by James Martin
People did not travel afar much, since it was both dangerous and expensive. When they did—for example, for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem—they did so in larger groups so as to ward off bandits. Life was, as Crossan and Reed say, “predominantly local.”16
Adding to the burdens of this life was the class system under which the vast majority of the populace labored. Much of what the land produced, and the income earned, went to support the ruling elite—in this case both Herodian and Roman authorities—through a system of taxation. There were triple taxes: first, the tithe, or 10 percent, that went to the Temple in Jerusalem; second, tribute to the Roman emperor; and third, payment to the local Jewish king, in this case Herod. Thus, because of the vagaries of weather and crop yields, poor health, and these triple taxes, families were liable to fall into debt and financial ruin.
The populace was overlaid with a complicated hierarchy made up of not only rulers but a governing class that consisted of members of the court, as well as merchants and some priests. And although the two “top classes” (the rulers and the governing class) comprised only 1 percent of the population, they took in not less than half of the income of the region.17 Just below the top classes were the merchants and priestly classes. At the very bottom were the outcasts.
Just above the unclean were the peasants, who worked the land, and the artisans. Interestingly, the artisan class, because they did not have the benefit of a stable plot of land, likely ranked somewhere below the peasantry. Jesus’s family was in the artisan class and likely near the bottom rung of the economic ladder. He would have known what it meant to be poor, and to dwell among those eking out a living in arduous circumstances, at the whim of the weather, illness, and one’s overlords.18 He would have also known what it meant to live in a world of interconnected relationships, where the artisan would have helped out the farmer, the older woman her pregnant neighbor, and the one with extra food the family whose crops had failed. “All archaeological evidence from the Roman period,” say Crossan and Reed by way of summing up, “points to a simple peasant existence in Nazareth.”19
What about the religious practices in this area? Even though the Gospels refer to “Galilee of the Gentiles” (that is, a land of non-Jews) and there were tensions between the high priests in Jerusalem and local Galilean priests, archaeologists are reasonably certain that Galilee was firmly Jewish.20 “Archaeological excavations in and around Galilee show that the Galileans were Jewish, not a mixed blend of Jews and Gentiles,” writes Reed. “Galilee was overwhelmingly Jewish at the time of Jesus.”21
Though part of the Roman colony of Palestine, the Jews of the area were distinguished from their Gentile neighbors by laws directly governing their day-to-day lives. This meant proper observance of the Jewish laws ordering practices such as the purification rituals for the body and hands, religious fasting and dining observances (including which foods were considered impure), keeping the Sabbath, clothing and burial customs, and avoiding people considered “unclean.”22 All of these observances provided a way to worship God not only with the spirit, but also with the body. Jesus would have been raised in such a system of laws and customs and would have been instructed on what and whom to avoid. He would later challenge some of these customs, to the horror of some of his fellow Jews.
Overall, Jesus lived the first thirty years of his life in a marginal Jewish hamlet. Significantly, Nazareth is not mentioned anywhere in the Old Testament. Nor is it mentioned in the Talmud, which lists sixty-three other villages in Galilee, or in the writings of Josephus, who names forty-five other Galilean villages. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” asks Nathanael.23 In that Gospel passage Nazareth is, quite literally, a joke.
And yet, just four miles from Nazareth was Sepphoris, a bustling city of thirty thousand, which was being rebuilt at the time by Herod Antipas. The city’s extensive ruins show an amphitheater seating three to four thousand people, courts, a fortress, a royal bank, and houses with frescoes and gorgeous mosaic floors; it was a cosmopolitan place where Greek would have been spoken.24 Jesus’s hometown, by contrast, was a place of subsistence only, very unlike other larger towns with a greater Roman and Greek influence. The modest remains of Nazareth today stand in stark contrast to clear residues of affluence in Sepphoris. One archaeological team wrote about Nazareth: “The principal activity of these villagers was agriculture. Nothing in the finds suggests wealth.”25
There is a lively scholarly debate over whether Jesus might have sought work in the growing city of Sepphoris, attracted by the demand for good carpenters or craftsmen, and therefore whether he would have been exposed to Greek and other cultures. The city called by Josephus “the ornament of all Galilee” was only an hour-and-a-half walk from Nazareth.26
“He doubtless knew Sepphoris,” writes E. P. Sanders in The Historical Figure of Jesus. Then why is this great town, so close to Nazareth, not mentioned in the Gospels? Reed hazards a guess: perhaps its Hellenized culture and affluent citizenry did not appeal to Jesus. Sanders writes that since Jesus viewed his ministry as primarily directed toward the Jews in the villages and small towns, cities like Sepphoris were not a high priority.27 Or perhaps like the rest of the Hidden Life, his visits are simply not mentioned in the Gospels.
It is impossible to know whether Jesus visited Sepphoris as a youth or adolescent, but to my mind, in the years that this curious young man lived in Nazareth and later as a craftsman seeking work, it would have been odd for him not to have visited the growing cosmopolitan city at least a few times and been exposed to the multilingual and multicultural world of Romans, Greeks, and fellow Jews. During his visits Jesus would have seen some of the wealthier, more lavishly furnished homes in Sepphoris, so different from the relative hovels of his friends and family in Nazareth. Perhaps the contrast between the wealth of Sepphoris and the poverty of Nazareth influenced Jesus’s later comments on income disparity. Perhaps he even picked up a few Greek words and phrases, which would serve him well later in life. Two of his disciples, Philip and Andrew, have Greek names, another indication of the mélange of cultures around the Sea of Galilee.
Also, though Nazareth itself was a backwater, it was in the middle of a complex series of roads and trade routes in Lower Galilee, and its proximity to Sepphoris would have placed it in the midst of an “urbanized and urbane” milieu, again arguing for some sophistication or at least some exposure to a sophisticated milieu for Nazarenes.28 Crossan writes that despite its size, the town’s residents “lived in the shadow of a major administrative city [Sepphoris], in the middle of a densely populated urban network, and in continuity with its hellenized cultural traditions.”29
Crossan argues against the picture of Jesus, then, as a country boy unfamiliar with anything outside his town. Moreover, Jesus would have also made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the major religious festivals of the year, along with his family, and would have been further exposed to life outside of Nazareth.
Still, as Sanders notes, Jesus was not an “urbanite.” Trips to Sepphoris would have been for work, not to imbibe the Greek culture. Village life was dominated by work; when his work was finished, a carpenter plying his trade in a nearby town would have packed up his tools and gone home. And as for language, as a resident of the tiny hamlet of Nazareth, besides his studies in Hebrew, Jesus would likely have known only a smattering of Greek. In his book Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus, Mark Chancey concludes, “[E]n-thusiastic claims about the high number of Galileans proficient in Greek are difficult to support,” probably more so in a small town like Nazareth.30
Jesus’s native language was Aramaic. The Gospels, though written in Greek, record several traces of Jesus’s mother tongue. Many scholars believe that some of the most “authentic” of Jesus’s words are those in Aramaic, preserved by the original listeners, then passed on by oral storytellers, and finally carefully recorded by the evangelists. We hear Jesus say to a little girl thought to be dead, “Talitha koum!” (“Little girl, get up!”). And to th
e ears of a deaf man, “Ephphatha!” (“Be opened!”). He tells people that they will be condemned if they call someone rhaka (“fool”). Jesus’s anguished last words, uttered from the cross, are in Aramaic: Elōi, Elōi, lema sabachthani! (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).31 So he was an Aramaic speaker, and almost certainly one with a distinctive Galilean accent. Interestingly, Peter is suspected of knowing Jesus during the Passion apparently because people recognized his Galilean accent.32
As for Jesus’s education, Meier notes in A Marginal Jew that, although Jesus may not have had what we consider formal education, he may have grown up in a culture that was more literate than we might suspect. While literacy was not the lot of everyone in Galilee, the fact that Jesus was able to read from the Scriptures suggests that he was literate. And, given that his teaching was “imbued” with the outlook and language of the sacred texts of Judaism, says Meier, “it is reasonable to suppose that Jesus’s religious formation in his family was intense and profound, and included instruction in reading biblical Hebrew.”33
And as my time in East Africa reminded me, many of the poor who interact with people from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds and linguistic groups learn to speak a number of languages—despite poverty and a lack of formal education. Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that Jesus’s everyday language was Aramaic, that he knew Hebrew, and that he perhaps spoke a smattering of Greek. But that he was literate made him atypical in the first-century world. “Jesus comes out of a peasant background,” says Meier, “but he is not any ordinary peasant.”34
But there is another kind of education: that of work. Which brings us to the tantalizing word tektōn, the sole evidence we have of Jesus’s Hidden Life. During the time between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it is likely that Jesus was apprenticed to Joseph as a tektōn, a word usually translated as “carpenter.” But the romantic view of the boy in a tastefully appointed workshop with a full complement of tools hanging primly on the wall is unwarranted. Joseph and Jesus probably worked in the hot sun, plying their trade, and lugging their tools overland to surrounding villages and towns to support the family. Jesus’s status as Mary’s firstborn (prōtotokos, as Luke tells us in the infancy narratives) meant that he would have also received, according to Meier, “special attention” not only in his religious education, but also in training for a trade.35
Meier surmises that the size of Jesus’s family (Mary and Joseph, four “brothers” and an indeterminate number of “sisters”) probably necessitated that they obtain some of their food from a plot of land.36 Interestingly, in his parables and stories Jesus frequently makes use of images not from carpentry, which one would expect, but from farming—the sower and the seeds, the mustard seed, and the weeds that grow up alongside the wheat, for example.37 Does this mean that Jesus spent more time in the fields than we suspect? Perhaps. His use of agrarian terms may also have made sense when preaching to crowds primarily made up of farmers, listeners who were more familiar with the flower and the stalk of wheat than with the saw and the adze.
Meier’s A Marginal Jew provides a superb description of what it meant to be a tektōn and what Jesus would have done during those eighteen years. Meier chooses to translate the word as “woodworker.” The term itself may have been used derisively, perhaps because it designates a person on the lower end of the social scale. We can find traces of that derision in the Gospels. In Mark, the earliest Gospel, people ask of Jesus, “Is not this the tektōn?” Writing later, Matthew seems to find the comment so bothersome that he transfers the occupation to Joseph: “Is not this the son of the tektōn?” Luke, even later, dispenses with the occupation altogether: “Is not this Joseph’s son?” So does John: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph?”38 Jesus’s trade seems not to have garnered much respect, even in the Gospels.
While Elizabeth Johnson notes that the Gospels use the word tektōn to “designate a carpenter, a stonemason, a cartwright and joiner all rolled into one,” Meier focuses mainly on the woodworking and attempts to reconstruct his work.39 His passage on Jesus’s working life deserves to be quoted in full:
Some of Jesus’s work would have been carpentry in the narrow sense of the word, i.e., woodwork in constructing parts of houses. But in Nazareth the ordinary house would have had walls of stone or mud brick. Wood would be used mostly for the beams in the roof, the space between beams being filled in with branches along with clay, mud and compacted earth. The people of Nazareth could not have afforded the use of wood to build whole houses, or even the floors in them. However, doors, door frames, and locks or bolts were often made of wood, as at times were the lattices in the (few and small) windows. Beyond carpentry in this sense Jesus would have made various pieces of furniture such as beds, tables, stools, and lampstands (cf. 2 Kgs 4:10) as well as boxes, cabinets, and chests for storage. Justin Martyr claimed that Jesus also made “plows and yokes.” While this is probably an inference by Justin rather than a relic of oral tradition, it does tell us what work a person from Palestine—which Justin was—would attribute to a tektōn. . . . Thus while Jesus was in one sense a common Palestinian workman, he plied a trade that involved, for the ancient world, a fair level of technical skill. It also involved no little sweat and muscle power. The airy weakling often presented to us in pious paintings and Hollywood movies would hardly have survived the rigors of being Nazareth’s tektōn from his youth to his early thirties.40
But even the sharpest historian’s tools cannot craft a complete look at daily life in Nazareth, for, as with those who are the desperately poor even today, life wasn’t all toil, filth, and misery, despite the crushing economic systems and the difficult physical conditions. Archaeological evidence of small stone dwellings for extended families also indicates the likelihood of close relationships and an ingrained feeling of belonging—to the family, to the extended family, and to the village. Living and working in close proximity to one another, whether in the fields or in the tightly packed houses of a small village, would have fostered a strong sense of community, particularly if Nazareth was seen by outsiders, as Nathanael’s comment suggests, as a joke. Strong religious beliefs would mean an awareness of a person’s reliance on God, a sense of gratitude for the blessings in life—a timely rain shower, an unexpectedly good crop, a baby delivered in good health—and the knowledge that God is part of everyone’s daily life.
While Jesus’s life in Nazareth would be considered hard by most modern standards, it was surely not a life without its moments, perhaps many moments, of joy and laughter.
This was the world out of which Jesus stepped—a world of poverty, hardship, and toil. But also a world of close-knit and religious families who relied on one another in tough times. And this was the background of the man who would soon speak to the people of Nazareth, who thought, falsely, that they knew all there was to know about him.
THIS BOOK IS MEANT to introduce you to Jesus Christ. And one way to know Jesus better is by understanding not only his words and deeds as recorded in the Gospels, but by thinking about what his life might have been like before his public ministry began. Thanks to archaeology, that life is becoming less hidden. So even from that short exploration of daily life in Palestine what spiritual lessons might we draw from the thirty years of Jesus’s life in Nazareth?
More specifically, how might Jesus’s daily life in Nazareth have influenced his later ministry? And how might his “ordinary” life intersect with our own?
First of all, Jesus understood the lives of those on the margins from firsthand experience. When Jesus meets the poor during his public ministry and treats them with compassion, and when he directs his followers to care for the poor, it is not simply the stance of someone looking down from on high, as a wealthy person might pity the homeless man he passes on the way to the office. Rather, it is the stance of the person who himself came from a poor town, and who may have felt that compassion for years. Jesus’s love for the poor came not only from meditating on the Scriptures, from seeing i
njustice in the world around him at the time of his ministry, and from his divine connection to the Father, but also from his life in Nazareth: his youth, adolescence, and early adulthood.
Even if he never once journeyed to Sepphoris (which is hard to imagine about a curious boy and then a carpenter eager to earn his daily bread), Jesus would have been acutely aware of the income disparities in Galilee, the taxes levied on the people, and the way that something as random as drought can wipe out a year’s earnings. Jesus knew the precariousness of human life. He would also have seen how the class system forced many poor people to see themselves as powerless.
Imagine someone growing up in a backwater town and being forced to witness his social group as not only indigent, but subject to slights and insults. As an adult that person might naturally want to lift his people from such indignities. (Once on a retreat I imagined a young Jesus passing by a poor man being harassed by a wealthy landlord, and feeling anger.) Again, Jesus’s emphasis on the dignity of the poor and marginalized (“Blessed are you who are poor!”) may have found its foundation not simply in what he saw as an adult, but in his experiences as a young man.
Second, and more basically, Jesus understood human life—all the messy physical realities of being human. Jesus wasn’t simply God playacting at being human. Here’s an earthy example: Last year a vicious stomach flu tore through my Jesuit community. Despite vigorous hand washing, it hit me one night. Without going into details, it was the sickest I had ever been—even including my time in East Africa. As I hunched over the toilet for the fifth time that night, I had a surprising thought: Jesus did this. Admittedly, he did not contract a norovirus in a Jesuit community, but Jesus certainly got sick. He got hungry. He ate. He drank. We know, explicitly from the Gospels, that he got tired, as when he falls asleep in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. The physical realities of human life were not unknown to him.