Nine months to the day before Christmas, Christians celebrate the Annunciation in honor of the day when an angel appeared before a virgin named Mary and announced to her that she was miraculously pregnant with Jesus. According to Bible specialists, this event took place around the year 6 BC. AD
The Annunciation shows Christians “that the birth of Jesus was part of the divine plan and that he was a human, born of a woman, also divine,” says Joan E. Taylor, professor emeritus at King’s College London and author of the book. Boy Jesus: Growing up Judean in Turbulent Timeswhich has not been translated into French.
Despite the importance of the Annunciation in religion, early Christian texts provide “few concrete details about where this event occurred,” says James D. Tabor, retired professor of religious studies/origins of Christianity at the University of North Carolina (United States) and author of the book The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus, which has not been translated into French.
Nevertheless, generations of pilgrims have long visited two different sites in Nazareth, where, according to them, the Annunciation took place: a cave where Mary would have lived and a well that she probably used.
Biblical archaeologists have in turn excavated these sites in the hope of finding evidence dating from the period of the Annunciation to confirm the possibility that Mary frequented the places. These excavations allowed researchers to better understand the ancient city of Nazareth, the way in which the first Christians venerated Mary and the religious experience of the pilgrims, even if they did not know with certainty that this was indeed the place where the Annunciation took place.
According to the Gospel, “the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth.” It was there that he visited Mary to announce to her his divine destiny.
Located in northern Israel, not far from Lake Tiberias, Nazareth still exists today (it is one of the largest Arab cities in the country). Its history dates back to antiquity, when the Gospels identified it as the birthplace of Jesus. At the time, Nazareth was under the control of the Roman Empire.
« Le village [ancien] was located on the lower slopes to the west and above the wadithe valley », explains the archéologue Yardenna Alexandre, here work for the Authority des antiquités d’Israël. « Les maisons étaient bâties sur le substrat rocheux assez incliné ».
If Nazareth today has around 80,000 inhabitants, the ancient village was a “small agricultural village with modest houses”, reports James D. Tabor. A place where “families lived in close proximity to each other and where daily life revolved around household chores, agriculture and common resources, such as wells and springs.”
Selon Joan E. Taylor, ces pèlerinages à Nazareth « ont commencé au début du 4e“century” and passed through the cave and well that are still associated with Mary to this day.
However, it is impossible to know exactly why these two sites became revered, observes archaeologist Kenneth Dark, author of the book Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth (not translated into French) and professor at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). “We don’t know who said what to the first pilgrims.”
Among these pilgrims was Egeria, a Spaniard whose letters on her travels to the Holy Land mention her visit to Nazareth around 383 AD. She wrote that Mary would have lived in “a large and truly splendid cave”, above which an altar had been erected.
This altar was undoubtedly part of a succession of religious structures built on what the pilgrims believed to be the site of the Annunciation. At the time of the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades, churches were built and then destroyed before others were built and expanded over the following centuries.
