I recently came across something about that. From what I saw, it said the translation might actually mean a handyman as opposed to a carpenter.
I defer to Prof. Foley on the topic.
True but even that kind of controversy doesn’t usually happen where everyone speaks the language of the text. I mean for all the controversy about the second amendment no one suggests it means “bear arms” in the sense of grizzly bear appendages
Now try that with “well regulated”.
Though the quote in question (specifically the “son of a carpenter” line) would have been spoken in Aramaic not Greek. The urban population, where the new testament was written down, spoke Greek but the rural masses (including around Nazareth) still spoke Aramaic.
Which begs the question (to me at least) does Aramaic have exact translations of tekon or carpenter.?
Pretty sure he wasn’t a cheesemaker… although I hear those are blessed.
I understand that Biblical scholars tend to put greater weight on less flattering parts of scripture or parts that report aspects of Jesus that need to be explained away. Since the expectation of the day would be that the Messiah would be a great leader, reports that Jesus was a tekton or had humble beginnings have enhanced historical credibility, relatively speaking.
Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55 tee up the Jesus saying, “No prophet goes without respect, except on his home turf and his home!” That saying has a version in Luke, John, and even Thomas, though in those cases the line is not prompted by the carpenter claim. So perhaps “Humble beginnings” is on firmer ground than Jesus’ specific occupational code.
(The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of Jesus sayings, with some gnostic influences. It was discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 and is non-canonical. Unlike the 4 Gospels, it provides no detailed backstory, just sayings attributed to Jesus at the time.)
This is called the “criterion of embarrassment”: You argue that passages which are not flattering to the Christian cause are likely to be true, because an author who made up the entire story would not have made it up in this manner. It’s an important technique in the textual analysis of the Bible, and for believers in the historical truth of the gospels it’s one of the key arguments in the debate whether the crucifixion was real.
What intrigues me is not the meaning of “carpenter” but that Mark NEVER mentions Jesus’ father. Matthew tells us a little (the father was a carpenter) but also NEVER mentions Daddy’s name except in the Nativity/Childhood myths.
Luke and John have passages similar to the “Is this not the carpenter…” passage in Mark, which DO name Jesus’ father. But other than these two mentions and one “Yeshua bar Yosef” patronymic in John, the New Testament provides ZERO mentions of Christ’s human father outside the Nativity/Childhood myths of Matthew and Luke.
I thought two of the gospels provided (different accounts of) Jesus’ decent from King David, the archetypal messiah in Jewish mythology at the time. Don’t both of those mention Joseph?
Yes. I’m afraid I lumped those genealogies with the Nativity/Childhood myths.
BTW, each of those genealogies is phrased so as not to affirm that Joseph was a biological father:
Both of those could be right. As could many others. David, if he existed, lived something like 850 years before Jesus and he had 18 offspring. By the time of Jesus, most likely everyone in Judea was descended from David in multiple ways. So those genealogies are pretty much worthless.
They both trace a direct male lineage, they can’t both be right. 
The argument too is that these stock phrases among other things makes the wording fit the meter of the original story, so the story can be recited with the right emphasis almost like lyrics of a song. Theoretically this makes it easier to remember word-for-word and enhances the ability of the bard reciting it consistently - and this is why these stories are repeated exactly.
In his book Zealot Reza Aslan suggests that Joseph and Jesus were day labourers (construction workers), and that there was work building Herod’s new city (Tiberias?) a few hours away on the Sea of Galilee.
I have to wonder how much simple wood there would have been available for assorted purposes, particularly furniture-making, in an area like that? How far did the famous forests of Lebanon extend?
Aslan also suggests that this was a deliberate insult by locals left in by the scribes who translated and copied gospels. Presumably Jesus’ origins, that his mother was pregnant before getting married to Joseph and not by him, was common gossip in the town. Later scribes did not realize that mentioning the mother and omitting the father in a paternalistic society was a deliberate insult alluding to his questionable paternity.
As for the carpenter cite, I refer to Nick Cave, whose song The Mercy Seat mentions this fact in the fifth verse. See video with sound or lyrics. Or at least that’s what he was told.
This is actually a pretty interesting line in the gospels.
It probably is a mangling of a Jewish aphorism in Aramaic that the gospel writer, ignorant of idioms an aphorism and such, tries to translate literally.
As evidenced by its use in the Talmud, which albeit is “dated” to the year 500CE was merely codified that year-- portions of it were written long before that and could be contemporary with the gospels (or even earlier), there is a saying in Aramaic well known enough among Jews to make it into scholarly commentary. It is this: such a puzzlement (dilemma, predicament, difficulty, puzzle, etc.) could be explained (resolved, explicated, understood) by a carpenter son of a carpenter! (that is, a carpenter whose father was also a carpenter)
The gospel writers, especially Mark, are terrible at translating Hebrew-- just compare their quotes of it to the actual passages they were trying to quote-- and it’s not because they were using the septuagint; otherwise, their quotes would agree exactly with the septuagint.
So my thinking is that one of them (whoever has this scene first, I can’t remember off-hand) encountered it in a source, and couldn’t quite grasp what was going on, other than Jesus’ hometown was full or scoffers and skeptics, and Jesus couldn’t work any miracles for them.
At some point, upon Jesus arrival, someone comments that this local Ne’er-do-well goes to Jerusalem, and has people hanging on his every word? that’s so bizarre, only the carpenter son of a carpenter could explain how that could happen. It’s a joke-- invoking the carpenter saying to compare Jesus attracting followers to difficult passage in scripture.
But after being ground up by the amateur translator, it comes out “Jesus was a carpenter, just like his father.”
And by the way, saying that someone is not just a carpenter, but a “carpenter son of a carpenter” is a way of saying he’s a really, really good carpenter. It just the way Hebrew, Aramaic, and some other related languages express this. It’s like saying “All-time best carpenter.”
This is exciting, because even though it takes us away from knowing something factual about Jesus, it does least suggest that among the sources the gospel writers used, one was a written source that was in Aramaic.
So, we know that if there was a written source in Aramaic, it virtually had to have been written by a Jew. Since we don’t have it in front of us, and since it was a record of him laying an egg in Galilee, we don’t know what the writer thought of him. It could have been mere collection of any stories the writer could find; it could be a record of Jesus failures, or an explanation of them for beievers, no way of knowing, outside of finding the whole documemt
Indeed, I teach at a school named after St. Joseph, sponsored by a religious order also named after him, and it’s a frequent topic of commentary just how little the Gospels actually say about him. We also don’t have any quotes attributed him, aside from the fact that he must have said the name “Jesus” when he named him.
David had multiple sons. It’s only a contradiction if you assume that all of the begats mentioned are firstborns, but it never claims that.
It was when Balthazar dropped the casket of myrrh on his foot.
Yeah, dropping the GOLD would have provoked something unprintable.