Because there are rituals and offerings when a firstborn child is a son, that are done more or less as soon as the child is born, regardless of future children. I’m pretty sure that at least the pidyom haBen existed in Jesus time, and the long lineages establish that Jesus is NOT a kohen or levirite. Do any of the gospels say anything about Joseph or Mary redeeming Jesus, paying the redemption, paying something to a priest? or anything like that?
Tekton is ambiguous and could be an unskilled construction worker as well as a skilled carpenter. And according to Reza Aslan, “The Romans used the term tekton as slang for any uneducated or illiterate peasant …”
Aslan also writes that when Jesus was a young man “practically every artisan and day laborer in the province would have poured into Sepphoris to take part in what was the largest restoration project of the time …”
Here’s what Luke’s gospel says:
On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived.
When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord”), and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: “a pair of doves or two young pigeons.”
Do the purification rites and sacrifice of a pair of birds count as “paying?”
The purification rituals were for Mary. She had to take a bath, and say a blessing to be “clean” for intercourse again after giving birth. It sounds horrifically sexist, but it did keep a man away from his wife for a few weeks after she’d delivered a baby, which was in her best interests, and she was probably glad for it.
Now, “Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord,” that was for Jesus. Every first born male-- a male child who “opened the womb,” or which to say, was his mother’s first-born, and was not already Levitical, had to be turned over to the Temple as a servant-- OR, his father had to pay a fee to redeem him. The fee is nominal now, and probably was by Jesus time, and was doubtfully even handed over to the Temple given the distance, unless there was someone who collected them for a whole area for like, a year, and turned them over at one of the pilgrimage holidays. Today, families usually have a small party, where the father symbolically hands a few silver dollars over to a friend who is a kohen, then everybody eats.
We had our kohen ready (good friend of mine since I was 15) when we found out we were having a boy, but he ended up being delivered by c-section, and therefore did not “open the womb” and did not need to be redeemed. That was a rabbinical ruling obviously made long after Temple times, and amuses me, because it’s just funny that Orthodox Jews still keep all that stuff in line.
It’s not all first-born males, to be very clear-- it’s the first-borns who are male. If an older sister already opened the womb, then the the first boy does not need to be redeemed.
In addition to the symbolic payment, at Passover, first-born males fast on the day before the first Seder, from sunup to the beginning of the Seder. That means if he wants to get up before dawn for breakfast, he can. Basically, he just skips lunch. Since it’s a fast where he can have water, it’s not bad. I know some first-born women who assert feminism by fasting, but I am hypoglycemic.
Again?
What do you mean again?
I think the idea is that he’s inferring that you’re implying that Mary had already had intercourse.
Duh.
Every Jewish woman is supposed to go to mikveh (clean, running water, now maintained by Orthodox synagogues, but back then, I think any deep, running stream) before or after certain events, and men too, sometimes. You also sometimes have to rinse dishes or clothes in the mikveh-- I don’t do this, so I don’t know the particulars.
A woman needs to immerse in the mikveh after childbirth before she is clean for intercourse.
Before marriage, a woman immerses as well. I have no idea what was done with obviously pregnant women in the first century-- nor, for that matter whether Mary was obviously pregnant at her wedding or not.
I’m pretty sure she would have needed to dunk before marriage whether or not she looked pregnant. I think the groom needs to do so, too. (Men need to dunk in the mikvah to be ritually clean if they’ve had a wet dream. Surely it would be safest for a bridegroom to dunk?)
The Jordan River “counts” ritually as a mikvah. John the Baptist was dunking men in a mikvah to ritually purify themselves. The rules of baptism are obviously not identical to the Jewish laws of ritual purity, but they are a direct offshoot, and have similar goals.
The point is that the same general group of people who wrote the Gospels also translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, and the Hebrew word they translated as “tekton” unambiguously means “carpenter”, suggesting that that was also the primary meaning of the Biblical Greek “tekton”. But of course it’s not proof, since the translation might simply have been wrong.
Just like literally no census in human history has ever required people to return to their birthplace to be counted, because that would be absurd. Clearly a retcon.
And of course, traveling long distances was a much more difficult and dangerous affair in the first century than it is today. To imagine a whole population on the move for the sake of a census is absurd. Asimov has some strong words to say about this ridiculous census story:
Though this device has much to be said for it from the standpoint of literary economy, it has nothing to be said for it in the way of plausibility. The Romans couldn’t possibly have conducted so queer a census as that. Why should they want every person present in the town of his ancestors rather than in the town in which he actually dwelt? Why should they want individuals traveling up and down the length of the land, clogging the roads and interfering with the life of the province? It would even have been a military danger, for the Parthians could find no better time to attack than when Roman troops would find it hard to concentrate because of the thick crisscrossing of civilians on their way to register.
Even if the ancestral town were somehow a piece of essential information, would it not be simpler for each person merely to state what that ancestral town was? And even if, for some reason, a person had to travel to that ancestral town, would it not be sufficient for the head of the household or some agent of his to make the trip? Would a wife have to come along? Particularly one that was in the last month of pregnancy?
No, it is hard to imagine a more complicated tissue of implausibilities and the Romans would certainly arrange no such census.
Of course it’s not proof. Because you are several centuries off if you think the Septuagint was written in the CE.
Biblical scholars agree that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were translated from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek by Jews living in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, centred on the large community in Alexandria, probably in the early or middle part of the third century BCE. The remaining books were presumably translated in the 2nd century BCE. Some targums translating or paraphrasing the Bible into Aramaic were also made during the Second Temple period.
(my emphasis)
From wiki.
The modern Hebrew, and Aramaic word for carpenter, which appears in the Talmud, is naggar (unfortunate, but true). IIRC, “carpenter son of a carpenter” is “naggar naggara,” but it’s probably like “Shabbat Shabbaton” (and it’s not “naggar bar naggar”) “a Shabbat of Shabbats.” In other words, a “carpenter of carpenters,” or something like “the greatest of carpenters.” Since “carpenter” is a stand-in for “wise man,” “naggar naggara” means, basically, “the wisest man of all.”
The biblical Hebrew word is kharash; this is the word that is translated at “tekton” in the Septuagint.
I recently ran across biblical commentator Géza Vermes observing that Greek writers in general tend to call carpenters specifically “tekton xylon.” If “xylon” (wood) is not specified, then some other kind of skilled craftsman is intended. Albeit, if there is an Aramaic source behind the story that says “naggar naggara,” which the gospel writer did not understand, and mistook as a literal description of Jesus’ and Joseph’s occupation, clearly, the gospel writer using tekton without a modifier understands it as carpenter-- unless he is unsure of the exact meaning of naggar.
Vermes also observes that there were not a lot of trees in the desert. It’s part of a longer argument that if “tekton” were Jesus literal day job, he probably was a stonemason, or some other kind of craftsman, not a worker in wood.
This would surprise me, because Matthew makes mistakes in quoting Hebrew text-- I would think a gospel in Hebrew would get the Hebrew of the prophets, or Psalms, or whatever, correct. Besides, not much writing in Hebrew was going on. Commentary from the 1st century is in Aramaic. If Mathew had some kind of Jewish-language source, I would expect it to be in Aramaic.