<p>13:55&nbsp;<em>Is this not the carpenter&rsquo;s son-&nbsp;</em>&ldquo;Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James? And they were offended at him&quot; (Mk. 6:3). Mark records that they said &ldquo;the carpenter&rdquo; (Mk. 6:3). In full, therefore, they likely said that Jesus was &ldquo;carpenter, son of a carpenter&rdquo;. Such was His humanity that He appeared to have just followed the profession of His supposed &lsquo;father&rsquo; on earth. In essence, the same is happening to Trinitarians. They just can't hack that Jesus, Son of God, perfect human being... was truly human, with a human brother, mother and relatives. And so they have stumbled off into various wrong theories and theologies about Jesus to try to rationalize and spiritually legitimise their lack of faith in Him as a human person.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Jesus was poor. He was from Nazareth, a village of between 200 to 2,000 people, about 7 km. away from Sepphoris, a city of 40,000. And He would have gone through the process of socialization which anyone does who lives in a village under the shadow of the big town. He is described as a&nbsp;<em>tekton&nbsp;</em>or manual worker (&quot;carpenter&quot; in many translations). &quot;A&nbsp;<em>tekton</em>&nbsp;was at the lower end of the peasant class, more marginalized than a peasant who owned a small piece of land. We should not think of a&nbsp;<em>tekton</em>&nbsp;as being a step up from a subsistence farmer; rather, a&nbsp;<em>tekton</em>&nbsp;belonged to a family that had lost its land&rdquo;. The problem was that the Jewish authorities insisted that the tithes were still paid, and these could amount to around 20% of agricultural income. But the Romans added their own heavy taxation system on top of this. Farmers had to pay a 1% land tax, plus a 12% crop tax on produce, as well as various other custom, toll and tribute taxes. For those who wished to be obedient to the Government as well as the Jewish law, there was a total taxation of around 35%. Those who could no longer pay their taxes to Rome lost their land, and a&nbsp;<em>tekton&nbsp;</em>was one in this class. It has been noted: &ldquo;Some peasants who were forced from their lands turned to carpentry as a profession&rdquo;. A case has even been made that the term &quot;Abba&quot; ['daddy'] was specifically &quot;from lower class Palestinian piety&quot;. If this is so, then we see yet another window into the poverty of the Lord Jesus, extending even to the kind of language He used to address His Father in prayer. So Jesus was Himself marginalized, the poorest of the poor [perhaps because of paying all the required taxes and not being dishonest], in one of the poorest corners of the Roman empire. The poor needn't think of Jesus as so Heavenly that He doesn't know their crises; the crises that come from not having food or money, the problems of drought, the worry about the weather, the rains not coming, the problem of broken equipment and worn out clothes and shoes, the distress that a little brother is sick, there's medicine in the nearby town, but no money for it...He&nbsp;<em>knows</em>. He really does. He can and does relate to all this. And it's why He is so especially watchful, according to His own teaching, of how we respond to those in such need. It means a lot to Him; because as a poor man, He must have known what it was to receive charity, to be given a few eggs by a neighbour, some milk from a kind woman down the street. When He taught &quot;Blessed are the poor... the hungry&quot;, He immediately had a realness and credibility. For all the poor want to be better off. But He was so self-evidently content with who He was. The poor also want a bit more security for the future than just knowing that they have enough food for today. Yet Jesus could teach people to pray only for the food they needed for each day. And they were to forgive their debtors. This was radical stuff for people who lived a generally hand to mouth existence as day labourers and subsistence farmers. Only if Jesus was real and credible would people have flocked to hear Him and taken His teaching seriously. The fact He preached to the poor was a sign that He was indeed Messiah (Lk. 7:22); the context of that passage suggests it was something totally unusual, that a religious leader should bother with the poor. Serious religion was some kind of hobby for those rich enough to be able to spare the time for it. But Jesus turned all this upside down; He, the poor man, preached to the poor, and showed them that God and salvation was truly for them more than anyone else.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>Is not his mother called Mary-&nbsp;</em>It has been suggested that the title &ldquo;son of Mary&rdquo; given to Him in Mk. 6:3 implied that they considered Him illegitimate- for men were usually called by their father&rsquo;s name. &ldquo;&ldquo;Jesus, son of Mary&rdquo; has a pejorative sense&hellip; [there is a] Jewish principle: A man is illegitimate when he is called by his mother&rsquo;s name&rdquo;. The perception of the surrounding world may have influenced Joseph, and must have surely given rise to at least temptations of doubt within Mary as the years went by. &nbsp;See on Mk. 3:21. It has also&nbsp;been observed that it was unusual for the villagers to describe Jesus as &ldquo;the son of Mary&rdquo; (Mk. 6:3)- even if Joseph were dead, He would have been known as Jesus-ben-Joseph. It could well be that this was a reflection of their perception of how closely linked Jesus was to His mother. According to Talmudic writings like&nbsp;<em>Yebamot</em>&nbsp;78b, Dt. 23:3 was interpreted as meaning that a fatherless man wasn&rsquo;t allowed to enter the temple or marry a true Israelite. The reference to Jesus as&nbsp;&ldquo;son of Mary&rdquo; (Mk. 6:3) rather than &ldquo;son of Joseph&rdquo; is, apparently, very unusual. It reflects the Lord&rsquo;s lack of social identity in first century Israel; He had no father&rsquo;s house to belong to. In passing, the jibe in Mt. 27:64 &ldquo;the last deception shall be worse than the first&rdquo; is likely a reference to Mary and Jesus claiming that He was the result of a virgin birth- this, as far as the Jews were concerned, was the &ldquo;first deception&rdquo;.</p>
<p><em>And his brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?</em><i><br />
</i>- The Greek&nbsp;<em>a-delphos</em>&nbsp;literally means 'connected to the [same] womb'. Whilst it is true to say that the term is used for close relatives as well as blood brothers, the idea is still present of very physical natural connection. If Mary had no other children (as the Catholics claim) or the Lord Jesus personally pre-existed (as most Protestants claim) or only passed through Mary's body as a pre-existent Angel (the Watchtower's version of pre-existence), then surely another Greek word would have been used apart from&nbsp;<em>adelphos</em>. This whole passage speaks eloquently and deeply of the Lord's humanity and cannot be easily explained away by Trinitarians or believers in a personal pre-existence of Christ.</p>
<p>This makes it apparent that Mary the mother of James and Joses is clearly enough Mary the mother of Jesus- for He had brothers of those names. She had followed Him to Cana, and she faithfully followed Him to the cross. But Rev. 14:4 alludes to all this by saying that all the redeemed follow the Lamb wherever He goes. Thus Mary and the ministering women, following even to the cross, become typical of us all. Not only following the Lord in popularity, but also in the real and radical demands of His cross. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>