these names were so popular, with half the Jewish women of the time named either Salome or Mary, some have argued that their significance is moot when it comes to Mary or her children. That ignores a simple point: the reasons such names achieved widespread use in the first place. The common denominator between Mary, Salome, Judas, and Simon, is that they are all Hebrew names favored by the Hasmoneans.
As a result, their popularity is reflective of political and national sympathies among the populace in Mary’s time. Mary did not choose Greek names like Alexander, Dositheus, Bernice, or Julia, or even the Hebrew names Menachem, Eleazar, Joanna, or Martha—all of which were quite popular as well. By choosing those names for her sons and daughters she was identifying with the messianic hope that God would bring about the redemption for his people as promised by the prophets.
As the matriarch of a family that could claim both royal Davidic and priestly Hasmonean lineage, Mary surely felt solidarity with the hopes and dreams of her people, but with a decidedly different view of how the messianic revolution would come about. She raised her children, including her most famous son, to appreciate that the horrifying scenes of carnage she lived through when he was not even a year old would never bring about the kingdom for which everyone longed. This unique approach to “revolution” is central to Jesus’s teachings, and since his brother James reflected similar views, it was clearly a core family value.
The two images are in striking contrast: the capital city of Sepphoris in flames with Roman legions in full battle gear imposing mass crucifixions and sending thousands into exile or slavery; and the massive economic renewal spurred by Herod Antipas’s rebuilding efforts that would have drawn in the populations of surrounding villages like a magnet.
No one could have known that Mary’s infant son represented a more significant challenge to the stability of this troubled eastern frontier of the Roman empire than any of these revolt leaders and their followers. The threat was a different one but had everything to do with the burning issue of royal legitimacy: who in the eyes of the populace might rightly become “king of the Jews”? And this is where Mary and her family played a critical role that has gone missing from the New Testament Gospels—namely, the revolutionary political implications of this twofold royal lineage.
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From The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus by James D. Tabor. Copyright © 2025. Available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
