Blue Collar (Part 1)

 

Blue Collar

(Part 1)

Blue Collar (Part 1) - Audio/Visual

Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us? (Mark 6:3)

When John Everett Millais began the painting that would launch his career as one of 19th-century England's most prominent artists, he needed props. He envisioned a young Jesus surrounded by his parents, Joseph and Mary, in their working-class carpenter's shop. It would be a new kind of scene: serene and overindulged with religious symbolism yet done in a style that no one would be expecting.

But Millais had a problem. The 20-year-old was not a working-class man. His parents were old money and he lived in Bedford Square, one of the swankiest neighborhoods in central London. He couldn’t simply wander over to his father's garage and sketch what he saw. So, he set out into the nearby cobblestone streets for inspiration. A woodworker on Oxford Street let Millais recreate his shop on canvas in painstaking detail – work bench, wood shavings and all. A butcher gave the painter two sheep's heads that he replicated in fields visible through the holy family's doorway.

The resulting painting, Christ in the House of His Parents, was completed in 1851. It placed a red-headed Christ at the center of a poor family with shabby clothes and shoeless, dirty feet. And it shocked England. For some, the image was so realistically ordinary it bordered on blasphemy. Charles Dickens hated it. Queen Victoria heard such an uproar about the painting that she had it brought to Buckingham Palace so she could see it for herself. People objected to almost everything Millais painted in that carpenter's shop. The one thing no one questioned, however, was Millais’ assumption that Joseph ran a carpenter's shop in the first place.

Few would today, either. Even people who know little else of Jesus grasp the idea that he, like his father, was a carpenter. From "My boss is a Jewish carpenter" bumper stickers, to the names of woodworking businesses, to church signs, to best-selling apologetics books, Jesus-as-carpenter is ubiquitous; it’s everywhere. Johnny Cash wrote a song about it in 1970, imagining how well-built the Savior's furniture must have been, i.e., Jesus Was a Carpenter. Mel Gibson hinted that Jesus invented the modern table and chairs for a rich man in his film The Passion of the Christ. ("Tall table, tall chairs!") And there’s obvious poetry in the image of a carpenter, none of which has been lost on countless lyricists, i.e., a man begins his calling with lumber and nails, and ultimately fulfills it nailed to a cross.

Unfortunately, carpentry, as we think of it, was not Jesus' trade. It is a misperception born of the imprecision inherent in the Bible’s translation, and the ethnocentricity of 17th-century England. We have long known this, but a more accurate story has never permeated the cultural mainstream. and our understanding of the life of Christ has suffered for it. If you had to surmise Jesus' trade based solely on his teaching illustrations and vocabulary, you might make some informed guesses. He spoke constantly of agriculture: crops, weeds, farmers, fields, seeds and fruit. Working the land was the primary vocation in first-century Nazareth, and agricultural examples connected with nearly all audiences. But the biblical text, early church tradition and even apocryphal writings agree: Jesus was not a farmer.

Jesus also spoke of fishing. At least a third of his disciples were fishermen. It's not groundless then to imagine he had something to do with the fishing economy. But when Jesus told the fishermen to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, they tried not to scoff at his outsider's lack of knowledge of their profession. (Luke 5:4-5) Of course, the surprise would later be theirs. (v. 6) Curiously, one trade Jesus never spoke of was carpentry. He hardly mentioned wood at all.

In all four Gospels, Jesus only referred to wood as a material twice. In the first instance he asked, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" (Matt. 7:3) The second is a reference to a green or dry tree in Luke 23:31, but it's not especially relevant to woodcraft. So, for a supposed carpenter, we have only one mention of workable wood from Jesus.

Even so, that plank from the Sermon on the Mount is sometimes invoked in connection with Jesus and carpentry. However, it is not the kind of wood a furniture-builder or toolmaker would have used. In the Greek, as many hypocrisy-focused sermons have noted for emphasis, the kind of planks Jesus spoke of were thick timbers meant to support roofs in larger building projects. But it's not all that surprising that a Galilean didn't talk much about wood. Galilee had very few trees, and the trees it did have were small. Beams and timbers had to be imported from surrounding countries.

And only the biggest-budget projects – like temples and government buildings – could incorporate these kinds of planks. In 1 Kings 5, for example, Solomon went to extreme lengths to acquire timber for the construction of the temple. He negotiated with the Phoenician king of Tyre and Sidon, sending Israelite men by the tens of thousands to learn how to cut down trees and then to actually do the work of cutting because "we have no one so skilled in felling timber as the Sidonians." (v. 6) The Israelites had to go abroad precisely because they did not have the trees locally. Suffice it to say, it's hard to be a carpenter in a place with so little wood.

Jesus may not have spoken much of wood, but there is one material about which he could not stop talking: stone. This, Jesus and his contemporaries had in abundance, and they built with it. Jesus spoke of it constantly, particularly of its use in large building projects: towers, foundations, cornerstones, rocks, walls, millstones, temple stones and winepresses. When Jesus reached for a metaphor or symbol, stones and building projects filled his vocabulary toolbox. If those praising him were silent, even the stones would cry out. (Luke 19:40) The one who hears his words and does them is like the person who dug deep and laid their foundation on the rock. (Matt. 7:24) "Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” (v. 9; emphasis added)

His disciple’s, Simon, nickname was not Cedar or Timber, but Cephas in Aramaic, and Peter in Greek, which both mean “rock”: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Matt. 16:18) And when Jesus chose to cite the Jewish Scriptures about his mission on earth, stone came to the foreground: "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." (Mark 12:10, from Psalm 118:22) Jesus' imagination was saturated with stones, rocks, building projects and foundations. It was nearly devoid of wood. It's an odd thing, then, that our translations call him a carpenter. So, did we get it wrong?

Well, sort of.

The New Testament records Jesus' vocation only once, in Mark 6:3: "Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?" The word carpenter is translated from the Greek word tektōn, a word that lives on for us in English words like architect (literally, "chief builder"). Scholarly dictionaries identify tektōn as "one who uses various materials (wood, stone and metal) in building," and "one who makes, produces" and "one who constructs, i.e., builder, carpenter." So, from a cultural perspective, the vocation of Joseph and Jesus would have been understood as a “builder,” which would have included all aspects of building including materials such as stone, wood, mud thatch, plaster, tiles, nails, etc.

The term tektōn was never limited to woodworking; it simply designated a constructive craftsman. In other words, the carpenter interpretation has been overused and the most accurate term for Jesus' occupation would have been a "builder-craftsman." And as a rule, craftsmen – handymen, if you will – tended to use materials that worked, that were readily available and that were not prohibitively expensive. In Nazareth, that meant stone.

An early church tradition recorded by Justin Martyr has that Jesus made and repaired plows and yokes, which were made of both wood and metal. It certainly fell to the local tektōn to do this kind of work, but you couldn’t make a living at that, at least alone. In a small agrarian village with a few hundred inhabitants, there simply wouldn’t be enough need for those kinds of implements. The local tektōn made his living in bigger projects, supplemented by smaller side tasks, just as a building contractor would today. In fact, ancient translations recognized the broader use of this term as a "builder" who would be skilled with numerous materials. With one influential translation, however, that was all but forgotten.

In 1611, when the King James translators arrived at the word tektōn, they saw that the Greek term clearly meant something like a craftsman or builder. But they had two things working against them. For one, their knowledge of Greek was primarily classical Greek – the older Greek of Homer and Plato that developed in Greece. And Greece had trees. Mark, though, was not steeped in the Greek classics. His use of tektōn was likely colored by the Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Old Testament – which is cited more often in the New Testament than the original Hebrew. In the Septuagint, tektōn is used broadly to stand in for the Hebrew and Aramaic word hārāš, a general term for a builder or craftsman. After all, when the townspeople in Mark 6:3 called Jesus a tektōn, they were actually speaking Aramaic which the Gospel writers later translated to Greek when they recorded their histories of Jesus. So, in Aramaic, they would have called Jesus an hārāš. And whether the builder was using stone or metal or wood, the Septuagint translated it as tektōn.

The second disadvantage for the early English translators was less technical. It was simply, well, England. A shortcoming of the KJV translation – as with most Western scholarship before the era of the passenger jet – was that most scholars never set foot in the biblical lands. They never saw how few trees grew in Galilee. In England, trees lined the entire country, and wood – not stone – was the readiest material for building. From Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to the rudest peasant hut, the English built with a lot of wood. So, given their material culture, English builders were mostly carpenters. Just as an Ethiopian painting of Jesus looks Ethiopian, and a 20th-century Swedish Jesus looks like he belongs on an Abba album cover, so different peoples imagine that Jesus' material culture resembled their own.

To be continued….