Alteration: Mark 6:3

In early manuscripts of Mark 6:3, Jesus is not a carpenter but the son of a carpenter.

RSV:

6 He went away from there and came to his own country; and his disciples followed him. 2 And on the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands! 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Misquoting Jesus p. 202-203

This is the one and only passage in the New Testament in which Jesus is called a carpenter. The word used, TEKTON, is typically applied in other Greek texts to anyone who makes things with his hands; in later Christian writings, for example, Jesus is said to have made "yokes and gates." 21 We should not think of him as someone who made fine cabinetry. Probably the best way to get a "feel" for this term is to liken it to something more in our experience; it would be like calling Jesus a construction worker. How could someone with that background be the Son of God?

This was a question that the pagan opponents of Christianity took quite seriously; in fact, they understood the question to be rhetorical: Jesus obviously could not be a son of God if he was a mere TEKTON The pagan critic Celsus particularly mocked Christians on this point, tying the claim that Jesus was a "woodworker" into the fact that he was crucified (on a stake of wood) and the Christian belief in the "tree" of life.

And everywhere they speak in their writings of the tree of life. . . I imagine because their master was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter by trade. So that if he happened to be thrown off a cliff or pushed into a pit or suffocated by strangling, or if he had been a cobbler or stonemason or blacksmith, there would have been a cliff of life above the heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed stone, or an iron of love, or a holy hide of leather. Would not an old woman who sings a story to lull a little child to sleep have been ashamed to whisper tales such as these? (Against Celsus 6, 34)

Celsus's Christian opponent, Origen, had to take seriously this charge that Jesus was a mere "carpenter," but oddly enough he dealt with it not by explaining it away (his normal procedure), but by denying it altogether: "[Celsus is] blind also to this, that in none of the Gospels current in the Churches is Jesus himself ever described as being a carpenter" (Against Celsus 6,36).

What are we to make of this denial? Either Origen had forgotten about Mark 6:3 or else he had a version of the text that did not indicate that Jesus was a carpenter. And as it turns out, we have manuscripts with just such an alternative version. In our earliest manuscript of Mark's Gospel, called P 45 , which dates to the early third century (the time of Origen), and in several later witnesses, the verse reads differently. Here Jesus's townsfolk ask, "Is this not the son of the carpenter?" Now rather than being a carpenter himself, Jesus is merely the carpenter's son.

Just as Origen had apologetically motivated reasons for denying that Jesus is anywhere called a carpenter, it is conceivable that a scribe modified the text — making it conform more closely with the parallel in Matthew 13:55 — in order to counteract the pagan charge that Jesus could not be the Son of God because he was, after all, a mere lowerclassTEKTON