Placing Nazareth on the map
For a long time the church didn’t know where Nazareth was located. Origen didn’t know, though he lived in Caesarea, while Julius Africanus seemed to locate it in Judea. It was Eusebius who first provided a location in Lower Galilee in the early fourth century:
Nazareth, from which the Christ is called Nazorean and we, who are now called Christians, were of old called Nazarenes. Today it is still located in the Galilee opposite Legio about fifteen milestones to the east near Mt. Tabor.
(Onomastikon 138.24–140.2; cf. The Myth of Nazareth p. 293.)
It is questionable from this, however, whether even Eusebius knew exactly where Nazareth was. This can be suspected because, first of all, the route from Legio (at the foot of Mt. Megiddo) was paved by the Romans towards the turn of the era and led to the major town of Diocaesarea (Sepphoris)—not to Mt. Tabor. Diocaesarea is only a couple of miles from Nazareth and one would think that Eusebius would surely signal “Nazareth close to Diocaesarea.” Secondly, Nazareth is located a full five miles away from Mt. Tabor.
As far as I’ve been able to find, Eusebius’ note in his Onomastikon is the very first literary attestation locating Nazareth in Lower Galilee. I’ve been researching Nazareth for a long time now, and strongly suspect that it must indeed have been Helena who ‘fixed’ the location of Nazareth where the tradition knows it.
... If the Empress herself took an interest in it, it would have been the simplest thing for a renaming to have taken place. No one there would have been literate, in all likelihood. Maybe this satellite of Sepphoris didn’t even have a name.
Epiphanius (Panarion 30) reports that Joseph of Tiberias built a simple ‘church’ in Nazareth (as well as in other places). This would have been within a few years of Helena’s visit. I write about this in THE MYTH OF NAZARETH (278 f). Joan Taylor, an archeologist who has studied the actual remains, detected what “seems to be the structure built by Joseph (c. 335), and nothing would suggest that the area was venerated prior to this time” (citation at MoN 285).
