Rejection at Nazareth (second visit)

Jesus comes back to Nazareth with his disciples and teaches in the synagogue on the Sabbath, and the reaction begins as amazement and turns into something else within a sentence.

Where did this man get these things? What is this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Then the questions that answer themselves: is not this the carpenter? Is not this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Are not his sisters here with us?

Two details in that list are worth pausing on.

The word translated carpenter covers a builder and worker in wood and stone generally, and in a village of a few hundred houses the trade would have meant roof beams, door frames, ploughs, yokes and repairs rather than furniture. Everyone in that room owned something he had made.

And describing a man as Mary's son rather than as Joseph's is unusual and slightly pointed in a culture that named men after their fathers. It most probably means Joseph was dead, and it may carry an edge about the circumstances of his birth, which would have been village knowledge for thirty years.

Four brothers are named and sisters are mentioned in the plural, so this is a large family. James becomes the leader of the Jerusalem church within a couple of decades, and a letter attributed to Judas survives; at this point neither of them believes anything about him, and elsewhere the family is described as having gone to take charge of him because they thought he was out of his mind.

Then a sentence about them: they took offence at him. The Greek verb is the one behind the English scandalise, and its root sense is a trap or a stumbling block.

The proverb he quotes is careful about its scope: a prophet is not without honour except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home. Three concentric circles, and the innermost one is the family.

What follows is the most restrained sentence in any of these accounts. He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

The visit is placed at the point where the Galilean ministry begins to close. After it he stops working out of Capernaum as a base and starts moving through the villages, sends the Twelve out to cover ground he cannot cover himself, and within months is travelling into Gentile territory to the north. Nazareth is where the door shuts.

What the town got wrong is not obvious. They had the evidence in front of them and the wisdom acknowledged in their own question, and the obstacle was familiarity. A man whose family they knew, whose trade they had employed, whose sisters were married into their households, could not also be what he appeared to be, and rather than revise the category they kept it and discarded him.

He is amazed twice in the Gospels. Once at a Roman officer's confidence, and once here.