The truth is nobody knows. Everything is speculation. All the publications you will read are the same, they speculate and all. Even the carpentry part is an assumption, because St. Joseph was a carpenter and the norm in the time is that the children learn the trade from the parent and continue the work, so its probably that Jesus was a carpenter. Even in Scripture he was never referred to as a carpenter himself, but rather then son of a carpenter.
Actually Jesus
is a
tekton - which has a much broader meaning than ‘carpenter’ in modern English, which usually specifically implies a woodworker: it literally means just ‘one who works with his hands’, a general laborer/artisan/craftsman - according to Mark (6:3). It is the parallel pericope in Matthew which has “the son of the
tekton.”
And you’re right: the gospels don’t give us much information. The scholar E.P. ‘Ed’ Sanders once wrote:
The synoptic gospels lack most of the things that we now expect in the story of someone’s life. Looks, personality, character - we know very little. When it comes to the other figures besides Jesus, we are really in the dark. Pilate, curiously, is given touches of character by Matthew and John, but for the most part the other actors are very flat. Peter, we learn, was a little wishy-washy. What was John like? James? We do not know. What about the Pharisees? They appear in a group, denounce Jesus, sometimes are denounced in turn, and disappear. What were they up to? Were they all equally hostile towards Jesus? Where did they go when they disappeared? If they thought that Jesus’ disciples were breaking the sabbath law (Mark 2.24), why did they not lay a charge by reporting them to a priest (who might have fined them by requiring that each bring a sin offering, two birds, when next in Jerusalem)?
Many readers today do not realize how episodic the synoptic gospels are, since Christians have had almost 2000 years to build up a more novelistic view of the events and people in the gospels. Books have been written, movies made, explanations offered. On Sundays numerous priests, pastors and teachers retell some aspect of the gospel account, adding personality and motive. Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, is often depicted as a frustrated zealot who wanted Jesus to lead a revolution, who thought of himself as a great man in Jesus’ kingdom, and who was bitterly angry when he learned that Jesus wanted another sort of kingdom. This gives the story colour and drama. There is nothing in the gospels about Judas’ ambitions at all. Perhaps he realized that Jesus was a marked man and decided to get out when he still could, while also making a profit. One guess is as good as another. Similarly Mary Magdalene has appealed enormously to people who have imagined all sorts of romantic things about her: she had been a prostitute, she was beautiful, she was in love with Jesus, she fled to France carrying his child. For all we know, on the basis of our sources, she was eighty-six, childless, and keen to mother unkempt young men.
This is part of the reason why many apocryphal literature were written Throughout the ages Christians have had the hunger for more: more information about the characters we hear about in the pages of Scripture. (For the record I think that apocryphal gospels are the ancient prototype of modern fanfiction.
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