Was Jesus a carpenter?
When Jesus goes to Nazareth, the crowds are amazed by his learning. “Isn’t he the carpenter?” they ask in the NIV translation. The Greek word is tekton, which means artisan or craftsman, and if you look online, you find plenty of people asserting that it should really be translated as mason or stonemason. A colleague asked me about this, and I expressed my opinion that it was much more likely to be a carpenter. There is a lot of scholarship on this, including an excellent piece by Matthew K. Robinson, “‘Is This Not the Τέκτων?’: Revisiting Jesus’s Vocation in Mark 6:3,” in Neotestamentica 55, 2 (2021): 431-445. Robinson concludes, reasonably, that the word was used in various ways with and without qualification, and we can’t really be sure beyond connecting Jesus to the building trades. That is fair enough. But suppose I want to do my own analysis. What do I do, not as a piece of serious academic research, but out of interest? Here are a couple of resources to check immediately. I’ll f...