Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

messiah.
    That
Jesus—the eternal
logos
from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God—you will
     find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and
     wise men bearing gifts from the east.
    But the real Jesus—the poor Jewish peasant who was born some time between 4 B.C.E . and 6 C.E . in the rough-and-tumble Galilean countryside—look for him in the crumbling mud and
     loose brick homes tucked within the windswept hamlet of Nazareth.

Chapter Four
The Fourth Philosophy
    Here is what we know about Nazareth at the time of Jesus’s birth: there was little
     there for a woodworker to do. That is, after all, what tradition claims was Jesus’s
     occupation: a
tekton
—a woodworker or builder—though it bears mentioning that there is only one verse in
     the whole of the New Testament in which this claim about him is made (Mark 6:3). If
     that claim is true, then as an artisan and day laborer, Jesus would have belonged
     to the lowest class of peasants in first-century Palestine, just above the indigent,
     the beggar, and the slave. The Romans used the term
tekton
as slang for any uneducated or illiterate peasant, and Jesus was very likely both.
    Illiteracy rates in first-century Palestine were staggeringly high, particularly for
     the poor. It is estimated that nearly 97 percent of the Jewish peasantry could neither
     read nor write, a not unexpected figure for predominantly oral societies such as the
     one in which Jesus lived. Certainly the Hebrew Scriptures played a prominent role
     in the lives of the Jewish people. But the overwhelming majority of Jews in Jesus’s
     time would have had only the most rudimentary grasp of Hebrew, barely enough to understand
     the scriptures when they were read to them at the synagogue. Hebrewwas the language of the scribes and scholars of the law—the language of learning.
     Peasants like Jesus would have had enormous difficulty communicating in Hebrew, even
     in its colloquial form, which is why much of the scriptures had been translated into
     Aramaic, the primary language of the Jewish peasantry: the language of Jesus. It is
     possible that Jesus had some basic knowledge of Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman
     Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome),
     enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly not enough
     to preach. The only Jews who could communicate comfortably in Greek were the Hellenized
     Herodian elite, the priestly aristocracy in Judea, and the more educated Diaspora
     Jews, not the peasants and day laborers of Galilee.
    Whatever languages Jesus may have spoken, there is no reason to think he could read
     or write in any of them, not even Aramaic. Luke’s account of the twelve-year-old Jesus
     standing in the Temple of Jerusalem debating the finer points of the Hebrew Scriptures
     with rabbis and scribes (Luke 2:42–52), or his narrative of Jesus at the (nonexistent)
     synagogue in Nazareth reading from the Isaiah scroll to the astonishment of the Pharisees
     (Luke 4:16–22), are both fabulous concoctions of the evangelist’s own devising. Jesus
     would not have had access to the kind of formal education necessary to make Luke’s
     account even remotely credible. There were no schools in Nazareth for peasant children
     to attend. What education Jesus did receive would have come directly from his family
     and, considering his status as an artisan and day laborer, it would have been almost
     exclusively focused on learning the trade of his father and his brothers.
    That Jesus
had
brothers is, despite the Catholic doctrine of his mother Mary’s perpetual virginity,
     virtually indisputable. It is a fact attested to repeatedly by both the gospels and
     the letters of Paul. Even Josephus references Jesus’s brother James, who would become
     the most important leader of the early Christian church after Jesus’s death. There
     is no rational argument that can be made against thenotion that Jesus was part of a large family that included at least four brothers
     who are named in the gospels—James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas—and an unknown number
     of sisters who, while mentioned in the gospels, are unfortunately not named.
    Far less is known about Jesus’s father, Joseph, who quickly disappears from the gospels
     after the infancy narratives. The consensus is that Joseph died while Jesus was still
     a child. But there are