<p>6:3<em> Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended by him</em>- See on :2.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. &nbsp;</p><p>According to Talmudic writings like <em>Yebamot</em> 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>Their offence or stumbling is effectively what 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.</p><p>One of the most surpassing wonders of the Lord&rsquo;s character was that He could live for 30 years in a small town in Galilee, never ever committing sin, and never ever omitting an act of righteousness... and yet when He stood up and basically proclaimed Himself to be Messiah, the people were scandalized. They were shocked that this carpenter&rsquo;s son should think He was anything much more than them. Yet whenever we try to be a bit more righteous than our fellows, it&rsquo;s always noticed and held against us. Yet the Lord Jesus was both perfect, and also in favour with men. He came over as the ordinary guy, and yet He was perfect, and the light of this world. In this there is a matchless example for us. This wondrous feature of the Lord&rsquo;s achievement in His own character is reflected by the way His own brothers, who knew Him better than any, perceived Him to be just an ordinary person. When He started implying that He was the Son of God, they thought He&rsquo;d gone crazy. When He declared Himself as Messiah, the people who had grown up with Him were scandalized. He was <em>so</em> human that even though He never sinned, the people who intimately knew Him for 30 years thought that He was truly one of them. In our making the word flesh, we tend to irritate people by our apparent righteousness, or turn them away from us by our hypocrisy. But the Lord truly made the word flesh, to the extent that the very dregs of society could relate to Him as one of them. There is a wonder in this that requires sustained meditation.</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 <em>tekton </em>or manual worker (&quot;carpenter&quot; in many translations). &quot;A <em>tekton</em> 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 <em>tekton</em> as being a step up from a subsistence farmer; rather, a <em>tekton</em> 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 <em>tekton </em>was one in this class. It has been noted: &ldquo;Some peasant 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 <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;</p>