Nazareth Trivia
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60 free Nazareth trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Nazareth is a small hill town in Galilee that most of the world knows from a single phrase - Jesus of Nazareth - and today it is the largest Arab city in Israel, with a Muslim majority, a Christian minority and two rival churches each claiming the exact spot where the angel spoke to Mary. This Nazareth trivia quiz opens with the easy questions - which angel, which country, which gospel, what the name might mean - and then walks through two thousand years of history: the Roman-era house dug up in 2009, the Crusader prince who made it his capital, the Mamluk sultan who wrecked its churches, the Druze emir and Arab sheikh who let them be rebuilt, Napoleon's brief visit, and the Canadian-born Israeli officer who refused an order to expel its people in 1948. The harder questions dig into the archaeology and the arguments: the synagogue inscription that gave the first non-Christian mention of the town, the marble tablet threatening death to tomb-robbers, the Brutalist basilica finished in 1969, Mary's Well, the Jesus Trail and the twin-town in Tuscany. Because the name travelled, the last stretch covers Nazareth, Pennsylvania - Moravians, Martin guitars, the Andrettis and a certain song by the Band - and the Scottish hard-rock group that borrowed the name. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the city, its churches, the inscription, the Pennsylvania borough and the band, and the sentence that supports each answer is saved with the question. For the wider story, try our Israel and Jesus trivia quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nazareth is the largest city in which of Israel's six administrative regions?
Northern District
Northern District: its biggest city was once so obscure that the Old Testament never names it, and in John's Gospel Nathanael asks whether anything good can come out of Nazareth.
Q 02In Matthew's Gospel, Joseph settles his family in Nazareth after bringing them back from which country?
Egypt
Egypt: they had fled there from Herod, and on the way back Joseph avoided Judea, where Herod's son Archelaus now ruled, and settled in Nazareth instead.
Q 03In Luke's Gospel, what sends Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem before Jesus is born?
A Roman order to register
A Roman order to register: Luke says Caesar Augustus decreed a census and everyone had to register in his ancestral town, which for Joseph, of David's line, meant Bethlehem.
Q 04Which inscription on crucifixes abbreviates the Latin for 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews'?
INRI
INRI: John's Gospel says Pilate had the notice written in three languages, and when the chief priests objected he answered, 'What I have written, I have written.'
Q 05According to Luke, which angel appeared to Mary in Nazareth to announce she would bear Jesus?
Gabriel
Gabriel: Luke has the angel sent to Nazareth in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, and he points to that pregnancy of Mary's elderly relative as proof that nothing is impossible.
Q 06Which Crusader leader became the first Prince of Galilee in 1099, with Nazareth in his new domain?
Tancred
Tancred. Within two years he gave up Galilee to govern Antioch for his uncle Bohemond, who had been taken prisoner by a Turkish emir.
Q 07One theory ties Nazareth's name to 'netzer', Isaiah's word for the promised king from Jesse's line, meaning what?
Branch
Branch. Isaiah promises that a branch from Jesse's roots will bear fruit, but one etymological dictionary calls the town's name of unknown origin, and a rival theory prefers a verb meaning 'to watch'.
Q 08In Acts, a voice saying 'I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you persecute' stops Saul on the road to which city?
Damascus
Damascus. Saul was carrying letters that let him arrest Jesus's followers there; instead he was led in blind, was baptised three days later and became the apostle Paul.
Q 09Which country's ancient Saint Thomas Christians are still known as Nasranis, their word for 'Nazarenes'?
India
India. Kerala's Nasranis trace their church to the apostle Thomas, said to have landed on the Malabar Coast in AD 52, and Arabic uses the same word for Christians in general.
Q 10The first non-Christian mention of Nazareth is an inscription found in 1962 in which city, once Pontius Pilate's seat?
Caesarea Maritima
Caesarea Maritima. The stone fragments list the Galilean towns where Jewish priestly families resettled after the revolts against Rome, and they place one family in Nazareth.
Q 11Which first-century historian wrote at length about Galilee's towns yet never mentions Nazareth?
Josephus
Josephus. He had commanded the Jewish rebels in Galilee and fortified its towns before surrendering to Rome in AD 67, so his silence suggests how obscure the village was.
Q 12Skeletons some 90,000 years old from Qafzeh Cave, just south of Nazareth, belong not to Neanderthals but to which humans?
Homo sapiens
Homo sapiens. They are some of the oldest remains of our own species found outside Africa, yet they lay among stone tools of a kind usually linked with Neanderthals.
Q 13Jesus's first miracle, turning water into wine at a wedding, took place in which village near Nazareth?
Cana
Q 21Which Mamluk sultan had Nazareth's Christian buildings destroyed in 1263 during his war on the Crusaders?
Baybars
Baybars. Sold into slavery in his teens, he rose through the slave-soldier ranks, helped beat the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260 and then turned on the last Crusader footholds.
Q 22The Druze emir who let the Franciscans back into Nazareth in 1620 is often called the father of which modern country?
Lebanon
Lebanon. Fakhr-al-Din II was the first to bring its Druze and Maronite regions under one ruler, and his alliance with Catholic Tuscany so alarmed the Ottomans that they drove him into exile until 1618.
Q 23A Nazirite is not a native of Nazareth but someone under a sacred vow; which Old Testament judge was one from birth?
Samson
Cana. John has Jesus's mother tell him the wine has run out, and the steward who tastes the result praises the groom for saving the best until last.
Q 14Archaeologists think Nazareth held roughly how many people when Jesus was growing up there?
About 400
About 400. Excavations point to an out-of-the-way hamlet of a few dozen families, and one archaeologist cut his own first estimate of up to 2,000 down to a maximum of 480.
Q 15In 2009 archaeologists in Nazareth announced the first find of what from the village of Jesus's day?
A house
A house. The modest home had two rooms and a courtyard, and beside it was a camouflaged pit, probably cut so the family could hide from Roman troops during the revolt of AD 67.
Q 16Around 570 a pilgrim from Piacenza reported being shown what in Nazareth's synagogue?
The bench where Jesus sat
The bench where Jesus sat. The pilgrim claimed Christians could lift it but Jews could not budge it, and said he was also shown the book in which the boy had practised his ABCs.
Q 17Which Byzantine emperor drove the Persians out of Galilee around 630, after which Nazareth's Jewish community ended?
Heraclius
Heraclius. Nazareth's Jews were accused of siding with the Persian invaders of 614, and the emperor who beat Persia went on to carry the recovered True Cross back into Jerusalem.
Q 18In Acts, Peter heals a lame beggar 'in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth' after admitting he has none of what?
Silver and gold
Silver and gold. 'What I have, that I give you,' Peter goes on, then pulls the man to his feet, and he walks into the Temple leaping and praising God.
Q 19Which 1187 clash returned Nazareth to Muslim control and forced out the Crusaders?
Battle of Hattin
Battle of Hattin. The Crusader army marched out from the springs of Sepphoris, near Nazareth, and was destroyed the next day, parched and surrounded, on a twin-peaked hill; Jerusalem fell that October.
Q 20Which crusading French king heard mass in Nazareth's Grotto of the Annunciation in the 1250s, accompanied by his queen?
Louis IX
Louis IX. He had reached the Holy Land after being captured on crusade and ransomed, and he remains the only king of France the Church has made a saint.
Samson. An angel told his mother that no razor was ever to touch his head, which is why his strength left him the night Delilah had his hair shaved off.
Q 24Whose army briefly occupied Nazareth in 1799 while marching from Egypt into Syria?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte. His general Junot beat off a far larger Ottoman force outside the town, but the campaign stalled before the walls of Acre and the army was soon retreating to Egypt.
Q 25In which Hollywood epic is the chained hero given water in Nazareth by a young carpenter on his way to the galleys?
Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur. Years later Judah recognises the same man stumbling under a cross in Jerusalem and tries to give him water in return.
Q 26Nazareth's 'Scottish Hospital' grew from an 1860s clinic backed by a medical missionary society in which city?
Edinburgh
Edinburgh. Its founder was an Armenian from Constantinople who had trained as a doctor in the Scottish capital, yet the place is also known as the English Hospital.
Q 27The feast of Nazareth's Annunciation once opened England's legal year, so Britain's tax year begins in which month?
April
April. The feast, Lady Day in England, falls on 25 March, nine months before Christmas, and taxes were reckoned from it until the eleven days Britain cut from its calendar in 1752 pushed the date into April.
Q 28The people of Nazareth name four brothers of Jesus in Mark's Gospel; which one became the Jerusalem church's first leader?
James
James. John's Gospel says that Jesus's brothers did not believe in him during his ministry, yet Paul later counts James among the pillars of the church in Jerusalem.
Q 29Nazareth's hills look south over which fertile valley, home to Megiddo, the Bible's Armageddon?
Jezreel Valley
Jezreel Valley. Armageddon is simply the Greek form of Har Megiddo, 'mount of Megiddo', a real fortress town at the valley's edge that armies fought over from about 1500 BC until 1918.
Q 30Who played the title role in the 1977 television epic Jesus of Nazareth?
Robert Powell
Robert Powell. He hardly blinks on camera, a deliberate choice that gave his blue-eyed Jesus a steady, penetrating gaze.