Nazareth

[RoadRunner79]

Yeah.... so some of you guys say.   Of course, the earliest copies we have are from the late 2d-3d centuries and the earliest xtian writers we know of never heard of them.  Maybe they were testing your fucking faith, huh?

Nonetheless, no one heard of any of them until the late 2d century.

Now, Justin, writing c 160 speaks of something called the Memoirs of the Apostles.... except what he writes does not match up to any of the nonsense we have today.  So, either no one had finished editing them or the stories were not fully fleshed out or Justin was a complete asshole.  Tell me which you prefer.

There's another possibility that they simply weren't that widely in circulation yet.

You also have earlier writers that do quote the scriptures quite a bit. Justin does some, but not nearly as much. Which I think has to do with his style and purpose.

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Bart Ehrman has a pretty good write up on his blog. https://ehrmanblog.org/did-nazareth-exist/

He seems puzzled with how much the question of Nazareth comes up. But he gives a pretty good critic of one “skeptics” objections. As well as explaining the evidence and why for most archeologist this is not a question.

The AP story concludes that “the dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres… populated by Jews of modest means.” No wonder this place is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, Josephus, or the Talmud. It was far too small, poor, and insignificant. Most people had never heard of it and those who had heard didn’t care. Even though it existed, this is not the place someone would make up as the hometown of the messiah. Jesus really came from there, as attested in multiple sources.