Q. We’re using your study guide to biblical wisdom literature in our Sunday School class. We’re currently studying the book of James and we have a question about its author, the half-brother of Jesus. Would he have been a carpenter too?
The place to begin answering this question is by asking whether Jesus was actually a carpenter himself. Mark records in his gospel that when Jesus returned to Nazareth and taught in the synagogue there, the hometown crowds were amazed at his wisdom and power and asked, “Where did this man get these things? . . . Isn’t this the tektōn?” In Matthew‘s version of the same episode, the people ask, “Isn’t this the son of the tektōn?”
In these cases the Greek term tektōn is traditionally translated “carpenter,” and this has led to popular pictures of Jesus at work with his father in a carpenter’s shop, building tables and chairs for friends and neighbors. But the term actually has a broader meaning. In classical texts in can refer to a worker in wood (for example, someone who makes plows and yokes for farming). But it can also refer to a “joiner,” that is, a construction worker who puts together buildings out of wood. In other texts it describes workers in stone, i.e. masons, and in rarer cases it even describes a metal-worker.
So we should really understand tektōn to mean something like “construction worker.” This gives us a very different picture of Jesus from the one that has him working in the family carpentry business. Jesus most likely took construction jobs wherever he could find them, such as over in the larger city of Sepphoris near Nazareth. He was, in effect, a day laborer. This helps us appreciate, for one thing, how Jesus shared all aspects of our human condition during his incarnation, including uncertainty over employment.
But knowing the broader meaning of the term tektōn also helps us appreciate that Jesus may have been regarded as socially inferior by many in his home town because of his occupation. The word seems to have those associations. For example, according to Walter Bauer’s Greek-English Lexicon, Aristoxenus says that the father of Sophocles was a tektōn. But the Life of Sophocles rejects this idea and suggests instead that the father may have had tektōnes among his slaves. So the occupation was considered lower class and perhaps even dishonorable.
This gives a more dismissive and condescending ring to the comments Jesus heard from the townspeople when he returned to Nazareth. But this is another way in which Jesus “made himself nothing” and took on the “nature of a servant” when he came to earth, as Paul says in Philippians.
And as for his half-brother James, if the father and the eldest brother were each a tektōn, then it’s likely that this was a landless family of day laborers and that all of the brothers would have worked in this same profession. One can easily imagine people from Nazareth hearing the wisdom teaching that was later collected in the book of James and wondering similarly, “Where did this man get these things? . . . Isn’t this the tektōn?”
Good Question 