“For example, it is independently attested that Jesus came from Nazareth (Mark, John). And this cuts against what Christians would have wanted to say about him, since the messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem (which is why we have stories about him being born there). But why would Christians say he came from Nazareth? Prior to Christianity, Nazareth was a one-horse town that almost no one had even heard of. The Christians who told the stories of Jesus got no mileage out of claiming he came from such a tiny, unknown, and inauspicious hamlet in the backwoods of Galilee. And so the stories that place him there are probably authentic—that is where he was from.”
Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 124.
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