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The name Nazareth occurs in a great orthographical variety, such as Nazaret, Nazareth, Nazara, Nazarat, and the like. In the time of Eusebius and St. Jerome (Onomasticon), its name was Nazara (in modern Arabic, en Nasirah), which therefore, seems to be the correct name; in the New Testament we find its derivatives written Nazarenos, or Nazoraios, but never Nazaretaios. The etymology of Nazara is neser, which means "a shoot". The Vulgate renders this word by flos, "flower", in the Prophecy of Isaias (xi, 1), which is applied to the Saviour. St. Jerome (Epist., xlvi, "Ad Marcellam") gives the same interpretation to the name of the town.
Nazareth was not such an insignificant hamlet as is generally believed. We know, first, that it possessed a synagogue. Neubaurer (La géographie du Talmud, p. 190) quotes, moreover, an elegy on the destruction of Jerusalem, taken from ancient Midrashim now lost, and according to this document, Nazareth was a home for the priests who went by turns to Jerusalem, for service in the Temple. Up to the time of Constantine, it remained exclusively a Jewish town.
St. Epiphaenius (Adv. Haereses, I, ii, haer., 19) relates that in 339 Joseph, Count of Tiberias, told him that, by a special order of the emperor, "he built churches to Christ in the towns of the Jews, in which there were none, for the reason that neither Greeks, Samaritans, nor Christians were allowed to settle there, viz., at Tiberias, at Diocaesarea, or Sepphoris, at Nazareth, and at Capharnaum".
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