Matthew is probably trying to restore as much of an Aramaic saying as he can, which Mark, or whoever wrote down some anecdotes in Greek that Mark used as a source, did not understand, and garbled.
The phrase, which appears in the Talmud, and in some earlier sources, suggesting it was in fact in use in first century Judah, was “Only a carpenter, the son of a carpenter can explain this puzzle.” It is something rabbis say when they come across a point of law they cannot elucidate. “Carpenter” is a loose translation-- if such a job existed in modern times, it would probably be “engineer,” or “rocket scientist,” but as it is, it means someone who can design a structure from the ground up-- who can make something from nothing.
When is interesting about this is that if it contains a vestige of an Aramaic phrase which was garbled, this suggests a real antiquity to the story.
It doesn’t prove anything beyond one of the several composite characters who contributed to the Jesus legend was an autodidact who wowed his hometown, to the point that some people questioned whether he might be a fraud, and others thought he might have some miraculous powers. It doesn’t prove the resurrection, or the transfiguration, but it does seem to establish that there was someone in first century Judah with a following, and Paul didn’t just make the whole thing up.
And it proves that stories were circulating, probably in written for in Aramaic, before the Jesus faith shifted to a Greek mystery religion.
While I’m on the topic of those wacky first century Jews, if anyone is interested, a first century superstition may be responsible for the idea that Jesus was dead for a full three days.
The superstition was that a person wasn’t “fully” dead until he was three days dead. It was then that the spirit exited the body, and any hope of recovery was impossible. Prior to the three-day mark, someone might revive. This superstition probably arose because coma, shock and other deathlike altered states of consciousness were not well-understood. However, without modern medicine, anyone in an altered state would probably die in three days, so yes, someone three-days dead was deaddy-dead-dead.
Probably everyone knew a story of someone who had “died” for a few hours and come back to life, so if Jesus was dead for a half a day, for example, there was nothing extra-special about him coming back to life. He had to come back to life after being three days dead, to demonstrate that he was really, really, beyond any doubt, DEAD.
Way I hear it, the actual word used for Jesus’ profession in the bible, tekton, is best translated “journeyman” or “artisan” or “craftsman”, not “engineer” or “architect”.
But was he actually dead for three days? He died on a Friday, yes? And with enough time before sundown that he could at least be carried to the tomb and the tomb could be closed. And he was resurrected before early morning Sunday, when the tomb was found empty. That may be 3 different periods of daylight, but that’s hardly 3 days later.
There is, no doubt, some theological explanation for this. I’m no Biblical scholar, and this only occurred to me a couple of days ago, so I’m sure someone else has already thought of it and explained it, but it does make me wonder.
The Greek word is tekton, but the Aramaic word was “naggar,” which usually gets translated as “craftsman”; it was a stand-by word for “the wisest man in the room,” which is why I compared it to the modern term “rocket scientist.”
No, he wasn’t dead for three days, but everyone says he was. That was my point. Why make such a fuss over his having been dead for three days, when he wasn’t? It’s because “three days dead” means “absolutely and beyond all doubt, not coming back without a miracle, dead.” That’s how dead Jesus needed to be for resurrection theology.
The next thing you’re going to claim is that in the Old Testament Flood, it didn’t rain for 40 days and 40 nights, that the phrase just meant “a long time” or something.
Yes, that was (according to secondary sources) the real litmus test for dead dead. Three days.
There’s something in Jonah, too, about 3 days and three nights in the belly of the whale, just like the messiah was prophesied to be dead, or something. I’m too lazy to look it up right now.
And really, anytime after sundown Friday night would have been sufficient, I think. His friends, aware that Jesus healed people on the sabbath, could have gone to the tomb, heard some groaning, and helped him. Or probably Saturday during the day (I don’t know Jerusalem’s geography well enough or the culture of the times to know how observed or unobserved one would have been at Golgotha on Saturday during daylight). Or anytime after sundown after Saturday would have been fair game - Sabbath’s over at sundown, not at dawn on Sunday.
And these people wouldn’t have been liars, either- they would have believed he was resurrected.
To me, the fact that the gospels awkwardly try to backfit the narrative onto the prophecies is decent evidence that this stuff happened. If I were making up the messiah’s resurrection out of whole cloth, he’d have been in the tomb three days and three nights, and risen on the Sabbath, rather than (how convenient) the dawn after the day when nobody’s supposed to do any work. I’d also not have let my boy enter Jerusalem on a young colt, but something more fitting. And not die humiliated by the crowds and one of the other crucifixees, but smiting everyone who dissed him.
But then again, I’m a wasp. It’s easy to picture Mel Brooks shrugging “yeah, the king came in on an ass, was crucified with a wise-cracking thief, and wha’d’I said - 3 nights? I meant two nights and change. Whaddyagonna do? Let’s sneak some treif while the women ain’t here.”
The Gospels weren’t written in Aramaic, they was written in Greek, and as such, if they wanted to use the same sense as the naggara from the Talmud, there’d be better words to use, I think. But I’m not a Koine scholar.
But I do note that the Wiki article mentions linking tekton and naggara as speculation, and cites a clearer precedent for a link between tekton and kharash, so there’s that.
Also, of course, that part of the Talmud dates to the 3rd century CE, so its relevance to what is meant in the Greek of the Gospels is kind of … limited. You can’t claim they were using some sort of metaphorical sense when they wrote the metaphor 200 years after the fact.
Right, but the point of the OP (I think) is that both those seem to add up to a poor translation from Aramaic - both gospels half-translated an idiom as literal.
If that’s true, if it were an idiom in the original Aramaic (but as far as I know there’s no scholarly belief that ‘Q’ or any other lost source was Aramaic), then neither one was a carpenter.
If someone today said, “Who’s that rocket scientist talking to the crowd?” in a context that wasn’t a space exploration lecture, one thing you can be pretty sure of, the guy’s not literally a rocket scientist.