March 9, 2015
Is this Jesus's childhood home? (Credit: Photo copyright Ken Dark)
Is this Jesus’s childhood home? (Credit: Photo copyright Ken Dark)

A British archaeologist says his team may have found the house where Jesus was brought up by Mary and Joseph in Nazareth. The largest city in the Galilee, Nazareth is believed to be the place where Jesus spent his childhood and youth.

The house was first unearthed by nuns in the 1880s. It is cut into a hillside and boasts mortar and stone walls, according to a report in LiveScience. In 2006, Dr. Ken Dark, a professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and his team revisited the site and dated the house to the first century.

“Was this the house where Jesus grew up? It is impossible to say on archaeological grounds,” Dark writes in the magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review. “On the other hand, there is no good archaeological reason why such an identification should be discounted.”

According to LiveScience, artifacts found in the first-century dwelling, located under a convent, include broken cooking pots, a spindle whorl and limestone vessels.

The archaeologists say the limestone vessels “suggest a Jewish family lived in the house, because Jewish beliefs held that limestone could not become impure. If a Jewish family lived here it would support the idea that this could have been Jesus’ house,” reads the report.

 

 

 

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