What do we know of Jesus’ family life? What is to be said of those the Gospels call ‘his brothers and sisters’? Could he have not been married? Did he join the clergy? How did he come in conflict with the priests? James Mc Polin SJ tries answer these questions.
In a village like Nazareth, with some 1,600 people, the extended family of Jesus made up a sizeable proportion of a population where many people would be distantly related by blood or marriage.
Brothers and sisters
There is mention in the Gospels of four ‘brothers’ of Jesus (James, Joses, Judas and Simon) and some ‘sisters’. The common teaching of the Catholic Church is that these ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ of Jesus were really cousins and that Mary remained a virgin. The common view in Protestant Churches is that they were biological children of Mary and Joseph.
Mary and Joseph
The firstborn son followed the trade of the father. Scripture does not tell us anything about the age of Mary and Joseph when they got married but the traditional (and most likely) explanation is that Joseph had died by the time Jesus began his public ministry.
Near the beginning of the public ministry John’s Gospel presents Jesus descending from Cana to Capernaum with an entourage that comprised ‘his mother, his brothers and his disciples’.
The absence of any mention of Joseph in such an all-inclusive group is striking. Granted that we do not know how old Joseph was when Jesus was born, and granted that life expectancy was much lower in the ancient world than in Europe today, there is nothing improbable about Joseph’s death occurring before Jesus reached the age of roughly thirty to thirty five.
Jesus’ marital status
On the marital status of Jesus, the New Testament is silent. It has been suggested that celibacy as a lifestyle for the ordinary religious Jew, and especially for a teacher or rabbi, would have been quite unthinkable at the time of Jesus, that the picture of Jesus as a perpetual celibate is the product of later Christian theology and that, though it is not mentioned that Jesus was married, it has to be presumed.
Against that, the silence of the New Testament about a supposed wife of Jesus, and the absence of any mention of children, is very significant. It is not by accident that the Gospels occasionally say or intimate that some of Jesus’ disciples left their wives and/or children while never speaking of that precise sacrifice in his own case. Judaism did have a place for celibacy, for example, in Qumran where some Essenes lived celibate lives.
There is a tradition that Moses, Jeremiah and John the Baptist also lived celibate lives. Besides, it is possible that Jesus is referring to his own, total self-consuming commitment to proclaiming and realising the kingdom of God in the words: ‘There are eunuchs such as make themselves eunuchs because of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:12).
A peasant family
It is commonly accepted that Jesus was a Palestinian peasant. A peasant has been described as a ‘rural cultivator’ who raises crops and livestock in the countryside’. A peasant is not the same type of person as the modern Irish farmer who may be simply an agricultural entrepreneur who is engaged in a particular type of business to make a profit in the market. He does not run an enterprise in the modern economic sense, but a household. The term ‘peasant’ denotes someone tilling the soil and raising livestock.
But in the Gospels Jesus is nowhere portrayed as a farmer. Of course, Jesus and the rest of his family may have been engaged in part-time farming of some plot of land. The family unit would have provided at least some of its food from farming. This may help explain why a good deal of the imagery in Jesus’ parables is taken from agriculture rather than from the workshop.
In what sense, then, was Jesus a peasant? He was economically connected with and in some sense supported by an agrarian society. He certainly was a member of a peasant society.
A poor carpenter?
Still, Jesus did not live as a worker on some great estate. He lived in a village (Nazareth) of between roughly 1,600 and 2,000 people and most of his income probably came from plying a trade among them. Only once it is mentioned (Mk.6:3) that he was a carpenter or woodworker (tekton). It was a calling involving a broad range of skills and tools. Some of his work would have been carpentry in the narrow sense of that word, i.e. woodwork in constructing parts of houses. Doors, door frames and locks or bolts were often made of wood. Beyond carpentry in this sense Jesus would have made various pieces of furniture such as beds, chests for storage, ploughs and yokes for animals.
In one sense, therefore, Jesus certainly belonged to the poor who had to work hard for a living. Jesus, the woodworker from Nazareth, was poor by modern Irish standards, though relative to his own society he was no poorer than the majority of Galileans. In Galilee the rich were a very small group that would have included Herod Antipas, his powerful court officials, the owners of larger estates and highly successful merchants.
Not knowing the destitution of the dispossessed farmer, the city beggar, the rural day labourer or the rural slave, Jesus was not at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. While we ourselves would find the economic and political realities of Herod Antipas’ Galilee unbearable, they were on the whole preferable to the chaotic last days of Herod the Great, the violent first days of the Jewish War in the late sixties, or the sense of oppression by foreigners that was aroused by the presence of the Roman governor (Pilate) and the Roman military in Judea.
Strange as it may seem, Jesus grew up and conducted much of his ministry in an uncommonly peaceful environment (Galilee), sheltered from the turbulent areas of Palestinian life. However galling the Gospels’ silence about Jesus’ hidden years, the silence may have a very simple explanation: nothing much happened.
Jesus, the Jewish layman
It is important to underline one aspect of Jesus’ life that tends to be overlooked: it is the simple fact that he was born a Jewish layman, conducted his ministry as a Jewish layman, and died a Jewish layman.
There is no reliable historical tradition that he was of priestly descent. He belonged to the category of ‘laity’ at a time in Israel’s history, when priests, and not the laity, controlled the levers of power whether in Jerusalem or Qumran. By being just a simple layman from an obscure town in the countryside of lower Galilee, Jesus was already marginal to the holders of religious power when he set foot in Jerusalem.
Jesus and religious authorities
Jesus dialogues with the religious authorities (Pharisees, Scribes, Sadducees) but there is greater hostility between him and the Sadducees (made up mostly of the priests and lay aristocracy in Jerusalem).
Jesus was on a collision course with the Jerusalem priesthood; he was a Galilean nobody in conflict with Jerusalem aristocrats; he was a poor peasant in conflict with the urban rich; he was a charismatic wonder-worker in conflict with priests very much concerned about preserving the central institutions of their religion.
But underneath these conflicts lay another conflict: Jesus was a religiously committed layman who seemed to be threatening the power of an entrenched group of priests. That, and other facets of his background, contributed to the final clash in Jerusalem. That Jesus was a layman was not just a neutral datum. It played a role in the drama of his life and death.
Jesus and the priests
It is important to emphasise Jesus’ status as a layman because many Christians are accustomed to the image of Jesus the priest or the ‘great high priest’. This image we owe to a later writer of the first century, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. However, the image of Jesus as the high priest in this Epistle in no way contradicts the Gospel presentation of Jesus as a Jewish layman.
Reading the Gospels we must remember that Jesus, the layman who confronts the authorities of Jerusalem, had no official basis for his own authority. Nor should we be too quick to stereotype Galileans as obstreperous rebels who were unconcerned about worship in the Jerusalem temple. Galilean Jews were faithful to their duty of pilgrimage to the temple. But reverence for the central place of worship and its cult by no means dictated an uncritical stance toward rich and worldly families in Jerusalem.
Conclusion
Jesus in Nazareth led a hidden life in the sense that he was ordinary and his ordinariness included the ordinary status of a layman, with no special credentials or power base.
As a Galilean layman he would have seemed at first negligible to the high priestly families in Jerusalem – until he began to appear dangerous. Jesus’ frequent visits to Jerusalem during his ministry (especially in John’s Gospel) may have fuelled a mutual and rapidly increasing hostility between the Jerusalem priests and the Galilean layman.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (February 2002), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
