Hmm…you bring a good point there. Pete already gave a good quote from St. Justin Martyr saying pretty much the same thing.
There are some think that two reasons why many believed Jesus made plows and yokes is because He talks quite a number of times about them, the reason being that He probably drew from experience, with the other reason being that the early Christians drew a sort of connection between Jesus’ woodworking with the wood of the cross, just as you realized.
An apocryphal gospel, the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Nag Hammadi
Gospel of Thomas), written between the 2nd to 3rd centuries, already attests to this belief. Note that there are
many versions of the text; I will be using text of the earliest Greek witness we have, known as
Greek Text S:
And he was about eight years old.
And when his father, a carpenter, was making ploughs and yokes, he received a bed from a certain rich man so that he might make it exceedingly great and suitable. And since one of the required pieces was shorter and he did not have a measure, Joseph was distressed, not knowing what to do. The boy came to his father and said, “
Put down the two pieces of wood and align them from your end.” Joseph did just as Jesus said to him. And the boy stood at the other end and took hold of the short piece of wood and stretched it. And he made it equal to the other piece of wood. And he said to his father, “
Do not be distressed but do what you wish.” And Joseph embraced and kissed him saying, “
Blessed am I for God gave me this boy.”
As an aside - prodigalson12 already mentioned it - here’s something in more detail:
Tekton, the word traditionally translated as ‘carpenter’ in the New Testament, actually just meant ‘someone who works with his hands’, i.e. a laborer or a craftsman. If you wanted to say someone was a woodworker or a stonemason, you would have to be more specific: something like ‘a
tekton who works in wood/stone’.
I guess Joseph and Jesus were like that. They were not just woodworkers like how many carpenters are today, but were probably also something like stonemasons or construction workers. In a place where stones were more numerous than high-quality wood - which were mostly imported and are thus unlikely to surface in a small town such as Nazareth (the wood they got at their backyard is enough to make yokes, plows and simple furniture, but that’s about it) - these would have been decent ways to make a living.
Some even think it likely that Jesus was also a boat builder and repairer at one point, citing His close relationship with the fishermen in the Capernaum area.
Of course, if we apply the ‘Jesus drawing from personal experience’ in here, you would note that one of His parables are about two people who built their houses in the rock and on sand. And the whole “
upon this rock I will build my Church” thing.
And yes, the yoke was a rather obvious symbol of servitude and submission, in the negative sense even of oppression (hence ‘breaking the yoke’).