This coming Sunday is the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time. What do the hometown people know about Jesus that would lead them to reject him? While there is much that I disagree with in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, by John Dominic Crossan, his social status of tekton  is enlightening:

Ramsay MacMullen has noted that one’s social pedigree would easily be known in the Greco-Roman world and that a description such as “carpenter” indicated lower class status [Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 384]. At the back of his book he gives a “Lexicon of Snobbery” filled with terms used by literate and therefore upper-class Greco-Roman authors to indicate their prejudice against illiterate and therefore lower-class individuals. Among those terms is tekton, or “carpenter,” the same term used for Jesus in Mark 6:3 and for Joseph in Matthew 13:55. One should not, of course, ever presume that upper-class sneers dictated how the lower classes actually felt about themselves. But, in general, the great divide in the Greco-Roman world was between those who had to work with their hands and those who did not. [p. 24]

Crossan, using a study by Gerhard Lenski [Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification], defines the upper and lower classes in an order of importance.

Crossan [25] writes: “If Jesus was a carpenter, therefore, he belonged to the Artisan class, that group pushed into the dangerous space between Peasants and Degradeds or Expendables…” Crossan also quotes Celsus, a pagan philosopher who wrote “True Doctrine” sometime between 177 and 180 C.E as an attack on Christianity. The great offense of this faith was not the claim that a human could be born of a virgin or that a human could be divine; but the fact that it could happen to a member of the lower classes! “Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s objection to Christianity,” to quote Crossan [p. 27].

Witherington (The Gospel of Mark) says something similar:

Notice that they neither dispute that he has wisdom or that he performs mighty works; they are just dumbfounded that it comes from a hometown boy like Jesus. More than just a matter of familiarity breeding contempt, this comes from the ancient mentality that geographical and heredity origins determine who a person is and what his capacities will always be. They see Jesus as someone who is not merely exceeding expectations but rather is overreaching. [p. 192]

Perhaps such “snobbery” is at the heart of the rejection of Jesus in Nazareth. Juel (Mark) writes:

The refusal — or inability — of Jesus’ neighbors to accept his status confirms what the story has suggested thus far: the world’s standards of judgment appear to run headlong into God’s ways. Jesus does not measure up. The circumstances of his origin allow no way of accounting for the stories about him. His common beginnings do not fit the assessment that he is a prophet. The result is scandal and fear. The reaction of the people from his hometown also suggests that real insiders are not necessarily those who by birth or circumstance are closest to Jesus. In fact, those who ought to know best turn out to be the most incapable of insight. [pp. 92-93]

It was inconceivable to them that God could be at work in the commonplace.

Domenico Ghirlandaio | Calling the Apostles | 1481 | Sistine Chapel, Vatican | PD-US