Searching for the site of one of Christianity's great miracles
Biblical archaeologists have long looked for evidence of the site where the Virgin Mary is said to have learned she was with child. Here's what they've learned.
Exactly nine months before Christmas, Christians celebrate the annunciation, honoring the day they believe an angel appeared before a virgin named Mary and announced that she was miraculously pregnant with Jesus. Biblical scholars date these events to around 6 B.C.
The annunciation shows Christians “that the birth of Jesus is part of the divine plan, and that he is human, born of a woman, yet also divine,” says Joan E. Taylor, professor emerita at King’s College London and author of Boy Jesus: Growing up Judean in Turbulent Times.
Despite the annunciation’s importance in the faith, early Christian texts give “few concrete details about where the event occurred,” says James D. Tabor, retired professor of religious studies/Christian origins at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus.
Nonetheless, generations of pilgrims have long visited two different sites in Nazareth where they believe the annunciation happened: a cave where Mary supposedly lived and a well she likely used.
Biblical archaeologists have in turn examined these sites hoping for evidence that dates to the time of the annunciation, opening the door to the possibility that Mary had been there. These excavations have given researchers a deeper understanding of ancient Nazareth, how early Christians venerated Mary, and the religious experiences of pilgrims—if not a definitive answer as to the reputed location of the annunciation.
The annunciation’s locations in the Gospel of Luke
Four gospels appear in the New Testament, but Mary’s annunciation story is only in one: the Gospel of Luke, which scholars believe was written sometime in the late first century A.D. That’s several decades after the annunciation was supposed to have occurred.
According to the gospel, “the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth,” where he visited Mary and announced her divine destiny.
(How Mary and Joseph's marriage was saved by Gabriel.)
Located in northern Israel near the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth still exists today––it’s one of the country’s largest Palestinian Arab cities––but its history stretches back to antiquity, when the gospels identified it as Jesus’s hometown. At the time, Nazareth was under the control of the Roman Empire.
“The [ancient] village was located on the lower slopes west of and above the wadi, [or valley],” says archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “The houses were built on the fairly sloping bedrock.
While today’s Nazareth is home to around 80,000 people, the ancient village was “a small agricultural village with modest homes,” Tabor says; a place where “families lived in close proximity to one another, and daily life revolved around household tasks, agriculture, and communal resources such as wells and springs.”
As their religion spread, early Christians began embarking on pilgrimages to holy sites in the region, including Nazareth. These pilgrimages brought them to places associated with Jesus, his family, and his ministry to nourish their spirituality and transcend the material world. They would pray, receive blessings, leave offerings, and take home tokens and religious souvenirs.
Taylor says these pilgrimages to Nazareth “began in earnest in the fourth century,” and included the cave and well that are still associated with Mary.
But there’s no way to know exactly why these two sites became revered, says archaeologist Kenneth Dark, author of Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth and professor at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. “We just don’t know what these early pilgrims were being told and by whom.”
Nazareth’s Church of Annunciation sits atop a cave linked to Mary
One pilgrim was Egeria, a woman from Spain whose letter about her travels to the Holy Land mentions her visit to Nazareth around A.D. 383. She wrote that Mary was believed to have lived in “a big and very splendid cave,” over which an altar had been erected.
This altar was likely one of a succession of religious structures built on what pilgrims believed was the annunciation site. Churches were built and ruined in the Byzantine and Crusader eras before others were erected and expanded in the subsequent centuries.
In 1954, the old church building was torn down to make way for the Church of the Annunciation, which still stands today. The demolition of the old church gave researchers the rare opportunity to excavate its foundations.
From 1955 to 1966, Bellarmino Bagatti, an Italian archaeologist and Franciscan priest, uncovered caves, pits, and tunnels that ancient Nazarenes would have used for storage, workshops, and even residences. These discoveries only bolstered the pilgrim belief that Mary lived in or near the cave.
Dark says similar installations in other nearby sites were used as hiding places during the Jewish Revolt of around A.D. 70, when Jewish Judaeans rebelled against imperial Rome in a bid for independence. Since the caves needed to have existed before the revolt, Dark says the timing with the annunciation story lines up. “There is nothing archaeologically disprovable about the Cave of the Annunciation being the biblical cave,” he says, though there’s nothing provable about it either.
The excavations also confirmed that Christian pilgrims had been traveling to the cave since at least the late Roman period when Egeria visited Nazareth. Dark says there’s evidence of an “elaborately decorated church” that dates to the fifth century beneath the Church of Annunciation’s foundations. Excavations also revealed lamps beneath the building’s mosaic floor, suggesting that pilgrims had been visiting the cave long before the late-Roman construction.
Did the annunciation occur at a public well?
Less than a mile from the Church of Annunciation sits St. Gabriel’s Greek Orthodox Church. It is near the well where, according to a different annunciation story, the angel first contacted Mary.
This story features in the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century apocryphal gospel that was popular, influential, and translated into at least nine languages. The text focuses on the birth, life, and perpetual virginity of Mary.
According to the text, Mary “took the pitcher and went out to fill it with water” before hearing a voice. “Hail, you who hast received grace; the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women!” Alarmed, Mary went home, where she was greeted by an angel who announced she would bear Jesus.
There’s “nothing [in the text] about her being in Nazareth,” Taylor points out. Nevertheless, by the fourth century, the well had become associated with the village, and pilgrims assigned the site of the Protoevangelium annunciation story to a place called “Mary’s Well.”
From 1997 to 1998, Alexandre and her team excavated Mary’s Well. Among their discoveries: coins depicting King Herod and Claudius and a lamp that suggests Nazareth’s residents were Jewish.
(Nativity villain King Herod killed his own children—and wife.)
Their work also verified that the well was used at the time of the annunciation, since “its remains from the late Hellenistic and the early Roman period indicate that the spring served the village in these periods,” Alexandre explains.
Tabor adds that the well “would have been a daily gathering place where women came to draw water. In a small village like Nazareth that would have been one of the central communal spaces.”
Our deepened understanding of Mary’s world
Scholars say from a historical and archaeological perspective, one site isn’t necessarily more or less likely than the other. Both show evidence of activity during the time when the annunciation would have happened. And some scholars believe trying to pinpoint the event’s exact location is focusing on the wrong question.
“Archaeology cannot confirm that the annunciation occurred, nor can it verify the supernatural aspects of the story,” Tabor explains. “What it can do is reconstruct the historical environment in which the tradition arose.”
