St. Anthony Catholic Church at 20428 Cortez Blvd., Brooksville, FL 34601 US - Jesus, The First Thirty Years

Jesus spent thirty years before Hs public ministry in Nazareth; good-sized town nestled in the hills of Galilee. Farming was the ordinary occupation; and His own family probably worked a small plot of land to provide food for themselves. This fact may explain why He made so many allusions in His preaching to sowing, harvesting and vinetending. Nevertheless, Mark’s Gospel calls Him “The Carpenter.” (Mark 6:3a), while Matthew says He is “the son of a carpenter” (13:55). At that time and place sons tended to apprentice to their fathers; so we can safely assume that both Joseph and Jesus were carpenters. In his two-volume study of Jesus, Father John Meier tells us that the word “carpenter” translates the Greek “tekton” that meant “woodworker”. Jesus did not build houses as these were made of bricks and mud. He probably fashioned the house windows and roof beams and provided His farming neighbors with yokes, plows and furniture. Fashioning these would have taken no little sweat or muscle, Meier notes. The somewhat fragile Jesus artists sometimes depict would have been a far remove from a man who spent many years as a woodworker. Some scholars think Joseph and Jesus may have been master builders who traveled extensively working on the great projects of Herod the Great in Jerusalem or on his son’s grand new capital in Sepphoris, just 312 miles from Nazareth, a town of about 2,000 people. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to think that He visited and occasionally worked in Sepphoris, where Greek was the ordinary language of tradesmen. Where did Jesus fit into the social structure of His time? It was a society of rulers, bureaucrats, peasant farmers, day laborers and slaves. Scholars think Jesus would have been the modern-day equivalent of a blue-collar worker in the lower middle class. His family would have been no poorer or less respectable than any other in Nazareth. Those thirty years were a rare period of peace and prosperity in Palestine, making it possible for Him to begin and carry out His itinerant ministry through Galilee and Judea.

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