NazarethGate: Quack Archeology, Holy Hoaxes, and the Invented Town of Jesus by René Salm

Author:René Salm [Salm, René]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Atheist press
Published: 2016-10-10T23:00:00+00:00

A huge new piece of evidence? This based upon the possibility that Jesus may have merely bathed there?

Actually, the waterworks under the Cactus shop are not insignificant, whatever their date, even though they do not justify Shama’s assertion of “possibly the largest and most important Roman bath ever discovered in the Middle East.” This is hyperbole, and it shows that the owner is apparently unfamiliar with the Roman baths of Jerusalem, not to mention those of Hammad Gader with their thirty-two marble fountains.[22] But he did expose a tunnel (later identified as a large water-furnace), piles of old stones, and arches—once the underfloor heating system for the bathhouse—as well as white marble tiles that constituted the actual floor of the bath.[23]

However, these features are quite typical of turkish baths of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. They would indeed have been remarkable in ancient times. If such an extensive installation existed in Lower Galilee at the turn of the era it would surely have been noted, as were Roman bathing complexes at Hammat Gader, Ptolemais (Akko), Callirrhoë (on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea), Livias, and Tiberias. These sites were much visited two thousand years ago and are amply documented. No such documentation, however, exists for a bathing installation in the Nazareth basin.

It is also curious how a small, poor, and insignificant village (as Jesus-era Nazareth is traditionally envisaged to have been) could have possessed such a massive bathhouse, a pagan installation only marginally tolerated by

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