this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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Narrows it down a bit, I guess 🤷🏻 (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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[–] Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

He definitely was on the more poor side. At least when Jesus was born.

When a son was born and presented to the temple, the parents would pay an offering. That was to be a one year old lamb for the burnt offering and one pigeon or turtledove for the sin offering, but there was a provision for the poor that could not afford to give a lamb to give two pigeons or two turtledoves.

Mary and Joseph gave two pigeons, which under the purification law would only be allowed if they were poor.

By the time he attended the wedding at Cana, Joseph was already dead. The last time he was mentioned was at the temple when Jesus was 12, and by the time of crucifizion Jesus entrusted Mary’s care to John. That wouldn’t have happened if Joseph were still alive.

Also, the book of John doesn’t mention any anointing oils whatsoever at the Wedding at Cana. Nothing in the passage marks it as particularly upscale.

John 2

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, 2 and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

4 “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”

5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.

8 Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, 9 and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine.He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

11 What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

12 After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days.

In fact, the master of the banquet makes mention that the normal way hosts do it is to serve what good wine they have first, then the cheapest wine once everyone is drunk, but that the host of that wedding seemingly deviated from that and served the best wine last (though they had actually run out and that was unknown to the master of the banquet). More likely is that they served all the wine they could afford already, and it wasn’t all that great of wine.

That plus the fact that Mary “was there” and instructing the servants, and then “Jesus and all of his disciples had also been invited”, it would be much more likely that it was a close family friend of Mary’s that came from more modest means.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Valid points. I may be confusing unrelated memories.

[–] m0darn@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The only reason I can think of for someone to need to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a census is if they were up to some sort of tax fraud. A tax fraudster would surely skimp on temple sacrifices as well.

[–] spencerwi@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

...the text literally explains that everyone was supposed to go to the regions allocated for their tribe? The whole Old Testament shows that Israel is pretty big on "this area belongs to this tribe, that area belongs to that tribe" for a while. The concept of the Year of Jubilee (when any land sales that were made revert back to their original owners) puts a really fine point on this.

But to give the exact quote from Luke 2:1-4:

Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David,

[–] m0darn@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh I thought we were having fun.

A census is meant to document how many people live where. Everyone going to their ancestral town doesn't make sense. And would obviously cause so much economic harm that the Romans would never demand it. I understand that there is evidence of travelling workers being instructed to go to their home towns, but that is very different from going to an ancestral town. Also wasn't the region under Herod at the time, not formally part of the Roman empire? Augustus wouldn't decree a census in a client kingdom, he would have herod make the decree wouldn't he? It's obviously invented as apologia for why Jesus can be the prophesied messiah even though he is a Nazarene not a Bethlehemite. It doesn't stand up to the smallest amount of critical thought.

[–] spencerwi@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Also wasn’t the region under Herod at the time, not formally part of the Roman empire?

Herod was the Rome-installed representative, which was a large part of why he was so resented at the time. You're probably getting a bit confused because Herod was from a Hebrew royal dynasty, but his successful ascent to the throne (after bloody internal power struggles in the region, and even within the same Herodic royal family) was a direct product of Rome aiding him and installing him militarily.

Augustus wouldn’t decree a census in a client kingdom, he would have herod make the decree wouldn’t he

I mean, outside of the bible, Josephus also records this same census happening during the same time frame. "Seems like wouldn't have" doesn't really hold up against historical contemporaries saying "did".

A census is meant to document how many people live where. Everyone going to their ancestral town doesn’t make sense

Doesn't make sense, to you, in a modern context, based on your present-day assumptions of how social structures are organized and what censuses are intended to measure.

Take, for example, taxation: in modern contexts, we'd look at the number of people living in various regions and apply their taxation rules accordingly, because variations in tax rules are primarily segmented by region (i.e. this state has different taxes than that one, this county and city have their own tax rules, etc).

In Hebrew contexts, taxation rules (particularly temple taxes) differed based on which tribe you belonged to (i.e. the Levite priests had different taxation rules than other tribes, for example). Herod, though he was a bit of a puppet installed by Rome, was himself still ethnically Hebrew and understood how those tax rules worked (as a layer on top of Roman tax codes), and so it logically follows for him to do what historical accounts record that he actually did: gather everyone in geographic locations that correspond to their tribal identities, and then count whoever's there, then apply the per-tribe rules and do the math.

To take another example, in the rest of Hebrew history, the most common reason for doing censuses wasn't to determine how many people live in a spot; it's to determine how many fighting men (and chariots, and horses, etc) your military was, and there are numerous accounts throughout the bible of those counts being segmented by tribal identity (like most of the book of Numbers, and even the book of Revelation at least references this segmentation because it was such a baseline expectation, though there's dispute about how literally to interpret its use there).

Basically, every time you have a Hebrew ruler going to do a census, they count the people by tribe. So again, a quick way to do that is to split everyone up geographically by tribal identity, then count the people in each spot. The ancestral-town thing is exactly in service of that repeatedly-demonstrated historical precedent.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Wait wat? Making an unknown number of people travel to a different city is a "quick" way to count them?

Hardly. It took Mary and Joseph about a week to go one-way to Bethlehem, and they only had to go 80 or 90 miles. A genuinely quick way would be to have people state their tribe while they're being counted. "But how do you know they're telling the truth?" Same way you know they traveled to the correct town to be counted, or that they didn't simply ignore the order and stay put. Having them move just to be counted is no more accurate than simply asking their tribe, definitely less quick, and generally makes no sense.

[–] m0darn@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

You're probably getting a bit confused because Herod was from a Hebrew royal dynasty, but his successful ascent to the throne (after bloody internal power struggles in the region, and even within the same Herodic royal family) was a direct product of Rome aiding him and installing him militarily.

I'm not confused about this. It was a client kingdom, not a Roman province until 6 CE, which is when the Census of Quirinius (the one you mentioned Josephus recording) was done to reckon what taxes should be levied.

The Gospel of Luke uses the Census of Quirinius to date the birth of Jesus but also cites the time of Herod the Great (who died between 5 BCE and 1 CE), while the Gospel of Matthew only references Herod the Great. Most critical scholars agree that Luke is in error, while some religious scholars have attempted to defend the gospel, sometimes invoking unproven claims.

(Emphasis mine)

In order to install an ad valorem property tax in the new province, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, the legate (governor) of the province of Roman Syria starting in 6 CE,[2] was assigned to carry out a census in Judaea.

Scholars point out that there was no single census of the entire Roman Empire under Augustus and the Romans did not directly tax client kingdoms; further, no Roman census required that people travel from their own homes to those of their ancestors.

Is it possible you've been misinformed about how historically accurate the bible is?