Was Jesus (Really) a Carpenter? Maybe Not!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Was Jesus a carpenter? The image of Jesus as a humble carpenter has become deeply ingrained in Christian tradition, exemplifying his connection to everyday working people and his unassuming origins. But how solid is the biblical foundation for this familiar portrayal? What did the term “carpenter” mean in the ancient world? Could it just as easily refer to another kind of manual labor if we explore Greek translations? And what does Jesus’ possible trade tell us about his social status and the world he inhabited?

In this article I’ll examine the evidence — biblical, linguistic, and archaeological — to explore what it really means to say Jesus was a carpenter, and whether that title is supported by the historical record.

Where in the Bible Does It Say Jesus was a Carpenter?

Unfortunately, our evidence for Jesus being a carpenter is extremely scanty, comprised of only two terse references, in fact. Mark, our earliest written Gospel, gives us the clearest evidence, in 6:2-3. In these verses, Jesus and his disciples visit Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth. On the Sabbath, Jesus goes into the synagogue and teaches, prompting amazement and resentment from the locals among whom he had been raised:

The shock and indignance of Jesus’ hometown crowd seems to indicate two things. First, they did not remember him as being particularly wise or impressive when he lived there as a child and young man. They even name his family members as if to say, “He was just a normal local boy. What happened to him?”

Second, they remember him as having a particular profession, a carpenter in most English translations (more on that later). The fact the locals are surprised that a carpenter can be so extraordinary seems to indicate people in that profession were not expected to be sages or religious teachers. In other words, carpentry was not considered a high-status job.

Scholars know that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written at least a decade after Mark, used Mark as a principal source, changing some details and often adding new ones. In this case, Matthew 13:54-56 tells the same story of Jesus being rejected by the people of his hometown, but changes slightly how they remember him:

How do we account for the difference between “carpenter” in Mark and “the carpenter’s son” in Matthew? One possibility is that while Mark felt comfortable saying that Jesus had been a carpenter, traditions about Jesus tended to exalt him more and more over the years. So, by the time Matthew was written, it seemed impossible for Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God, to have such a humble profession himself. Either way, in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan notes that, in some ways, the two assertions amount to the same thing, since in the ancient world, sons almost always did the same work as their fathers.

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These verses in Mark and Matthew are all the biblical evidence there is for Jesus as a carpenter. Luke and John don’t talk about it, nor does Paul or any other NT author. For this reason, in order to determine the likelihood that Jesus really was a carpenter before beginning his ministry, we’ll need to do some historical work, first on the etymology of the original Greek word translated as carpenter and then on the economy of ancient Roman Palestine.

Was Jesus a Carpenter or Something Else?

The biblical Greek word usually translated as carpenter is tektōn. While “carpenter” is certainly one possible translation, there are others, opening up possibilities for what Jesus’ early profession might have been. A look into the Cambridge Greek Lexicon shows us that while tektōn can mean “a builder in wood, or a joiner,” it can also mean “a skilled worker in other materials, a craftsman.” This could include being a stonemason or even a sculptor. While it’s unlikely (as we will see) that someone raised in Nazareth would be a professional sculptor, it is entirely possible he was a stonemason.

However, whether we translate the word as carpenter or stonemason, we should be wary of importing modern ideas about those professions onto their ancient counterparts. In the modern world, a carpenter is a skilled, lucrative, and respected middle-class profession. But Crossan says this wasn’t the case in Jesus’ time and place. He notes that in Roman-controlled Palestine, economic inequality was brutal, and that the social distinction between rich and poor often meant distinguishing between those who had to work with their hands (the poor) and those who didn’t (the elite).

It's not that carpenters and stonemasons were not skilled. It’s just that in the ancient hierarchy of skills, manual labor was always less valued by the elite, those in control, than mental labor. In other words, carpenters and stonemasons generally lived in poverty, a hand-to-mouth existence. To understand this further, let’s look at the economy of ancient Palestine and, specifically, that of a tiny hamlet like Nazareth.

It’s About the Economy!

In The New Testament World, Bruce J. Malina writes that Palestine and other Roman provinces were “a nearly perfect example of what anthropologists call classic peasant society: a set of villages socially bound up with administrative preindustrial cities.” In his book Jesus and the Peasants, Douglas Oakman defines what this meant:

So peasants were those who labored constantly but could never get ahead because so much of the fruits of their labor were given, usually through taxation, to wealthy landowners who typically lived in large cities such as Jerusalem. And as we’ll see, Nazareth was most definitely a small village, not a city.

First-century Palestine was a typical agrarian society. In Christian Origins: A People's History Of Christianity, Steven Friesen explains that this means wealth was almost completely based on land ownership and that most of the land was controlled by a tiny number of elite families. The wealth of these families also meant they had undue influence on the politics of the region, allowing them to profit from taxation of the peasantry as well.

Friesen estimates that 40% of people in the Roman provinces, including Palestine, lived “at subsistence level and often below minimum level to sustain life.” Among those in this situation, Friesen places small families of farmers, laborers (skilled and unskilled), artisans (such as carpenters or stonemasons), and fishermen. If indeed Jesus was a carpenter or stonemason, he and his family were barely able to keep their heads above water.

In a rural village like Nazareth, were carpentry or masonry common professions? In Archaeology, the Rabbis, & Early Christianity, Eric Meyers and James Strange note that Nazareth in Jesus’ time was a village of only 400-500 people. It was so small, in fact, that it’s not even mentioned in Jewish sources until the 3rd century CE, according to an article by James Strange in the Anchor Bible Dictionary.

While many people in small villages worked as fishermen, Nazareth was 23 miles from the Mediterranean Sea and 19 miles from the Sea of Galilee, making it all but impossible to commute daily on foot. Instead, people from Nazareth would probably have been either artisans or workers on surrounding farms.

While people have speculated for years that Jesus did his early carpentry in the nearby city of Sepphoris, a significantly larger and more Roman-influenced town than Nazareth, recent archeology puts that conclusion in doubt. Archeologist Ken Dark writes that the Galilean region which included Nazareth “was unusual for the strength of its anti-Roman sentiment and/or the strength of its Jewish identity.” Furthermore, he notes that the archeological evidence shows that it’s likely that “there was no close connection between Nazareth and Sepphoris in the Early Roman period.”

If Jesus was indeed a carpenter, what kind of work would he have done in and around Nazareth? In her book Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament, Sabine R. Heubner writes that ancient carpenters made many items for local people, including wagons, yokes for oxen, oil mills, and boats. These would have been useful for the Galilean peasantry and did not require any contact with Roman forces or culture.

Heubner also says that while it’s difficult to know how much a carpenter was generally paid, since elite writers paid little attention to the lower classes, an ancient lease agreement for an oil mill shows that the carpenter that worked on it received 50 denarii a month working for an elite owner. When working for poor farmers or tradespeople, though, carpenters might have merely traded their services for goods or services they needed.

In other words, in a village as small as Nazareth, it is plausible that Jesus could have grown up to be a carpenter. In addition, since carpentry was not a high-status profession in the ancient world, it seems difficult to imagine that the author of Mark would invent this detail for Jesus. Instead, it’s likely that memories of Jesus’ humble origins had long circulated and thus, his early life as a tradesman was common knowledge.

Some common misconceptions are that Jesus was a fisherman or shepherd. We already established earlier that it was unlikely he was a fisherman due to  geographic reasons. Although the New Testament calls him “the Good Shepherd (John 10:11),” this is a metaphorical title and there is no evidence that Jesus himself was a shepherd.

Conclusion

Was Jesus a carpenter? Our analysis began with the unfortunate fact that there are only two references in the entire New Testament indicating this possibility. In Mark, he is called “the carpenter” by the people among whom he grew up. In Matthew, this is changed to “the carpenter’s son.” However, that is an almost meaningless distinction since the son of a carpenter would, in normal circumstances, have been a carpenter as well. What other evidence is there, then, that Jesus could have been a carpenter?

Etymologically, the Greek word translated as carpenter — tektōn — denoted a skilled builder who could have worked with wood, but also possibly with stone or other materials. Both carpenters and stonemasons were ubiquitous in the ancient world, so either is possible as a correct translation.

While we may think of carpenters as skilled, highly-respectable professionals, in the ancient world they would have been consigned by the elite to that massive lower echelon of the economy reserved for those who worked with their hands. If Jesus was a carpenter, he was not a member of the elite. Instead, he and his family would have lived at a subsistence level.

Finally, having seen that Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, was a tiny village located far from large bodies of water, it is likely that a young man would have been involved in a trade such as carpentry or masonry in order to make a living. We can never be entirely certain, but there is no reason not to believe Jesus was a carpenter before his ministry began.