From time to time (and twice in the past couple of weeks) I am asked about the idea that Jesus may have been part of a casual workforce from Nazareth employed on the rebuilding of Sepphoris prior to commencing his public activity as a prophet of the basileia tou theou (the empire of God).
This is often linked with the idea that Jesus would have been exposed to Hellenistic cultural influence through this connection to Sepphoris, and specifically may have had some contact with Stoic ideas.
The underlying historical realities behind this question include:
- proximity (ca 6km by foot)
- prominence (Sepphoris was the capital for Herod Antipas)
- opportunity (the city was rebuilt by Antipas after being destroyed by Roman forces in response to a rebellion by th city after the death of Herod)
- cultural diversity (Sepphoris was a diverse city, with evidence of Greek theatre and Jewish synagogues)
- parallels (some aspects of Jesus’ teaching and practice are similar to those of the Stoics)
What follow here is a recent response I made by email to one such query.
Attempting to identify any particular influences on Jesus during his formative years is a very difficult task.
We have no direct evidence, and can only work from more general models (eg, Jewish kinship systems and domestic religious practices), informed—if we are fortunate—by archaeological insights.
The information we have about Nazareth around the turn of the eras, does not support the suggestion—proposed, or at least made popular, by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor—that Jesus may have been engaged in the workforce at Sepphoris.
It is true that Sepphoris was not far from Nazareth and was the dominant city in that area. It was destroyed by the Romans after an uprising that followed the death of Herod, and Antipas did engage in a rebuilding project. However, his rebuild was pretty modest, and short-lived. It would have ended by 18 CE (if not sooner) once he began the new city project at Tiberius and switched all his funds across to that project.
The short-lived rebuilding project at Sepphsois was between, say, 6 BCE and 16 CE.
The interpretation of tekton in Mark 6:3 is problematic. A single reference is not sufficient to establish the occupation of Jesus’ father, and in any case “carpenter” is not a good translation. “Construction worker” would be a better way to translate that term, and it could mean little more than handyman.
Jospeh may have been the local maker and fixer of agricultural tools, but we cannot tell from this one passing reference and we certainly cannot speculate about any details of Joseph’s life. Tekton is more likely to have been a generic indicator of Jesus’ social status, than a formal classification of his father’s skills.
More than that, Dennis R. Macdonald has suggested that the reference to tekton/carpenter may be a deliberate Homeric allusion by Mark and have no historical value.
However, the crunch factor is that the most recent archaeological work done in the area between Sepphoris and Nazareth has demonstrated that the Torah-observant Jews in the small village of Nazareth would have been most unlikely ever to have any contact with the non-observant population at Sepphoris and at the villages that lay within its orbit.
In summary, Nazareth was a kosher community while Sepphoris was not. The key research here is by Ken Dark:
Dark, Ken. Roman-Period and Byzantine Nazareth and Its Hinterland. The Palestine Exploration Fund Annual XV, edited by Chiara Fiaccavento, XV. Routledge, 2020.
For a brief summary of what we know about Nazareth in the Roman and Byzantine periods, see Nazareth Then and Now.
All things considered—and allowing for all the things we do not know, such as when Jesus was born—there is not much likelihood that he would ever have visited Sepphoris, let alone been influenced by any hypothetical Stoics based there. Of course, we have no evidence for Stoics (or Pharisees for that matter) being in the rather modest and only partly-rebuilt city of Sepphoris during the first two decades of the first century.
Finally, most of the impressive Hellenistic features of Sepphoris are from the second century CE or later. As such, they are irrelevant to the question of any cultural influences on Jesus.
It may be significant that Sepphoris is never mentioned in the Gospels.
It seems more likely that his formative experience was grounded in village Judaism with a strong attachment to Jerusalem and its temple.
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