 Hello, whoever and wherever you may be, I'm James Randi, or did you guess? There are well-accepted accounts from the Bible that Christians and others never question—events and locations that are part of the story told of Christ and his history. One such is the account in John 1 of the birth of Christ in the lower Galilee town of Nazareth. This town is not mentioned at all in the Old Testament nor in any of the extensive rabbinical literature, and the only established site there is the ancient town Waterwell, now referred to no surprise as Mary's Well. The modern town is covered with churches, also no surprise, and though archaeology offers no support at all for them, the Nazarenes can point out sites such as Joseph's carpentry shop, and the spot where Mary received the Annunciation, the message from the angel Gabriel that she was pregnant with Jesus, as well as the exact location of Mensa Christi, the table where Jesus dined with his apostles after his resurrection, and the site of the synagogue where Jesus preached as a lad. But Nazareth may be overrated as an historical site that proves the inerrancy of the Bible. Author René Solom has written The Myth of Nazareth, the Invented Town of Jesus, a book that effectively demonstrates the controversial archaeology of the town where the Bible has Jesus Christ being born. Of course, the religious faction has reacted furiously to the book, specifically in The Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, B-A-I-A-S, which devotes some 47 pages to five angry rebuttals. There is, we are told, an ambitious commercial enterprise presently under construction in Nazareth to rescue the facts about Jesus' hometown. It's a resort known as Nazareth Village. It is designed to eventually contain streets and several dozen stone houses inhabited by actors and storytellers in authentic garb, who will illuminate the life and teachings of Jesus. The notion perhaps inspired by the phenomenal success of Disneyland, where Tinkerbell and Mickey Mouse are seen flitting and strolling about, also in authentic garb. As of ten years ago, an international consortium of Christian groups called The Miracle of Nazareth International Foundation had raised some $60 million for the project, with contributors in the U.S. such as former President Jimmy Carter, Pat Boone, and Reverend Reggie White, formerly a Green Bay Packard football star. Scholars associated with the Nazareth Village project, Stephen Phan, Yehuda Rappuano, and Ross Voss, none of the archaeologists now say that evidence has been discovered there for a town that existed at the time of Jesus, a settlement before the First Jewish War that took place in 70 CE. This evidence was simply lying on the open surface of the site, they say. This claim, author Psalm shows, is bogus, and it results from misdating, mislabeling, misinterpreting, and from pure invention. These artifacts and facts were somehow missed by the previous crowds of professional archaeologists who had been digging on that site for the last century. The Nazareth Village Resort lies on a 15-acre plot of land called the Nazareth Village Farm, the NVF. The scholars under discussion surveyed the farm, dug on it, and published a lengthy report in the 2007 issue of the BAIAS Journal. There is little difficulty to show that their evidence for a town there, 11 small pieces of pottery shards, actually dates as late as the second century CE, and Psalm's research shows that the rest of the material from the Nazareth site dates well after the time of Jesus Christ. There simply is no demonstrable evidence from the Nazareth site that dates to the time of Jesus Christ and to Hellenistic times. In fact, one awkward fact after the other stands in the way of such a claim. For example, the Church of the Annunciation at Nazareth, the largest Christian structure in the Middle East, is a primary destination of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Of course, it is there that the faithful believe Mary received the Annunciation from the Archangel Gabriel at her home, but the existence of a number of tombs directly under the structure firmly established by archaeologists is just impossible. As for the faithful, tombs have no place under such a structure. According to Jewish religious law, Jews cannot live in the vicinity of tombs, which are a prime source of ritual impurity, so the ancient commentary on Jewish law mandates that tombs must be located outside of the village proper. Thus, tombs under the house of Mary are denied by the tradition. These post-iron age tombs are also post-Jesus, middle Roman and later, and the wealth of pottery found in them is also later. Consider, continuing pilgrimage to Nazareth, which fortifies the convictions of the true believer while supporting the community financially, depends on the sanctity and the reputation of the site. As author Salm points out, perhaps the entire Jesus story depends on it too. He also tells us not to be too surprised if remarkable finds at Nazareth conveniently appear in the next few years, finds that substantiate a settlement there at the time of Christ. To fit the demands of the Christian tradition, the upcoming material will have to be early and non-funeral real. And just recently, as if Salm himself had prophetic powers, the NVF now reports that a cache of Hellenistic and early Roman coins has recently been found at Mary's well, at the northern end of the Nazareth Basin. But strangely, nothing even remotely similar had ever been found there before in the entire century of professional digging about. A cache of Hellenistic and early Roman coins, a bonanza for any archaeologist, is exactly the sort of evidence which the believers need in order to decide the matter in their favor. But the earliest coin found there dates to about 350 CE. In fact, a 2006 report from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, signed by the archaeologist who dug at the Mary's well site, mentions no early coins at all, when coins found in wells are very frequent discoveries. The only datable coins she found there were from the 14th and 15th centuries after Jesus. The facts are that no demonstrable evidence dating either to the time of Jesus or to earlier Hellenistic times has been found at Nazareth. It is a late Roman Byzantine village, not a mythical settlement at the turn of the era. His author, Psalm says, that question has already been answered and answered convincingly. Here we have a parallel with the situation re-evidence for the parapsychological miracles. For generations, the believers who support the Nazareth myth have been defending their case by demanding, prove me wrong. When empiricists come up with the required facts, they discover that the facts don't seem to matter to those people. They also know that there's no way to disprove the myth. Psalm notes, as I have, that no one can prove that Santa Claus doesn't exist, for example. We can go to the North Pole, we can dig up there all we want, and we can find absolutely no evidence for his gift manufacturing facility, nor for his team of flying reindeer. All the believer has to say, under those circumstances, is, well, you just didn't look in the right places, or he's hiding, or even he's invisible. Ooh. Measuring chimneys, tracing gifts back to the factories in China where they were made, and discovering that the serial numbers on watches were stamped there in a little Swiss town, those things proved nothing to the true believer. The mythology of Jesus is every bit as weird. Oh, one additional fact. There are the so-called venerated sites in which the various Franciscan pseudoarchaeologists have been digging for the last century or so. They were situated where they are to make them fit, as much as could be done, the requirements of the Gospel's description. For example, according to Luke 4, verses 16 to 30, quote, he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. He spoke some controversial words, and all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, and rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereupon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong, end of quote. By the way, Jesus escaped by some sort of subterfuge, but we don't have to get into that. But let's examine these infallible facts, shall we? According to these holy words said to be written by St. Luke himself, there was a synagogue at Nazareth. But extensive archaeological excavation over a century, remember, has only found the city well, nothing else, not one stone of construction remaining from this temple, anywhere in the vicinity. Also there is no Nazareth hill, thus no brow of the hill, nor cliff exists, or existed within the last hundred thousand years. There is no such elevation, nor is there any reasonable place where such a cliff could have existed. The bare fact is that no evidence of buildings or cliffs of any kind dating to the turn of the era has ever been found at these venerated sites. The tourists are barking up the wrong tree. St. Luke, and thus the Inerran Bible, was plainly, demonstrably, dead wrong. Shall we also question the rest of the Holy Bible? Hmm, yes, I think so. We thank you for watching this latest episode of James Randy Speaks. For more of James Randy and the Educational Foundation, make sure you visit randy.org.