I don’t think he read my recent post 🙂 but Bart Ehrman has also posted on the evidence for Nazareth existing at the time of Jesus.
Bart has several advantages over me. Not only is he a professional working full time in this field, but he is able, because of his position, to have personal communication with some of the key players, as he reports on in this blog post.
Ehrman points out that Rene Salm’s arguments, even if they were well based in the archaeology, don’t prove that Nazareth didn’t exist in Jesus’ day. They would just show that there is limited evidence for this – not surprising since it was a small village and the area is now overlain by a city.
But he also points out that the archaeological evidence does indeed point to habitation in Nazareth at the time of Jesus – probably a small and rather poor village.
Worth reading.