Sure, I don't want to give the wrong impression here, a healthy scholarship requires a dialect, where any question can be asked, and all results are subject to scrutiny. And every new idea starts out as a minority position--my own graduate work was on an obscure grammatical formalism, which 30 years later is now mainstream, so I've been one of these contrarian scholars myself. Its a huge risk though--I never even tried to get an academic position, because nobody gives you 30 years to get tenure. And, let's face it, most contrarian ideas turn out to be wrong.
*Somebody's* gotta take those risks, or new discoveries will never be made--but the better you *understand* those risks, the better your chances of making your case, and sometimes getting that understanding can require decades of study, inside or outside of academia.
So yeah, it's never a bad idea to ask any question. But sometimes, if you are lucky, you actually get an answer!
In the instant case here, we know that virtually every aspect of Jesus's life was continually interpreted and re-interpreted looking for some kind of deeper, symbolic meaning, and "Nazareth-Nazorine" was definitely something which the early writers jumped all over. Depending upon your larger goals here, it might not even matter whether there even was a historical Jesus from a historical Nazareth or not. "Nazareth-Nazorine" is an evocative comparison to make, no matter whether "Nazareth" was fictional or not.
For example, if you want to prove that Mark made up the story of Jesus coming from Nazareth, to portray him as some kind of spiritual athlete, the lie works a lot better if there actually was such a town. And ex-post facto creating a town in the middle of nowhere just to support the lie would be an enormous task, impossible to keep secret, so would end up undercutting the lie anyways.
But if you want to prove that Mark *wasn't* trying to fool anybody into actually taking the story seriously, rather, Mark assumed his readers would recognize his story as being transparently fictional, it doesn't really matter that much either way. Sure would make perfect sense that Mark would have him come from some hicksville-sounding fictional name for a fictional town, but even if there *were* such a town, it wouldn't compromise Mark's story, Nazareth was basically nowheresville and having him come from there *still* makes the story sound pretty fictional.
So what *are* your larger aims here? Say you had a definitive answer to the question (which you probably do....) what difference would that make for your larger program? Is it really that important to you one way or the other? What's at stake?
