What language did Jesus speak?

[outhouse]

Meanwhile ...... is a masterful display of agenda driven speculation, non sequitur, and irrelevance.

im sorry bud

but Meyers, Crosson, Borg, Reed all support this without any agenda, backed by archeology and anthropology


what you posted was backed by wishful opologetics

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

im sorry bud

Yes ...

but Meyers, Crosson, Borg, Reed all support this ...

References? I have a pretty substantial library at home - no 'Crosson' or 'Meyer' but I do have Crossan, Meier, and Borg, along with Ehrman, Mack, Sanders, Wright, Vermes, and a few others.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Parenthetically ...

As Joseph may have done stonework and manual labor rather than being a craftsman with wood, this would have put him in the lowest of the lower class. Therefore, the family Jesus grew up in would not have owned land, but they would have been subsistence farmers accustomed to menial labor.

... would be an irrelevant non sequitur even if it came from Aristotle. That someone may be manual laborer does not insure that one is a subsistence farmer nor does it preclude one from being bilingual.

And be honest: have you actually read Read's work?

 

[outhouse]

Yes ...


References? I have a pretty substantial library at home - no 'Crosson' or 'Meyer' but I do have Crossan, Meier, and Borg, along with Ehrman, Mack, Sanders, Wright, Vermes, and a few others.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

here ya go

John Dominic Crossan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Crossan suggests Jesus was an illiterate "Jewish Cynic" from a landless peasant background, initially a follower of John the Baptist

An Interview with Jonathan L. Reed

Think of his disciples--Galilean peasants--

But I wouldn't want to minimize how dramatic an impact Sepphoris would have had on a peasant like Jesus

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

You wouldn't happen to have an actual book reference would you? You know: title, page, etc.

Never mind.

 

[tumbleweed41]

Think of his disciples--Galilean peasants--

Peter, John, James, and Andrew were fishermen.
Mathew was a tax collector.
And we can assume Judas, as the disciples treasurer, was an educated scribe or bookkeeper.

And your use of the term peasants only further reveals your agenda.

 

[outhouse]

Peter, John, James, and Andrew were fishermen.
Mathew was a tax collector.
And we can assume Judas, as the disciples treasurer, was an educated scribe or bookkeeper.

And your use of the term peasants only further reveals your agenda.

my agenda???

that was a direct quote from Reed

and according to scholars fishermen on Galilee were peasants.



No for what its worth, since many here refuse modern scholars in favor of apologetics

Before you trash Reed, maybe you could produce someone with better anthropology and archeology in Galilee ???

Jonathan Reed academic credentials

Jonathan L. Reed is Professor of Religion at the University of La Verne in La Verne, California. A specialist in early Christianity and the sayings gospel Q, he earned his Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California, where he studied with Burton Mack.
Reed is the author of the HarperCollins’ Visual Guide to New Testament (2007), Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence (2000) and co-author with John Dominic Crossan of In Search of Paul (2004) and Excavating Jesus (2001).
He serves as the Director of the Sepphoris Acropolis Excavations in Israel and was previously square supervisor for the Israel Antiquities Authority Excavations in Capernaum, Israel. He was also an Instructor and as Associate Director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate School, and a Guest Lecturer in the theological faculty and Director of the University of La Verne Study Abroad Program at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany.
The recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Presidential Research Fellowship (1999, 2000, and 2004) and Teacher of the Year (2002–2003) at the University of La Verne, Reed is the senior historical consultant for the National Geographic Channel’s Science of the Bible series on Jesus and archaeology which premiered in September 2005.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

here ya go

John Dominic Crossan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Crossan suggests Jesus was an illiterate "Jewish Cynic" from a landless peasant background, initially a follower of John the Baptist

Apart from Crossan's misapplication of ancient literacy in general to 1st century Galilee, along with numerous other methodolocial concerns (read "mistakes") with Crossan's general approach, the very idea of an "illiterate Jewish Cynic" seems a prima facie contradiction. For Crossan, Downing, and the other "cynic-Jesus" proponents we have this illiterate peasant in a small Jewish village, who somehow is sufficiently acquainted with an ancient Greek philosophy that he doesn't merely incorporate it into his understanding of Judaism, but so completely encapsulates the "cynic" worldview, philosophy, and life-style that there are few traces of Judaism left (one is reminded of the anti-Semitic portraits of Jesus from the early 20th century which similarly sought to construct a non-Jewish Jesus).

If Jesus began as a disciple of John the Baptist (who, in both the NT and in Josephus is not even a wandering preacher, let alone a cynic), where did this cynic "training" come from? But for a moment, let's grant that Jesus had such an extensive familiarity with what was ostensibly a Hellenistic philosophy but in reality the "Cynics never were a philosophical school like the Stoics, Academics and Epicureans, and their movement is better described as a way of life." (p. 6 of Morford's The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the death of Marcus Aurelius; Routledge, 2002). Why, then, would we suspect him illiterate?

The revival of Cynic philosophy in the first century of the Roman empire was not the philosophy of Diogenes, but an amalgum of Hellenistic ideas, thoughts, ways of life, movements, including philosophical, political, and religious. Most imporantly, in addition to philosophical writings now lost to us, we know of (and possess some of) the Cynic Epistles. These letters "confirm the impression that Cynic literary production in the empire is no longer marked by the innovative parodies and polemics of the classical period and now serves primarily to propagate Cynicism as a popular ideology and collective moral praxis" (p. 15 of the introduction to the edited volume The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy; University of California Press, 1996).

In other words, not only had Cynicism never been known for illiteracy or lack of education, but in particular during Jesus' day was known to have used literary communication to attract and educate followers.

In his paper on Seneca's letters (published in the volume Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography; Oxford University Press, 2007), Brad Inwood discusses the effect of "the tradition of philosophical letter writing into which Seneca inserted himself" which, among other types/collections, included the "Cynic epistles" (p. 136).

In other words, during Jesus' day the "Cynic" movement cannot be characterized the way Crossan and other like him do, namely by focusing on the wandering, anti-establishment, anti-materialism, and oral performances aspects of what was in reality a far more literary, educated group of who usually shared a number of commonalities and who used literary as well as oral methods of communication, education, and proselytism.

If Jesus were a Jewish Cynic, we'd expect him to be far more acquainted with Hellenistic philosophies in general, and in all likelihood to be literate.

Which brings us to the question of how much interaction Jesus likely did have with Cynics. Mark A. Chancey's article in the journal Biblical Archaeology Review ("How Jewish was Jesus' Galilee") notes that "Jesus was soon compared to the cynic philosophers" in part because "some studies proposed that in Jesus' time, many Galileans were Gentiles". However, as the more detailed publication of archaeological finds have made more systematic study possible, many of these views are being questioned". Indeed, one such systematic study was that by Chancey himself, in a monograph from the Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series vol. 134 Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (2005). His survey is, perhaps, the most thorough in existence, yet at its end he concludes "By Jesus’ time, the region’s encounter with Hellenism was over three centuries old. Despite occasional scholarly claims to the contrary, however, the penetration of Greek culture does not seem to have been especially deep" (p. 221).Instead, Chancey shows that those who propose "Jesus had heard the teachings of Cynic philosophers at Sepphoris or while he traveled throught the region" and should be understood as a Cynic-like philosopher do not simply overestimate the influence of Cynics in the region, but are for the most part wrong about the influence of Hellenism in Galilee in general.

 

[outhouse]

Another good post with decent information, you also had me go out and study the word Cynic.


My only issue is that, hellenism was already prevelant in oral trdaition and that didnt equate to higher literacy.


Jesus according to scripture has cynical traits. I dont think one has to study to find these traits appealing, not only that, dont we see JtB influence in his cynical ways??

But then one has to ask, did they write jesus in cynical? I would say no. because of JtB living outdoors and being sort of anti-establishment already, it would make sense a historical jesus, would be living this way to.



for me, I dont see a link between jewish peasant cynicism and literacy in this case. There was a twon a days walk from Nazareth where Cynicism was known to be studied. Im sure this would have also been in the oral traditions through out Galilee

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Before you trash Reed, maybe you could produce someone with better anthropology and archeology in Galilee ???

First off, just to clarify, I have no intention of trashing Reed. I would, however, like to suggest that there are specialists whose background better equips them to deal with the issues of Hellenism (and its influence on Galilee during Jesus' day) as well as Q. I already referred to the survey of evidence by Mark Chancey, whose Ph.D. work was in Christian origins and whose specialty is the relationship between Greco-Roman culture and Galilee. The monograph from 2005 I cited in my last post is the later of two on the subject, but despite the incorporation of more recent finds and studies, reveals much the same as did his earlier monograph The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (2002).

As for Q, we have Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series vol. 118 by Maurice Casey: An Aramaic Approach to Q: Sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Personally, I think Casey's extensive knowledge of Aramaic has biased him here, and that he turns what are no doubt underlying influences of Aramaic in the gospel texts into complete reconstructions.

That said, he isn't alone, as Mack and Reed (among others) do the same in a different way. The problem with a hypothetical document is that as it is already only hypothetical (even though there is very good evidence for it), any hypotheses on its nature are necessarily hypotheses built upon hypotheses. As mush as I disagree with N. T. Wright in general (mainly because his approach to history is dated, but also because his 3rd volume leaves history behind altogether), I very much agree with his statement about Q and how it is approached by those like Reed, Mack, Crossan, and others (each to a varying degree): "To treat Q as a document at all is controversial. To treat it as a gospel (Crossan insists emphatically on this) is more so; to postulate two or three stages in its development is to build castles in the air; to insist that the document was 'composed by the fifties, and possibly at Tiberias in Galilee' [here Wright is quoting Crossan], is to let imagination run riot." (p. 48 of Jesus and the Victory of God; vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God).

Wright may be a bit unfair here, but there is in general too much faith in what can be gleaned not only about the nature of this hypothetical "document" (there is the possibility that it was never written), but about the communities behind the various imagined layers. Meier's approach is far more balanced that Wright, although the second volume of A Marginal Jew reflects an approach to the gospels that belongs to an earlier time in the 20th century and is no longer adequate. However, all the volumes are still incredibly valuable mainly because of the ingenius way Meier has structured them such that the general reader will have no great difficulty because the technical details of interest to specialists are relegated to chapter endnotes and to excurses. In his excurses on Q, Meier has a particularly valuable gem: "I cannot help thinking that biblical scholarship would be treatly advanced if every morning all exegetes would repeat as a mantra: "Q is a hypothetical document whose exact extension, wording, originating community, strata, and stages of redaction cannot be known." This daily devotion might save us flights of fancy that are destined, in my view, to end in skepticism." (p. 178 of vol. 2 of A Marginal Jew).

With all that in mind, Casey's treatment of Q is relatively free of wild flights of imagination. This is less true of his Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series vol. 102). However, the combination of competence in koine Greek as well as Aramaic does make him ideally suited to at the very least recognize when some line or phrase within the Greek gospel texts are influenced by Aramaic. Combined with the thorough treatment of evidence for Hellenistic influence in Galilee by (among others Chancey), we aren't left with much to support a wandering, illiterate cynic-like Jewish peasant.

Nor can the findings of Harris (which Crossan in particular relies on) be extended to Galilee. In his first volume of A Marginal Jew, Meier's analysis of Jesus' education is in general nothing special, but he does concisely yet thoroughly illustrate the problems for the "Jesus was illiterate" side: "For all the differences among various groups of Jews, the narratives, the laws, and the prophecies of their sacred texts gave them a corporate memory and a common ethos. The very identity and continued existence of the people of Israel were tied to a corpus of written and regularly read works in a way that simply was not true of other peoples in the Mediterranean world of the 1st century...To be able to read and explain Scriptures was a revered goal for religiously minded Jews. Hence literacy held a special importance for the Jewish community" (p. 274-5).

As far as anthropology is concerned, the evidence in general supports a wider literacy than Harris (who reacted against what he felt were overly optimistic numbers for the Roman empire in general) and those who cite his work propose. The evidence from literary scraps, epigraphy, and even magical devices point to a wider community of people with a basic literacy than Harris suggests. When Daniel Odgen wrote his contribution to the Witchcraft and Magic in Europe (vol 2: Greece & Rome) in 1999, we already had a collection of around 1,600 "curse tablets" written mainly in Greek. Although some are long before Jesus, the proliferation occured during the Imperial age and the Hellenism which accompanied it. Odgsen notes that although the distribution during the Imperial age became geographically quite dispersed, the "overall uniformity of their texts is striking". By the second century CE, we even have an influence from a mixture of Jewish and Egyptian culture. Yet these tablets were not the work of the literary elite, but rather were quite thoroughly peblian.

The same is true of other media, from Ostraca to tavern walls. In Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East, Bagnall provides a thorough picture of a far wider literacy than supposed by Harris, as well as the reason for it: survival of any text was the exception, but the fact that we have such a vast wealth of literary scraps from Hellenistic Egypt suggests that, had other regions shared Egypts climate and geological properties, we'd find similar surviving texts across the entire Roman empire. In the course of making this argument (to which the book is devoted), Bagnall mentions the over "seven hundred ostraca written in Aramaic, in Jewish block Hebrew, and in other Semitic scripts, dating to the period of the Jewish War of 66–70, were found at Masada. These were mostly inscribed with letters or names and interpreted as having served as tokens in a food-rationing system, but their ranks also include letters, accounts, writing exercises, and other types of texts. Greek ostraca were also found in small numbers at Masada. The editors argue that these too were written by Jews rather than being the product of the besieging Roman army" (p. 124).

That Jesus was literate is still just guesswork. However, that it is improbable a priori is, I think, no longer tenable.

 

[outhouse]

First off, just to clarify, I have no intention of trashing Reed. .

and your not.

Like most scholars, historians, or anthropologist. I think most have something valuable to offer.


Not everything about Crossan I agree with, but I do like his and Reeds work. Looking at Nazareth and viewing it as a work camp for Sepphoris isnt alltogether far fetched, and complies with what we know from the negative overtones mentioned in the NT.

I see no reason for a poor peasant jesus, and knowing he hangs out with a bug eating, camel hair wearing leader, who lives outside and in a cynical sort of way, I dont see many signs with credibility that jesus ever would have had any wealth, nor the skills to earn it under roman oppression, poverty and poor oppressed people went hand in hand.

his excurses on Q, Meier has a particularly valuable gem: "I cannot help thinking that biblical scholarship would be treatly advanced if every morning all exegetes would repeat as a mantra: "Q is a hypothetical document whose exact extension, wording, originating community, strata, and stages of redaction cannot be known."

I agree, but it still should be researched for what its worth.


and it begs to be stated, with such close simularities between GL and GM which are not really reliant upon one another, did it take a written source when oral traditions were so accurate? I think good cases can be made for both, but in the end I believe a written source was used cherry picked for content, and now lost.

I disagree with Crossans dating as well.

That Jesus was literate is still just guesswork.

I wish he had more historicity then what we can deduce with certainty.


I see no reason why he would be educated at any level based on geographic location, while being in a area of oppression and poverty. there was no middle class, and he wasnt rich.

 

[tumbleweed41]

Before you trash Reed,...

I'm not trashing Reed. I am pointing out your bias.
Wilhelm H Wuellner, Ph.D. in Hermeneutical Studies and Professor of New Testament Studies at Pacific School of Religion, described the fishing guilds of Galilee as middle-class.
And you ignored Mathew and Judas.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Another good post with decent information, you also had me go out and study the word Cynic.

But the word and the "philosophy" (inasmuch as it ever was a philosophy rather than a lifestyle with certain typical worldviews) are two different things, and (more importantly) the cynicism of Diogenes and his followers is not the same thing which emerged in the first century of the roman empire. The similarities are mainly due to the lifestyle, rather than a knowledge of previous cynic philosophy. This is not to say that the first century cyncic movement had no philosophical views, just that these were even more nebulous than those of the Greek cynics. The new movement incorporated more of the "hellenistic world" (which was neither actually hellenistic nor really all that unified), which entailed an even greater familiarity with and adoption of Greco-Roman thought, education, and literature than did the "original" cynics.

Jesus according to scripture has cynical traits. I dont think one has to study to find these traits appealing, not only that, dont we see JtB influence in his cynical ways??

The issues are
1) Are the traits that bear a certain relation to the cynic movement of the first century best explained by a knowledge of this movement
&
2) Was the undeniable presence of hellenistic culture in Galilee during Jesus' day sufficient that we can safely assert there were cynics around who a Jew with a socio-economic background similar to Jesus' would be likely to encounter and not just encounter, but learn from?

The answer to the first issue is a resounding no. Not only are there too few components of Jesus' teachings which are cynic-like to begin with (e.g, he didn't beg, his wandering seems to have been somewhat limited as he appears to have had a "home base"), but there is also the problem of explaining "cynic-like" aspects of Jesus' life and teaching as the product of actual familiarity with the cynic movement rather than Jewish movements. Jesus' anti-materialistic views, for example, are easily explained by looking at similar views held by his Jewish contemporaries. There is nothing in our evidence which, if it has a factual base, can only be explained by a knowledge of cynicism rather than through the various Jewish movements, ideas, groups, practices, and so on of Jesus' contemporaries.

But then one has to ask, did they write jesus in cynical? I would say no. because of JtB living outdoors and being sort of anti-establishment already, it would make sense a historical jesus, would be living this way to.

Anti-establishment is also better explained by looking at Jewish, not hellenistic, thought. Not only is there plenty of this, but: "The emergence of Cynicism as a potent political ideology—opposed to hereditary monarchy—in the first century A.D. is highly significant but potentially misleading: most Cynics lived not in Rome or the West, but in the Greek-speaking cities of the East, from Athens to Alexandria. Most were not politically active but busily engaged living the Cynic way of life—begging their daily bread and bearing witness to Diogenes' example." (p. 13 of the edited volume The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy; University of California Press, 1996).

for me, I dont see a link between jewish peasant cynicism and literacy in this case. There was a twon a days walk from Nazareth where Cynicism was known to be studied. Im sure this would have also been in the oral traditions through out Galilee

1) The problem is finding evidence to support Jewish peasant cynism at all, not whether or not such individuals would be literate
2) There is no actual evidence of Cynicism in Galilee at all. It is assumed that, granted the degree of Greco-Roman culture which existed there alongside with (and interacting with) Jewish culture entails cynic activity. However, it's questionable that there actually was a sufficiently "gentile" Galilee to assume this, and unlikely that if there were cynics they had any influence on Jewish thought or ways of life (peasant or not).
3) If there were such a presence, then "studying" it would make literacy almost a requirement. And even if Jesus simply learned through hearing cynics speak, there really isn't a better exemplar of everything Hellenistic and non-Jewish than the 1st century cynic movement, as it was not only in part a revival of actual Greek philosophical views, but had extended these to match the changes which came from a non-Greek world ruled by Rome and consisting of a vast borrowing, adoption, adaption, etc., of gentile worldviews and ideas. I find it hard to imagine any Jew, from peasant to those like Philo, embracing such a movement.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

My only issue is that, hellenism was already prevelant in oral trdaition and that didnt equate to higher literacy.

So, therefore, you offer the following ...

Jesus was called a tekton and son of a tekton.

Tekton could mean stone worker.

Therefore tekton in this case does mean stone worker.

Therefore Jesus was a landless peasant.

Therefore (with Crossan) Jesus was illiterate.

Therefore Jesus couldn't speak Greek.​

Really?

 

[outhouse]

So, therefore, you offer the following ...

Jesus was called a tekton and son of a tekton.

Tekton could mean stone worker.

Therefore tekton in this case does mean stone worker.

Therefore Jesus was a landless peasant.

Therefore (with Crossan) Jesus was illiterate.

Therefore Jesus couldn't speak Greek.
​

Really?

NO

its possible he spoke some greek.

tekton in that time in that place, were displaced renters with little to nothing, living a life below the common peasant.

Nazareth was nothing more then a work camp for Sepphoris, there was little to nothing there, and according to gospel authors, sort of a low life place to live.



there is nothing pointing towards literacy, to suggest he was. and we have roughly a 97% percent chance he was illiterate, due to geographic location alone.

unless you want to believe apologetics that take the NT literally

 

[outhouse]

I'm not trashing Reed. I am pointing out your bias.
Wilhelm H Wuellner, Ph.D. in Hermeneutical Studies and Professor of New Testament Studies at Pacific School of Religion, described the fishing guilds of Galilee as middle-class.
And you ignored Mathew and Judas.

I dont have bias to be pointed out.

Im folowing Reed, Meyers, Crossan, and Borg, because I think they make a great case, and have the best most "current" information, since they are actually involved and working in the field in Galilee.

Wilhelm H Wuellner, Ph.D.

was a hell of a nice gentlemen, who lived 20 minutes from my house.

but lets face facts, he studied in the 50's and was not current, he retired in the 90's due to his cancer. RIP

he really isnt followed by modern scholarships.



the current scholarships state they had to rent the little skips they were in, and also lived a life below poverty

which poverty levels even among those who worked was quite normal, there was no middle class.

And you ignored Mathew and Judas.

Judas has no historicity, and he may have only lived in fiction, much of his contradicting legend comes from the OT

GMt is just fiction layered to GM, in different degrees, by someone far removed from events, who had to copy GM just to have a foundation to his version.


you want to debate this properly, bring up specific verse, because different cerses have different degrees of possible historicity

 

[outhouse]

Heres a good article on Crossan view, from Crosson

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/socialclass.html

A PEASANT BOY IN A PEASANT VILLAGE

We know presumably that he grew up in Nazareth. What does that imply about his background and his class?
Jesus being born in Nazareth and growing up in Nazareth tells us that he was a peasant boy in a peasant village. Maybe we might estimate 100 to 200 people maximum in this tiny village perched up in a hill, within sight, by the way, of a fairly major city, Sepphoris, but one of its surrounding villages....
Tradition has it that Jesus was a carpenter. The term is in Greek "tectone" in Mark's gospel..., "artisan" would be maybe our best translation. But in the pecking order of peasant society, a peasant artisan is lower than a peasant farmer. It probably means usually a peasant farmer who had been pushed off the land and has to make his living, if he can, by laboring.
The difficulty for us in hearing a term like "carpenter" is that we immediately think of a highly skilled worker, and at least in North America, in the middle class, making a very high income. As soon as we take that into the ancient world we are totally lost. Because, first of all, there was no middle class in the ancient world. There were the haves and the have nots, to put it very simply. And in the anthropology of peasant societies, to say that somebody is an artisan or a carpenter is not to compliment them. It is to say that they are lower in the pecking order than a peasant farmer. So it's from the anthropologists that I take the idea that a peasant artisan is not a compliment.
There's a theory, though, that Jesus' place of birth gives us a clue to a rather more sophisticated character. Somebody who was just on the doorstep of a Hellenized small town, multi-lingual. He possibly spoke Greek or would have heard it spoken. Possibly could have been influenced by Greek thought or Hellenistic thought. In other words a far more sophisticated guy. Do you reconcile these images or do you flatly disagree with that?
Well, the interesting thing is that as a fact, Jesus never mentioned Sepphoris. And he doesn't use metaphors that tell us profoundly he knows urban societies. He may talk about land owners or bailiffs or stuff like that. There is no evidence that Jesus is any way involved in the urban life of Sepphoris, which is within viewing distance of Nazareth. But to live close to a city in the ancient world was not necessarily a good thing.
What's the argument against him being a more Hellenized, urbanized person? Why do you place him so firmly as a low-class peasant?
Well, a lower class peasant is somebody who is in interaction, not necessarily happy interaction, with a local city. If you take away the city, you don't have a peasant, you have a farmer, a happy farmer, probably. So, first of all, Jesus never mentions Sepphoris, although he grew up within sight of it. He doesn't seem to be talking urban images.
And if he knew anything about Sepphoris, what would he know? He would know that aqueducts take the water from the countryside into the city. And aqueducts run in only one direction. And the city people were the washed, they're the people with the public baths. So, from the countryside into the city, and I don't see any aqueduct coming back, Jesus was sophisticated [enough] to know what the city was, which was the seat of peasant oppression.
Do his travels, or the parables that he teaches, also give us a clue to his probable class, his apparent avoiding of cities?
If you take three parables that are used in the common material in the Q gospel and in the Gospel of Thomas, for example, the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the mustard seed, or the parable of the leaven. All of those are absolutely ordinary, everyday, rural experiences. They presume no profound knowledge. Anyone would understand them. They speak strict to the rural audience of Jesus. No matter, in a way, who Jesus is or what his background, he is certainly telling his stories for a rural audience. It seems to me, born in Nazareth, speaking to a rural audience, it seems Jesus is a peasant, speaking to peasants.

 

[oldbadger]

the current scholarships state they had to rent the little skips they were in, and also lived a life below poverty

Hello again, outhouse. I can only add to the above short sentence.....

Zebedee worked a large boat. It must have been very very valuable, given timber scarcity. He hired two or more crew members, as well as using two of his sons, James and John, (for what they were worth to him).

If the boats were hauled out (please tell me, someone?) then they were smaller and needed extra hands. If they were moored 'off' then they could be larger, but in either case, I reckon Zebedee was one rich guy. I don't think he had to have rented this vessel off anybody.

The thread and posts are truly educational. Thankyou, everybody.

 

[outhouse]

Hello again, outhouse. I can only add to the above short sentence.....

Zebedee worked a large boat. It must have been very very valuable, given timber scarcity. He hired two or more crew members, as well as using two of his sons, James and John, (for what they were worth to him).

If the boats were hauled out (please tell me, someone?) then they were smaller and needed extra hands. If they were moored 'off' then they could be larger, but in either case, I reckon Zebedee was one rich guy. I don't think he had to have rented this vessel off anybody.

The thread and posts are truly educational. Thankyou, everybody.

Sea of Galilee Boat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
see a typical Galilean boat.

there is no mention of a large boat

 

[outhouse]

heres another great article that gets into detail

CPSP Little Rock Chapter: Jesus of Nazareth: The Peasant from Galilee as Model for Chaplaincy

. Life in the Time of Jesus

Nazareth in Galilee was a hamlet or village at the time of Jesus, a place so small that it is never mentioned in any ancient texts other than the gospels and texts that rely on them. Despite the mention of literally dozens of other Galilean towns in the Hebrew scripture or Josephus or the rabbis, Nazareth is not named (Crossan 1991: 15).


Given the fact that Nazareth was under the radar of ancient historians, I think it likely that it had a very small population. John Meier suggests that the population of the village at the time of Jesus may have been approximately 2000 souls (Meier 1991: 277), but recently Jonathan Reed and John Crossan have argued that the population was under a thousand and perhaps as low as a few hundred. Evidently the people lived in small houses or caves, and were for the most part farmers. Reed further notes that there is no archaeological evidence for either any public buildings or a synagogue in Nazareth before the late third or early fourth century CE. If in fact there were none, that would suggest not only a very small population but also the absence of any center for learning. Much of Jesus’s early life would have been lived in the context of a small agrarian town functioning at a mostly subsistence level (Crossan & Reed 2001: 33–36; Crossan 1994: 26).


Nazareth is located just over four miles south from the Herodian city of Sepphoris, which was one of the bigger towns in the region in spite of having been destroyed and rebuilt in the course of the late first century BCE and first century CE, acting briefly as the capital city for Herod Antipas. While Sepphoris would have been the closest commercial center, it was not a place that the typical Nazarene peasant would have dropped into as a part of daily life. Nazareth is over a ridge of hills and down in a valley, so it would have taken the better part of two hours to walk over the hills on dirt paths to get to the more populated location. On the other hand, once out of the valley and into Sepphoris, there was a network of roads that ran west to Caesarea Maritima and east to Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee, so, although remote, Nazareth was by no means totally isolated and its inhabitants would have been exposed to examples of Hellenistic and Roman culture. (Crossan & Reed 2001: 80)


The Roman Empire had an agrarian based economy. In theory at least the emperor owned the land or at least controlled it within contractual constraints. As patron he then distributed it to his clients, who in turn could rent or lease it to their clients. Something like 1% of the population owned or controlled 50% of the land in the Empire; another 15% was owned by priests. Other small land holders included military leaders and merchants. The largest population consisted of peasants, very few of whom controlled the land they farmed; approximately 2/3rds of their crops went to landlords. Further down the social scale were the so-called “artisans” who were often dispossessed farmers. Finally, on the lowest rung of the class ladder came what sociologists have called the “expendables,” the ancient equivalent of the day laborer, who had no patrons. (Crossan 1991: 43–46) This model of patron and client dominated both political and economic life in Palestine (Malina 1996: 143–175), with Herod the Great and his sons—Agrippa, Archelaus, Philip, and Antipas—among the best illustrations of how the system privileged the aristocracy.

In Mark 6:3, during the course of visiting Nazareth, the people react to Jesus’s teaching by asking, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” (BTW, Matthew changes the question to, “Is this not the carpenter’s son?” Luke makes a further modification: “Is this not Joseph’s son?&#8221 The Greek word used here—the only place in the gospels where Jesus is identified with a particular type of work—is typically translated as “carpenter” but would be better translated as “handyman.” It refers to one who works with his hands at a variety of tasks, among them wood working. It does not imply any modern notion of carpentry. Those who worked with wood were among the artisan class (Crossan 1994: 23–26). If John Meier is correct in his observation that Jesus’s use of illustrations and parables based on agriculture suggests he may have been a farmer at some time in his life (Meier 1991: 279), Mark’s report that the people of Nazareth knew him as a handyman suggests the family may have lost the farm during one of the many political upheavals in Lower Galilee, and Jesus had to turn to a different line of work to help support his rather large family.


One more historical fact to add to the picture: Recent studies have argued that literacy rates in the Empire were not high. Something on the order of 10–20% of the population of the empire were functionally literate.[1] Wealthy aristocratic families and some of the merchant class could afford to send their sons to school, but even then most received basic schooling in what was called grammar—reading and writing—while advanced education in rhetoric was pursued only by a few.[2] There were slaves who were scribes or secretaries, and ordinary citizens in larger towns had access to professional scribes who could, for example, write letters for them (Murphy-O’Connor 1995: 8–16; Klauck 2006: 55–60). Reading, even of personal letters, was done out loud (cf. Achtemeier 1990). Most people learned orally and had the capacity for what we would consider major feats of memory. Scholars now question how much, if at all, Jesus could read. It is quite likely that his knowledge of the law and traditions of Israel came from hearing scripture read and engaging in conversation with more learned people when he went into places like Sepphoris.[3]

[1] Harris (1989) argues that while literacy rates may have been higher in Greece in the era of the city states, and that the spread of the Roman empire might have boosted education in some places, in general it is hard to find evidence that literacy rates for men rose much beyond 20%, and those for women beyond 10%. They would have been even lower for peasants.
[2] In addition to Harris, good reviews of education in antiquity include H. J. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (University of Wisconsin Press, 1956) and Stanley Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome (Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 1977).
[3] Meier (1991:277–278) argues that there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that Jesus had some literacy in Hebrew, although he admits there almost no direct, indisputable evidence supporting that conclusion. Given the economic circumstances of Nazareth and cultural studies done by others, I think it highly unlikely Nazareth could have afforded a Torah or that Jesus would have had access to anything other than self-taught “rabbis.” He may have spoken Aramaic and a little Greek, but it seems highly unlikely that he could have read Hebrew or written anything.


There is so much more detail that could be used to fill in this sketch of the times of Jesus, but you get the idea. Clearly he was from the peasant class and that left him in a position of political and economic powerlessness. He had no access to a powerful political patron and thus no easy access to education, health care, or economic opportunity. Even his access to religious institutions and cult observances was difficult. And, to make the point clearer, what we can say about Jesus, we can also say about those to whom he ministered! From what we can tell, Jesus ministered primarily to the peasants, artisans, and outcasts of Galilee.​