Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?

• Matthew 13:55

Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

• Mark 6:3

So Rachel died and was buried on the way to Ephrath (that is, Bethlehem).

• Genesis 35:19

Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. 

• Mark 2:4

There is a slight difference in the wording of the first two Bible verses above, but that can often happen with eyewitness accounts.  Experts would tell you that it makes it more real.  Being exactly the same would mean collusion, and why have more than one Gospel if they were all the same?

But whether they are talking about Jesus being a carpenter or Jesus being the son of a carpenter, I have heard and read scholars who claim that the word in the Greek really means a general builder.  They start talking about the building trades of the first century and if you only worked with wood, you did not get a lot of work to do.

When I have heard and read these comments it irritated me.  Sure, I “taught” a class in December about how Luke 2 mentions manger, but we invent the donkey Mary rode into town on, the animals in the barn or stable.  Luke 2 does not mention animals, except the flock of sheep outside of town.  Luke 2 does not mention a building of any sort.  These days, the tour in Bethlehem takes you to a cave outside of town.  But Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not somewhere close to Bethlehem.  Sorry, I believe in “prepositions.”  Rachel gave birth the Benjamin and then she died (Genesis 35:19).  She was buried along the road to Bethlehem, not in Bethlehem.

But then, it was like God tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You, idiot!  You know the answer.”

The photo above explains what the biblical scholars could not figure out.  There are five photos in the image.  One has a young soldier wearing a yellow hardhat, working on a fence.  The fence is made of wire.  Right?  The young soldier was an electrician, and his helper was a carpenter.  Okay, that is true, but really…  A combat engineer heavy platoon has about twenty carpenters, five or six electricians, if you are lucky, and I was blessed – one mason, and maybe one or two plumbers.  Then you had a few truck drivers.  Total of a little under forty soldiers, usually.  It was the way they set up the construction schools after the soldiers left basic training.

But do you clearly see any wood in any of the photos?

The young soldier laying glass brick in the ladies’ shower room at a gymnasium in an undisclosed location in Germany is a young man that I greatly admired.  He carried a mason’s tools around for a few weeks, and then the mason went on leave back to the USA and managed to get a hardship transfer and discharge.  I only had the mason for a few months.  He was a certified mason in civilian life. He had joined the Army Reserve.  He loved the extra pay, but he did not like going to drill meetings once a month, especially when his customers paid double and triple normal hourly rates to work on weekends.  On those weekends, he was losing a lot of money.  The Army did not like his attitude, and they punished him by giving him orders to report to active duty.  Before he knew what was going on, he was in Karlsruhe, West Germany, putting glass brick windows in a veterinary clinic in an undisclosed location where they had a lot of guard dogs.

Why did I admire the young soldier?  He was a carpenter, and there was absolutely no work for carpenters in a concrete block world in Germany at that time (late 1970s).  He watched that mason for about a month, and when the mason left, he took over.  And frankly, he did a better job.

The two photos of young soldiers swinging hammers at a concrete wall were trying to fix their own mess.  These men were carpenters, but they learned that putting grout on a trowel and throwing the grout onto a vertical wall was not that easy.  And once the grout dried and the wall had slumped toward the floor, you finally got to use a carpenter’s tool (the hammer) to bust the grout off the wall and start over.

The central photo is of two opposite people.  The yellow hardhat soldier was a staff sergeant.  He would retire as a sergeant major soon after the first Gulf War.  When they knocked down a concrete wall to redirect the stairway away from what was now the ladies’ restroom, locker room, and shower room (where the glass brick was laid), they found a hole in the floor.  An interesting hole with pipes marked with swastikas.  The soldier with the white hardhat was fresh out of his carpentry school and was regretting ever joining the Army.

But finally, there was a need for carpenters.  They built a form to pour the steps down to floor level.  When you were in Germany in those days, you would arm wrestle ten gorillas just to have a chance to hold a nail and swing a hammer.

Sure, Joseph was a carpenter, but when the work that day called for cutting a stone to fit in a particular spot, he got tools and went to work.  The buildings may have been stone and dirt for the most part, but they had doors and gates for the animal entrance.  Yes, the animals and the people lived under the same roof most of the time.  In the winter, you used the animals’ heat to keep the house a bearable temperature, but the animals stayed on a lower level.  And the roof may have had some kind of clay sealant, but to lower the paralytic man down to Jesus, they cut through layers of wood, a form to lay the clay upon (Mark 2:4).

Among the carpenters on the job site in the first century, did Joseph, and for a time Jesus, arm wrestle the other carpenters to get the door job or the roof work?

The word might have meant “builder,” and they chose carpenter when translating.  There may not have been a lot of pure carpentry work in those days.  But I had some very flexible carpenters.  Sure, they complained about not seeing a nail for weeks, but they did the work that they were assigned to the best of their ability.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.