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That a false Nazareth is the case was not apparent until recently, and we do not know if some of the attackers are pagans, Jews, or otherwise, at least not officially.
The notion of the Gospel writers pointing to a 'town' or 'city of Nazareth' as a fabrication is not the idea; but rather that it is an outright mistake, a mistranslation:
Jesus is known to the world as Jesus of Nazareth. It is an almost formulaic
description of the historical Jesus, and frequently features as the sine qua non
for such a character. Even the minimalist identikits for a real Jesus, which
strip out the supernatural events and the Old Testament copy, leave behind a
bare-bones historical Jesus who carries this plain heading on his wanted
poster: Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, the minimalist theory goes, may not have
been a divine miracle-worker, but he was from Nazareth, preached, and was
crucified by Pilate. Such a process is based on the same flawed premise as
reconstructions of the Testimonium Flavianum obtained by subtracting the
most implausible elements. However, the inclusion of the Nazarene element
in the gospels like so many historical aspects missing from the Pauline
epistles - raises more fundamental issues which throw some dim light on the
mythologizing and historicising processes of early Christianity.
Every reference in the gospels to Jesus of Nazareth including the gospel
equivalent of our wanted poster, Pilates iconic inscription above the cross
(John 19:9) says something quite different: Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος - Jesus
the Nazōraios, or Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζαρηνός - Jesus the Nazarēnos. Does this
phrase really just mean Jesus of Nazareth? Or does it have a distinctive
religious significance that was originally tied to a mystical idea rather than a
place?
Ehrman favours the historicity of anything in the gospels that early Christians
had no obvious reason to make up and to him the idea that Jesus came from an insignificant town such as Nazareth is not a detail that would
advance Christian vested interests (Ehrman, Disk 6, 11-3). According to Ehrman such details survive in our tradition because they were real. The so-called Criterion
of Embarrassment, also known in more philosophical language as the
criterion of contradiction (Meyer 2002) or more portentously as the
movement against the redactional tendency (Porter 2000, p.162) is
particularly popular with historicists. Meier (2001, p.168) suggests that
embarrassing material coming from Jesus would naturally be either
suppressed or softened in later stages of the Gospel tradition". However,
neither the embarrassment felt, nor the compulsion to include such
embarrassing details, has been satisfactorily explained. The results of
applying the criterion are hardly convincing: details considered authentic
due to embarrassment include supernatural events such as the cursing of the
fig-tree (Barnett 2009, p.223). And in terms of embarrassment, it is hard to
top the accounts in the infancy gospel of Thomas (which Ehrman dates as
early as 125CE) of the child Jesus petulantly killing children for petty
sleights: it is clear from the reaction of the other townspeople that the
embarrassment factor spans the ages and by the logic of this criterion, these
episodes would be particularly authentic. Given the extraordinary deeds and
events reported in the gospels, the proposition that anyone living at the time
of writing would have called the writers to account for things that they knew
to be untrue or that they had omitted, seems implausible. It can be said that
Jesus fed 5000, turned water into wine, walked on water, resurrected the
dead, and so on yet somebody would be sure to pull the evangelist up if
they left out a few details? If compulsion applied, it would be to church
leaders in relation to the feasibility of significantly altering texts which were
widely circulated - not to the gospel authors, for whom any hidden agenda of
embarrassment can only be speculation.
Nazareth is one such detail commonly allowed as historical under the
Criterion of Embarrassment. Ehrman maintains that Nazareth is a feature
which is both random and embarrassing, and that it must thereby be real.
Christians, Ehrman says, would have had him come from somewhere like
Bethlehem to fulfil a prophecy and "wouldn't have made up the idea that he
came from a little one horse town like Nazareth" (Ehrman, Disk 6, 11-3).
However, Ehrman ignores the fact that Jesus was said to come from Nazareth
precisely so that a prophecy might be fulfilled. Matthew explicitly frames
Jesus coming from Nazareth in these terms: Joseph, having been warned in
a dream about returning to Judea, decides to go to Galilee instead, and makes
his home in a city called Nazareth, ὅπως πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ τῶν
προφητῶν ὅτι Ναζωραῖος κληθήσεται so that it might be fulfilled what
was spoken through the prophets, that a Nazōraion he shall be called
(Matthew 2:23). Ναζωραῖος is almost universally translated here as a
Nazarene but when used elsewhere in conjunction with Jesus, as Jesus of
Nazareth. Matthew 2:23 raises two connected questions: what does
Nazōraion mean, and what is the prophecy? These questions stand regardless
of whether or not the phrase is an interpolation - and Scaliger, cited in Jonge
(1996, p.182) believed that it was, and an inept one at that (additiones sunt
veterum christainorum ineptae though neither Scaliger nor Jonge indicate
why it would have been interpolated, and the devout Scaliger deemed it
interpolated only because of its foolishness).
The prophecy can potentially inform the meaning of Nazōraion, but may just
as well raise further questions concerning its fulfilment. Given that there is
no Old Testament reference to a city or town called Nazareth, it seems that
the embarrassment may well lie in the quality of a prophecy that depends on
word-play. Kittel et al (1985, p.625) insist that the term derives from the city
of Nazareth as the hometown of Jesus and that there is no obstacle to such a
proposition. On the face of it, however, the word Nazōraion does not and
cannot mean of Nazareth: it is not the natural word to describe a citizen of a
place variously named as Nazara, Nazaret and Nazareth. If we take Nazareth
as the most common spelling of the place-name (5 times in the gospels,
against four for Nazaret and two for Nazara), a Nazarene would have been a
Nazarethnon (Ναζαρέθνός, Nazarethenon (Ναζαρέθένός
(Ναζαρέθαiός
people of Jerusalem) Nazarethiton (Ναζαρέθιτός
Nazōraion or a Nazarēnon.
Yet the most natural way to refer to Jesus being from Nazareth would simply
be to say what the translations insist on saying: Jesus of, or from, Nazareth.
When Acts refers to Paul being a native of Tarsus, it is as Saulon Tarsea
(Acts 9:11 Σαῦλον Ταρσέα
Nazarēnos) is mentioned much more frequently than Nazareth. Jesus is
repeatedly called 'the Nazōraion' and 'the Nazarēnon (ὁ Ναζωραῖος and ὁ
Ναζαρηνός
Tarsus (at least when he's not also being described as a Nazōraion). While
there are frequent references in translations to Jesus of Nazareth, they are
all essentially mistranslations of ὁ Ναζωραῖος and ὁ Ναζαρηνός. On only one
occasion in the gospels is Jesus identified (by the people of Jerusalem) as
Jesus the prophet from Nazareth (Matthew 21:11 Ἰησοῦς ὁ ἀπὸ Ναζαρὲθ
a more elaborate rendition. Mark 1:9 refers to Jesus physically travelling
from Nazaret: Ἰησοῦς ἀπὸ Ναζαρὲτ . and John refers to Joseph as being
ἀπὸ Ναζαρέτ.
http://www.nazarethmyth.info/Mckenna2010HM.pdf
The facts that Nazareth is never mentioned in the OT, nor in any lists of Galilean towns, nor by Josephus, nor by the Talmud, nor was shown on any map of the time, and exists only in the vacuum of the NT, support the idea of a mistranslation.
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