Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

those who believe that Joseph never actually existed, that
     he was a creation of Matthew and Luke—the only two evangelists who mention him—to
     account for a far more contentious creation: the virgin birth.
    On the one hand, the fact that both Matthew and Luke recount the virgin birth in their
     respective infancy narratives, despite the belief that they were completely unaware
     of each other’s work, indicates that the tradition of the virgin birth was an early
     one, perhaps predating the first gospel, Mark. On the other hand, outside of Matthew
     and Luke’s infancy narratives, the virgin birth is never even hinted at by anyone
     else in the New Testament: not by the evangelist John, who presents Jesus as an otherworldly
     spirit without earthly origins, nor by Paul, who thinks of Jesus as literally God
     incarnate. That absence has led to a great deal of speculation among scholars over
     whether the story of the virgin birth was invented to mask an uncomfortable truth
     about Jesus’s parentage—namely, that he was born out of wedlock.
    This is in actuality an old argument, one made by opponents of the Jesus movement
     from its earliest days. The second-century writer Celsus recounts a scurrilous story
     he claims to have heard from a Palestinian Jew that Jesus’s mother was impregnated
     by a soldier named Panthera. Celsus’s story is so clearly polemical that it cannot
     be taken seriously. However, it does indicate that, less than a hundred years after
     Jesus’s death, rumors about his illegitimate birth were already circulating throughout
     Palestine. Such rumors may have been current even in Jesus’s lifetime. When Jesus
     first begins preaching in his hometown of Nazareth, he is confrontedwith the murmuring of neighbors, one of whom bluntly asks, “Is this not Mary’s son?”
     (Mark 6:3). This is an astonishing statement, one that cannot be easily dismissed.
     Calling a first-born Jewish male in Palestine by his mother’s name—that is, Jesus
bar Mary
, instead of Jesus
bar Joseph
—is not just unusual, it is egregious. At the very least it is a deliberate slur with
     implications so obvious that later redactions of Mark were compelled to insert the
     phrase “son of the carpenter, and Mary” into the verse.
    An even more contentious mystery about Jesus involves his marital status. Although
     there is no evidence in the New Testament to indicate whether Jesus was married, it
     would have been almost unthinkable for a thirty-year-old Jewish male in Jesus’s time
     not to have a wife. Celibacy was an extremely rare phenomenon in first-century Palestine.
     A handful of sects such as the aforementioned Essenes and another called the Therapeutae
     practiced celibacy, but these were quasimonastic orders; they not only refused to
     marry, they completely divorced themselves from society. Jesus did nothing of the
     sort. Yet while it may be tempting to assume that Jesus was married, one cannot ignore
     the fact that nowhere in all the words ever written about Jesus of Nazareth—from the
     canonical gospels to the gnostic gospels to the letters of Paul or even the Jewish
     and pagan polemics written against him—is there ever any mention of a wife or children.
    In the end, it is simply impossible to say much about Jesus’s early life in Nazareth.
     That is because before Jesus was declared messiah, it did not matter what kind of
     childhood a Jewish peasant from an insignificant hamlet in Galilee may or may not
     have had. After Jesus was declared messiah, the only aspects of his infancy and childhood
     that did matter were those that could be creatively imagined to buttress whatever
     theological claim one was trying to make about Jesus’s identity as Christ. For better
     or worse, the only access one can have to the real Jesus comes not from the stories
     that were told about him after his death, but rather from the smattering of facts
     we can gather from his life as part of a large Jewishfamily of woodworkers/builders struggling to survive in the small Galilean village
     of Nazareth.
    The problem with Nazareth is that it was a city of mud and brick. Even the most elaborate
     buildings, such as they were, would have been constructed of stone. There were wooden
     beams in the roofs, and surely the doors would have been made of wood. A handful of
     Nazareans may have been able to afford wooden furniture—a table, some stools—and perhaps
     a few could have owned wooden yokes and plows