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When I think of Mary the mother of Jesus I think of the forgotten city of Sepphoris. According to tradition she was the firstborn daughter of an older couple called Joachim and Anna who lived there. Few today have heard of Sepphoris. It is not mentioned in the New Testament. Until fairly recently it was not even included on those maps of the Holy Land found in the back of many Bibles. It had become a lost city to us—until very recently.
…When Jesus was growing up in Nazareth, Sepphoris was the dominant city of the entire region. Built on a hill rising 400 feet above the flat plain below, it is still visible from miles around. Jesus’ well-known saying that a “city set on a hill cannot be hid” surely came to him growing up in Nazareth and looking north at the gleaming city of Sepphoris four miles away. It could not be missed. Nazareth was hardly anything. Nestled in the hills, just to the southeast by a spring, the total population was probably not more than 200. It was one of dozens of small villages that dotted the plain around the huge and impressive capital city.
…Though living in a small village, Jesus grew up just outside the urban capital of Galilee. The implications of this geographical fact are enormous as we seek to historically recapture hidden or forgotten aspects of the early life of Jesus. When Mary was born, around the year 18 BC, the Romans occupied the northern area of Palestine called Galilee. Sepphoris was a Jewish city, but the Romans had made it the administrative center for the entire region.
In 4 BC, when Mary would have been about 14, Herod the Great died. Shortly after the death of this “king” a man known as “Judas the Galilean” broke into the royal palace at Sepphoris. After seizing all the arms that were stored there, he and his followers began to rampage throughout Galilee. Pockets of revolt and opposition to Rome broke out all over the country. …The Romans reacted quickly and with overwhelming force. The Roman governor of Syria, the infamous Publius Quintilius Varus, led three legions from Syria to brutally crush opposition to Roman rule. Including auxiliary forces as many as 20,000 troops poured into the country from the north, burnt Sepphoris to the ground, and sent its inhabitants into slavery as punishment for their participation in the outbreaks. Varus rounded up rebels all over the country and crucified 2,000 men who had participated in the revolt. The trauma that gripped Galilee must have been dreadful, with dying men nailed to crosses at intervals up and down the main roads or on hillsides visible to all who passed.
Following the revolt the Romans divided Palestine into three districts, each ruled by a son of Herod the Great... Herod Antipas received the territory of Galilee, north of Judea, as well as Perea that lay east of the Jordan River. This was the same Herod that later beheaded John the Baptist and participated in the trial of Jesus. Herod chose to fortify and rebuild the city of Sepphoris, making it his palatial capital, and he did it in high Greco-Roman style. …
Sometime before the conflagration of Sepphoris, Mary and her family moved to the little village of Nazareth, just four miles southeast, practically still in the shadow of Sepphoris. We have no record of what happened to her parents, Joachim and Anna, or whether they were still alive at the time, but we do know what became of their daughter. …When you understand the history of Sepphoris a whole new set of images is added to the “Christmas story”: crucified corpses rotting on crosses, the nearby capital city in flames, and fellow citizens either killed or exiled into slavery. The future of this family (of Joseph and Mary) and the Child that they carried was hardly certain.
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