Hi outhouse, please let me answer some of this....
The NT mentions his outer group of 70 disciples. It also mentions his followers in general. It also mentions his followers vin thousands, but that may be hyperbole.
But this is all about his life before his ministry, and he probably had no disciples at that time. ??
None. correct.
We really don't know much, and educated guesses are all we can go on. There are varied opinions and scholars do interpret this differently.
They did quite well, and there reported deaths show that their life expectancy was higher than, for instance, the essenes, whose life expectancy was up to 40 years, as shown by analysis of the bodies found art Qumran.
And so they must have had adequate food and shelter.
You cannot compare the Zealots to Essenes, hell comparing the Zealots to the Pharisees is tough because of some of the similarities. I view the Pharisees as a wide diverse sect as well.
They did not do quite well. You have to think of what Herod's were doing to pay for the rebuilding of Sepphoris and Tiberious.
Many of Jesus parables were for the poor and oppressed. He speaks of hunger and empty bellies.
They paid them almost nothing for labor, the NT has parables about greedy farm owners, Herods forced people off their land to take it to feed his cities. The fishing industry regulated to some extent. 10,000-15,000 people flooded into Sepphoris while excavations there show they were Jewish, these were not typical traditional Jews in Galilee, these were Hellenistic Jews. The real Jews worked in what amounts to forced labor just to survive. Nazareth and Capernaum were poor places. While Nazareth little is known, they did live in crude fieldstone houses and its my opinion it was sort of a work camp for the rebuilding of Sepphoris
Is this Crosson? Oh dear.....
More then a handful of scholars actually.
Johnathon Reed, Marvin Meyers, John Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Lawrence Shiffman
If he got food and shelter and gifts from grateful families, then he earned from his work..... and before his ministry started he probably traveled as a healer and social advisor on his own, because that way the villages would be much more welcoming.
Free health care for a few pieces of bread dipped in vinegar or olive oil, and possibly some lentels. Its stated by a few scholars above, he would have had his disciples go into a village on market day and sort of set him up stating a great teacher is coming, a while later Jesus pops into town, and has to yell to gather a very small crowd to get his message across hoping to reach out to at least one person who could feed his crew. They did not charge for healing, so it wasn't work.
His message of peaceful resistance against the Romans would have been well accepted, and since he was not under Roman control, he was flying under the Roman radar so to speak. That changed when he went to Passover.
Scholars..... have no idea where he worked, probably not at Sepphoris!
No
Its possible. Wanting to and having too, just to survive, are two different things.
He loved the people of the waterfront.... he didn't recruit from Sepphoris, and if he was a travelling healer then what was he doing with carpentry at Sepphoris?
Tekton does not mean carpentry, there was little to no wood in Nazareth. More of his parables speak of what a stone worker would say, more so then a wood worker.
Did he help build houses or stone fences for courtyards out of fieldstones? probably so.
No sense there. He may well have been making stones and wooden equipment for the fishermen....stuff they couldn't make themselves, and flax working tools etc, and slowed that down to nothing as his skill with healing grew, and his reputation flourished.
We really don't know enough to get into to much detail.
These scholars are good at scrutinising documents and archeology, and then they start telling us about what they think, which can be quite as daft as anything that we come up with. Academics....no common sense, little initiative.....crazy ideas, ............. well, that's me being aggressive about them!
The trick is after a while, you see a pattern of "their" thought that takes them to their opinions. Its finding the bias in each so you can hopefully find the truth that makes you personally happy given the lack of information.
I do like Vermes and Sanders, though.... so far
So do I
I think both give great foundations to work form. I do find both of their work to be outdated in many areas.
Its my goal to investigate as much as possible in the socioeconomic divisions of Hellenism in Sepphoris. Johnothan Reed has his view that Sepphoris was a Jewish city with a Hellenistic veneer in the first century. I don't think that fully addresses what we see.
