The New Testament tells us little or nothing about the youth and early adulthood years of Jesus. Since we know that St. Joseph was a carpenter by profession, it is logical to assume that the boy Jesus got skilled in the same trade. When St. Joseph passed on, it would have been logical for his son to carry on the family business.
It is therefore likely that by the time he started his public ministry around the age of 30, Jesus would have accumulated sufficient capital to maintain his mother and himself. That is probably why we do not come across him as being stressed for funds at any point of time…
Two things.
(1) Back in those days, it was actually common for the extended family to live together (still is today in a number of cultures). We commonly picture Jesus living with Mary and Joseph
only, but it’s also likely that some uncles and aunts and their kids lived with them. Scripture does mention Jesus’ “brothers and sisters” being in Nazareth with Mary. They could have continued to support the (extended) family even after Jesus went off to do His thing.
Jesus’ family wasn’t dirt poor. They were ‘poor’ in the sense that there was really no “middle class(es)” to speak of - you were either one of the wealthy elite - the haves - or a ‘peasant’ - the have-nots. Jesus’ family were on the well-off side of have-nots: not rich, but not utterly destitute either. We know that Zoker/Zechariah and James, the two grandchildren of one of Jesus’ brothers, Jude who lived during the late 1st century, jointly owned thirty-nine
plethra (depending on how you interpret plethra, it could either be something as small as nine to ten acres or at the maximum, around twenty-five acres) worth of farmland with which they supported themselves. Supposing that that farm the two owned was something handed down within the family, it would have been a bit larger during Joseph’s generation.
Jewish inheritance customs dictated that the eldest son inherited the family home and a double share of the land, while the rest was divided among the other sons. Dividing the property was fine in theory, but as you go further down the family line, the land that will be inherited will get smaller and smaller until the individual plots become too tiny to support even one person. In those cases, the younger siblings had no other choice but to either sell their land for cash and consider other options - work and live someplace else, rent, beg, steal - or continue to live together and keep a smallholding undivided as the joint property.
(2) Even during His ministry, Jesus wasn’t a penniless vagrant. Luke speaks of the women disciples who followed Jesus alongside the male ones and provided for the whole team: “The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.”
