I’m from the North. When I moved to go to college, I had to modify my accent – otherwise some people wouldn’t have understood a word I said. I later discovered that my hometown (Strabane) had been judged (by Channel 4) to be the third worst place to live in the United Kingdom.

This past year I realized that Strabane is not the first place where outsiders think that the odds were stacked against us. The other place was blindingly obvious, but I had missed it. This has made me do some hard thinking.

You see, people scarcely know where Strabane is. My wife was greatly amused when I brought two travel books home from Stillorgan Library, both of which explained how to avoid Strabane. Now, I know there are some people in South Dublin who know Strabane because they pull off the bypass just long enough to buy food in Strabane’s Asda to take with them for their holidays in Donegal. And there are clever people who also know that we had an awful time during the Troubles.

It’s like people are thinking, ‘Can any good thing come out of Strabane?’

But that rang a bell in my head. Think about it – what other place have you heard of where northern people had an odd accent, weren’t very well connected to the rest of the country and had an iffy reputation as people affected by violence? Galilee. Yes, that Galilee – the one in the Bible.

Around the time when Homer was at home writing his ‘Odessey’ the population of Galilee was being whisked off to Assyria. They came back in dribs and drabs but never fully recovered.

By the time Jesus arrived from Egypt as a toddler with the rest of his refugee family, Galilee – and specifically Nazareth – was ‘nowheresville’ as far as the Jerusalem elite was concerned. Joseph had passed Jerusalem and gone the extra 60 odd miles up north to withdraw to somewhere he knew. Jesus was never going to be ‘Jesus of Jerusalem’. He died there but he didn’t live there.

Lots of Greeks and Romans lived up in Galilee – they weren’t exactly kosher but it did no harm to the local economy. In the very first chapter of John’s gospel we meet Nathanael who came from Cana – about five miles from Nazareth. He knew a thing or two about the Galilee region. His opinion? ‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’ (Nazareth hadn’t even appeared in the Old Testament).

Jesus didn’t move on until he was 30 – albeit to another Galilean town. But he was still going to be ‘of Nazareth’. By that time his family was a known quantity around town – they were the carpenter people.

Moving to Capernaum allowed him to make sure that Galilee was covered first with his thought-out plan, teaching both in their synagogues and in the open air. The New Testament text tells us that people came to hear him from every single village in Galilee. And of course, he was healing people right and left at the same time. All that required the involvement of 12 selected followers.

Then the centre of gravity of his work moved south. As much as ever, people called him ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ – from disabled people to people in authority. And the ‘Galilee’ issue raised its head.

Top Pharisee Nicodemus, who had met Jesus in an after-hours appointment, spoke up for him amongst his colleagues who then began to rib him asking, ‘Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee’.

Eventually, the accent became a big deal. On the night that Jesus was arrested and taken to the high priest’s house, Peter got as far as the front courtyard. He hung around like everybody else, keeping warm at a fire. One of the girls working at the house said to the group, ‘This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth’. Peter didn’t like that. Then a few people said, ‘Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away’. That was the exact point where Peter flipped and denied Jesus.

Pilate cooperated with the Jewish leaders and had Jesus crucified, but not before attaching a nameplate to the cross: ‘JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS’. This time it was the chief priests who got annoyed. They thought they already had a ‘king of the Jews’ and wanted Pilate to re-write the nameplate to say that Jesus was only claiming to be the King of the Jews (Pilate didn’t re-write it). It was a sore point because the Romans were the people really in charge (of course, the priests didn’t object to the ‘Nazareth’ bit).

You might think that this ‘Nazareth’ identifier would now be finished with, but no! –  it turns out that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ was going to be the name used to front the happy update about God going out across the world.

Even an angel on Day One of the new era explained to the bewildered women who came out of Jesus’ empty tomb, ‘Don’t be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here’. He further explained that there would be a rendezvous with the disciples, guess where? – Galilee!

When the church then got going, the main message was about ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ all the way. In the record of the apostle Paul’s last public sermon, presented to King Herod Agrippa II (the new man in the ‘top Jew’ job) and Governor Festus (the new ‘top Roman’ in the province), he tells them that he had been against Jesus of Nazareth – until he met him outside Damascus.

This ‘man from Nazareth’ image isn’t just a nice metaphor. It shows that he speaks my language. And yours too. This has now deeply penetrated cultures in every continent in the world.

Which is why, in 2014, when ISIS wanted to identify Christians so they could persecute them in Iraq, they sprayed an Arabic letter ‘N’ on their houses, short for ‘Naṣrānī’. They were identifying the ‘Nazareth’ people. Which produced millions of Facebook accounts which included that letter ‘ ن’ in their personal profiles, in Christian solidarity.

Somebody from heaven has gone to great lengths to get in touch. If I hadn’t done so already, I would turn myself in right now to get his amnesty – to be forgiven and join him on the road.