And Joseph, wheresoever he went into the city, took the Lord Jesus with him, where he was sent for to work to make gates, or milk pails, or sieves, or boxes; the Lord Jesus was with him wheresoever he went. And as often as Joseph had anything in his work, to make longer or shorter, or wider, or narrower, the Lord Jesus would stretch his hand toward it. And presently it became as Joseph would have it. So that he had no need to finish anything with his own hands, for he was not very skilful at his carpenter’s trade.
I Infancy 16:1-4 [as printed in World Publishing “Lost Books of the Bible” 1926]
What jumps out at me is that in today’s world, these are more tasks associated with a cabinet-making rather than carpentry. This passage doesn’t even mention carpens.
No, Hello Again has it (almost) right. According to Jewish law (not written down in the Mishnah about a century or so after Jesus’s time, but those teachings were certainly already in circulation by then, and many of the Rabbis quoted in the Mishnah were his contemporaries), any Jewish town with more than 120 people was supposed to have a formal court. If the population of Nazareth was 500-1000, and I’ll assume it was a mostly Jewish town, they would have had one.
Anyway, back to the OP, the Romans had a excellent and quite fair court system. However, like today, if you were very very rich you could hire the best lawyers and even bribe the jury.
VIRAG (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon’s cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
—Ulysses, Circe
ETA: Ahem, look around yourself. ;)
You know, “tekton” is a Greek word. The Aramaic and Hebrew word is “naggar.” There is an idiom “naggar ben naggar,” or “craftsman son of a craftsman,” which meant “very wise person,” and an expression that was current in the first century “It would take a ‘naggar ben naggar’ to explain this”; ie, “this is very confusing,” or “quite a puzzle,” or “complicated.”
It is very likely that there was a story in Aramaic about Jesus returning to his home town all hippie-fied, with his band of unwashed disciples, who were managing to make a living out of what must have seemed like a hybrid of fortune-telling, and plain old begging by able-bodied people. What the hell happened to normal (not to mention humble) people to make them think that they had a direct line to G-d, or the world owed them a living? Not even "naggar ben naggar can explain it.
The first Greek to write down this story found it a little confusing. He couldn’t make sense of the idiom, and took it literally, and maybe his Aramaic wasn’t so great to begin with. He also didn’t understand the Jewish self-deprecating style of writing, which could tell the story from the locals’ viewpoint (thus disrespecting Jesus), and not expect the reader to adopt it.
Instead of a slightly humorous story that references angels who come unrecognized, the story becomes a story about how stupid people in Jesus’ hometown are, and instead of the reader being left to infer a moral (and pat himself on the back for being wise, if he does), the writer invents one about prophets going unrecognized in their hometowns-- which probably has some truth, but probably wasn’t in the original story.
And in the process, Jesus and his (step?)-father become carpenters.
