The scenario I've just outlined is large and complicated, but the evidence warrants a large and complicated explanation. It's not the sort of situation the early Christians are likely to have made up if they were free to have made up whatever they wanted. When the pregnancy is premarital, Mary lives in Nazareth rather than Bethlehem, Joseph is in Nazareth shortly before the wedding in spite of having a home in Bethlehem, etc., the early Christians probably were operating under significant historical constraints that prevented them from giving an account that was as simple and easy as they would have preferred.
See here for an acknowledgment of the significance of one of my points about Nazareth from Christopher Hitchens. Bart Ehrman has gone as far as to refer to Jesus' upbringing in Nazareth as "certain": "Little can be known about Jesus' early life, but one thing that can be said for certain is that he was raised in Nazareth, the home village of Joseph and Mary." (The New Testament [New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 269)
Perhaps you have covered this, and though not overly relevant, where do you think Jesus was in terms of the social strata during his childhood? I have heard things across the board (though not rich).
ReplyDeleteI haven't studied the subject much, and the comments I've come across over the years have varied a lot. Luke 2:24 is sometimes brought up to argue that the family was poor, and the lack of accommodations in Bethlehem earlier in Luke 2 will sometimes come up. But whatever we make of Luke 2:24, it occurs early in Jesus' life, just after his parents' marriage, so there was a lot of potential for circumstances to have improved after that. And I've argued elsewhere, like here, that Joseph lived in Bethlehem and that Jesus' birth occurred in a family home among Joseph's relatives. See here regarding the careers of Joseph and Jesus. There was a lot of work for builders in the Nazareth area. The family wasn't rich, but they weren't among the poorest people in their culture either. They were somewhere in the middle (though the middle in that context was much worse off than something like the middle class in the United States). One complicating factor is that Joseph seems to have died between the time when Jesus was twelve and the start of his public ministry, but we don't have much to go by in judging just when Joseph died in that timeframe. The timing would have had a significant effect on the family's financial status. And that further underscores the point I made about Luke 2:24, that a family's financial status can change significantly over time. It's likely that the family was somewhere in the broad middle range - above slaves, the homeless, and such, but not among the wealthy - and at different points along that spectrum at different points in time. Given factors like Luke 2:24, the size of the family, Joseph's early death, the nature of his and Jesus' careers, Jesus' reception in Nazareth and Capernaum, and his lack of resources during his public ministry, I'd place him and his family on the lower side of the middle range of their culture.
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