Word: nazareth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nazareth has hardly changed since the days when the young Christ walked its streets-the hard-pressed Nazarenes subsist, as their forebears did, by tending tiny shops or grazing sheep on the windswept hills. But above the Biblical old town sits a new Nazareth, settled by 8,000 Jews who take their economic lessons from the Book of Progress. The new town boasts a textile mill, chocolate-processing plant, 750-seat movie theater and 48-store shopping center. Being built is an 80-unit housing development whose windows overlook Mount Tabor, the site of Christ's Transfiguration, and nearby...
Perhaps it is the holly and the ivy, or the midnight services, or the sight of spotlight creches, but the Christmas leg end each year still moves men's hearts as no other story can. The Carpenter Joseph, taking his pregnant wife on the hard journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, forced to shiver through the winter cold in the only lodging available -a humble stable. There the Christ Child is born, watched over by lowing oxen and sheep, and worshiped by three kings from the East, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh...
...course, none of this has much to do with the real birth of Jesus of Nazareth around 7 B.C.* Many Protestant scholars, and even a few Roman Catholics, regard the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew as too contaminated by myth to be considered reliable history. And even the more conservative scholars who accept these accounts as historically plausible agree that most of the famous Christmas legends are unsupported elaborations of the spare, precise biblical reports. In a new volume of reverent debunking called Born in Bethlehem (Helicon; $3.50), Dutch Theologian H. W. van der Vaart Smit borrows the conclusions...
Better Off in a Stable. Smit, an Evangelical minister turned Roman Catholic, argues that the birth of Christ in dire poverty and in the dead of winter is just pious nonsense. By the standards of his time, Joseph was comfortably middleclass: the reason he went from Nazareth to Bethlehem-probably several months before Jesus' birth-was that he had property in Bethlehem and owed taxes to the Roman authorities there...
...Lebanon more ambiguously declared: "It is like Christ coming back once again to chase the Pharisees from the Temple." But the Pope clearly intended his voyage to be nonpolitical: he will fly to the Holy Land on January 4 with a handful of aides and security guards, visit Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, return to Rome on January...