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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 591. The Home at Nazareth
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The Home at Nazareth
The life of the household in which he was brought up was one of the utmost simplicity and frugality. The furniture, the meals, and the dress of all the members were of the plainest kind. Luxury was unknown, just as poverty was equally unknown. The necessaries of life were much cheaper in Galilee than in Judæa, and a moderate income sufficed to maintain a family in comfort. Food, clothing, and a house were readily procured by any man prepared to work. Joseph, it may be taken for granted, was diligent in business, and his trade of village carpenter or wright, though doubtless yielding him only a modest competence, was amply sufficient to supply the wants of his family. The sons and daughters of the home would be brought up to assist their father and mother from their earliest years, and the boys would be set to work as soon as they left school.
The circumstances of Eastern life take away all the sting from the condition of the industrious poor. The wants of life are there reduced to their simplest elements. There is no wasteful luxury, no extravagant display. A little bread, a few dates, a spring of water, a humble cottage, a single change of raiment, are enough to support the honest labourer in dignity and contentment; and these he can earn with ease and certainty. Where there is no envy in the heart, where restlessness and ambition are under due control, such a state of life is not only tolerable, it is endowed with special elements of happiness. There must, we may be sure, have been many who sat around our Lord as they listened to the Sermon on the Mount who could understand from happy personal experience the beatitudes pronounced upon the poor who were also poor in spirit.1 [Note: F. W. Farrar, The Early Days of Christianity, 280.]
2. Whatever means of instruction were within reach of the home at Nazareth, would, we may feel certain, have been eagerly taken advantage of by all its inmates. While accepting, therefore, the view which seems to be best supported, that Jesus and His brothers usually spoke Aramaic, we are surely not bound to suppose that, with towns like Sepphoris and Tiberias in their immediate vicinity, with Ptolemais, Scythopolis, and Gadara at no great distance, they remained ignorant of Greek. In the eyes of the scribes they might “never have learnt letters,” since they had not attended the Rabbinical schools at Jerusalem; but the ordinary education of Jewish children and the Sabbath readings in the synagogue would give sufficient start to enable any intelligent boy to carry on his studies for himself; while the example of Solomon and the teaching of the so-called “sapiential” books held up the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as the highest duty of man.
The love of knowledge is a passion which, once in possession of the mind, can hardly ever be extinguished; it is noble in its nature too, and like other noble passions elevates itself into a kindred with all the virtues of the character.2 [Note: The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, i. 186.]
3. James's father, as St. Matthew tells us (Mat_1:19), was a “just” or “righteous” man, like the parents of the Baptist (Luk_1:6); and this was the title by which James was known during his lifetime, and by which he is still constantly known. He is James “the Just.” The epithet, as used in Scripture of his father and others (Mat_1:19; Mat_23:35; Luk_1:6; Luk_2:25; Luk_23:50; Act_10:20; 2Pe_2:7, and in history of him, must not be understood as implying precisely what the Athenians meant when they styled Aristides “the Just,” or what we mean now by being “just.” To a Jew the word implied not merely being impartial and upright, but also having a studied and even scrupulous reverence for everything prescribed by the Law. The Sabbath, the synagogue worship, the feasts and fasts, purification, tithes, all the moral and ceremonial ordinances of the Law of the Lord-these were the things on which the just man bestowed a loving care, and in which he preferred to do more than was required, rather than the bare minimum insisted on by the Rabbis. It was in a home of which righteousness of this kind was the characteristic that James was reared, and in which he became imbued with that reverent love for the Law which makes him, even more than St. Paul, to be the ideal “Hebrew of Hebrews.” For him Christ came “not to destroy, but to fulfil.” Christianity turns the Law of Moses into a “royal law” (Jam_2:8), but it does not abrogate it. The Judaism which had been his moral and spiritual atmosphere during his youth and early manhood remained with him after he had learned to see that there was no antagonism between the Law and the Gospel.
New England literature is essentially a product of the Puritan spirit, though of the Puritan spirit touched, liberalized, transfigured by new thought and cosmopolitan culture. Now, all the great New England writers were men of Puritan ancestry; and this fact enables us at once to account for their splendid moral fibre, the strength and nobility of their characters, the religious element which is so prominent in their works, and their insistent-often, indeed, over-insistent-didacticism and preoccupation at all times with ethical themes.1 [Note: W. H. Hudson, Lowell and his Poetry, 13.]
4. It is certain from the custom prevailing among the Jews of his rank in life that James would be taught a trade, and it is quite probable that tradition is correct in saying that he became a carpenter, like his father. It may also be supposed that he was married. Marriage was regarded as a duty among the Jews, and St. Paul says (1Co_9:5) that the brethren of the Lord took their wives with them when they went to visit the churches.
That it was a beautiful household in which he was brought up, well governed, happily trained, we may well believe. She who was honoured above all women by being privileged to be the mother of Jesus, and to train Him in His childhood, must have been a good mother to all her children. The presence of her sons, on more than one occasion, with her seems to indicate that the domestic ties were close and warm, that it was a happy, united household till an awful tragedy temporarily scattered it. But more we cannot say. That the influence of the Perfect Child shed a radiance of unseen joy and an atmosphere of purity all around Him wherever He went is what we should all have expected. And yet the family may have been slow to perceive its rare significance. Evidently there was nothing outwardly abnormal about His life and action. The foolish legends of apocryphal gospels are quite out of harmony with the probability suggested by the silence of the authentic records of Christ's life.
Something that abode endued
With temple-like repose, an air
Of life's kind purposes pursued
With order'd freedom sweet and fair.
A tent pitch'd in a world not right
It seemed, whose inmates, every one,
On tranquil faces bore the light
Of duties beautifully done,
And humbly, though they had few peers,
Kept their own laws, which seemed to be
The fair sum of six thousand years'
Traditions of civility.1 [Note: Coventry Patmore.]
Embosomed among soft grey swells, Nazareth was shut out from the world, and offered a sweet seclusion, than which nothing could have been better fitted for the early years of our Lord and His brethren. There was nothing to distract or disturb in the idyllic isolation of the little valley. The young child could not see beyond the heights around it, but when the years brought growing vigour and curiosity, He would only need to wander to the top of the village hill to have a wondrous panorama before Him. The great plain of Esdraelon lay at His feet, to the south; then, no doubt, rich in varied growths, to the far-away foot of the Samaritan hills and the range of Carmel. To the west His eye would sweep, over the sinking fringe of the hills of lower Galilee, to the “Great Sea,” where the promontory of Carmel plunges down into the Mediterranean waters. In the east He had before Him the great wooded cone of Mount Tabor, then crowned by a stronghold, but covered on its sides, we may be assured, as it is to-day, with rich growths of varied green. The caravan track from Damascus to the coast had run for ages, as it still does, along Esdraelon, two hours from Nazareth; and over it, when old enough to stray as far as the heights looking down on the plain, He would see long strings of camels, each tied to one before, and all following the humble ass of the turbaned driver, leisurely pacing east or west, to or from distant Syria, laden with the wheat or oil or other produce of Western Asia, or bearing back the varied commodities of Phœnicia, the great trading mart of those ages. There are no signs of any highway ever having led up from the great plain to the tableland of Nazareth, and even now one has to let his native horse climb the steep cliff as it best can. Indeed, the ascent is only possible to a creature bred in the country, twisting and winding between rocks, or forcing its way up slopes distressingly near the perpendicular.1 [Note: C. Geikie, Hours with the Bible: The Gospels, 13.]