Joseph was a carpenter. We can extrapolate that the Holy Family were not poor. They belonged to the working class. They were not beggers. Jesus wore quality clothes. They cast lots for his tunic.
The Greek word
tekton has actually a more wider meaning than “carpenter” and could also mean something like a craftsman, a sort of builder/construction engineer/architect. So Joseph and Jesus would not only have been making woodwork, but were also designing and constructing private and public edifices.
We also know that he was not a resident of present day Nazareth. Present day Nazareth was built later. But there was a group of people in that region who were called Nazarenes. They were considered a lower class of Jews. Peter asks, “What good can come from Nazareth?” He’s not referring to a city, but to a community of people.
Nazareth was not a city, at the time of Jesus it was a small village (with an estimated population of somewhere around 200-400 people) literally “off the beaten tracks” since no major road passed through it; the only way one could get there was through winding footpaths on an upward incline from the Jezreel valley.
Outside of the New Testament, Nazareth is rarely mentioned until the Byzantine period (4th century AD). Archaeological excavations have confirmed that the city was only a small agricultural village during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Due to the lack of any valuable mention (and outdated research), some believed that Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century A.D and was either an invention or interpolation by early Christians. However, recent research and archeology is suggesting otherwise. Paul Barnett’s
Behind the Scenes of the New Testament says that:
Despite the Hellenization of the general region and the probability that Greek was known to many people it seems likely that Nazareth remained a conservative Jewish village. After the Jewish war with the Romans from AD 66-70 it was necessary to re-settle Jewish priests and their families. Such groups would only settle in unmixed towns, that is towns without Gentile inhabitants. According to an inscription discovered in 1962 in Caesarea Maritima the priests of the order of Elkalir made their home in Nazareth. This, by the way, is the sole known reference to Nazareth in antiquity, apart from written Christian sources…
(next paragraph) Some scholars had even believed that Nazareth was a fictitious invention of the early Christians; the inscription from Caesarea Maritima proves otherwise.
Another would be John P. Meier’s
A Marginal Jew (citing Eric M. Meyers and James F. Strange’s
Archeology, the Rabbis, & Early Christianity):
Despite Nazareth’s obscurity (which had led some critics to suggest that it was a relatively recent foundation), archeology indicates that the village has been occupied since the 7th century B.C., although it may have experienced a ‘refounding’ in the 2nd century B.C.
