Historicity
Although the historian Flavius Josephus (AD 37 – c. 100) mentions 45 towns in Galilee, he never mentions Nazareth. But Josephus also writes that Galilee had 219 villages in all, so it is clear that most village names have gone unrecorded in surviving literature. Nazareth was overshadowed by nearby Japhia in his time, so Josephus might not have thought of it as a separate town. The earliest known reference to Nazareth outside the New Testament and as a contemporary town is by Julius Africanus, who wrote around AD 200. Writers who question the association of Nazareth with the life of Jesus suggest that "Nazorean" was originally a religious title and was later reinterpreted as referring to a town. This process would assign Nazareth as a hometown.
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