Let’s suppose Jesus was indeed a carpenter.   Where did he get his wood?  I’m assuming he didn’t pick it up at Lowe’s or Home Depot….

Pondering that question has helped me think in more granular detail about why it makes no sense to talk about Jesus in relation to modern economics.  It’s easy, of course (and completely right), to say in principle that Jesus could not be a capitalist because there was no such thing as capitalism then (or socialism, or marxism, or pick your ism).  But it’s useful to think in a bit more detail about it.  Why couldn’t Jesus be a capitalist?

There certainly were people (presumably lots of them) at his time, as always, who were committed to making profits, to adjusting prices based on the market (that is, charging the most they could get), and to competing for customers without governments governing the means of production or setting prices, etc.  But a capitalist economy as we know it requires advanced technology, production, and distribution, unavailable to humans in Jesus’ day, or ever, actually, for nearly all of humanity’s first 300,000 years.

To illustrate the point, let’s think about pins and gates.

Adam Smith begins The Wealth of Nations by discussing the importance of specialization or production for modern economies, famously providing the example metal pins.  How long does it take to make a pin?  If you don’t have any machinery to produce it, well, good luck period.  Doing it with or without advanced equipment requires drawing out the wire, straightening it, cutting it, pointing it, grinding the top flat to make it receptable to a head, fashioning the head itself, attaching it to the body, and so on.  In the end, Smith points out, it takes something like eighteen different tasks to do the job – to make a single pin.  If you’re the one doing all this you almost certainly could not make 20 pins a day.  Maybe only one.

But Smith visited a pin factory that employed ten people, each with a specific task (or two or three closely connected ones).  Doing it that way, with the requisite machinery, one person is drawing the wire, another straightening it, another cutting it, etc.  This small business could produce around 48,000 pins in a day, that is, an average of about 4800 per person (instead of less than 20).

Extend that to other industries.  How many functions are there for producing a wool coat?  You need a shepherd/sheerer, a sorter of the wool, a scribbler, a carder, a dyer, a spinner, a weaver, a fuller, and so on (not to mention work involved with producing buttons etc.).  If you are all of those, how long will it take?

And then you have to sell it.  If you make hundreds of coats (or tens of thousands of pins), you need customers who want them and are willing to pay for them.  Otherwise there’s no point making them.  To get your products to them you need transportation system (today: planes, trains, ships, eighteen-wheelers, etc.).   All those means of conveyance as well, though, can only be manufactured en mass by advances in technology and specialization and yet other transport systems.

Jesus, obviously, had none of the above.

If Jesus was a woodworker, how would he do his work?

Jesus lived in a small hamlet, Nazareth, in rural Galilee.  Archaeologists have shown that it was a small place, covering around four acres, with possibly 50 houses, and a population perhaps of 400 or so.  (Based on Mark 6:3, Jesus’ family would have numbered 9 or 10 at least – himself, his parents, four brothers, and at least two sisters).  Everyone was poor – there were no public buildings or signs of wealth (e.g. nice dishware, mosaics, etc).  The houses were evidently built from field stones piled on one another with the gaps filled with smaller stones, insulated with mud, clay, or dung mixed with straw, and with thatched roofs.

There were no major roads connected to the village.  There must have been trails to nearby villages but there appears to have been no road leading to the closest city, Sephoris.

As with most villages in Galilee, residents of Nazareth would principally have been farmers, growing their own produce and paying taxes (Roman and the Jewish temple tax) out of whatever surplus they had.  Subsistence living.  There is no evidence of large agricultural estates there, so the inhabitants would not have been working as tenant farmers (i.e., more or less above the level of slavery).  But the soil was fertile and there was ample rainfall.  The main crops were grains (barley or wheat), olives, fruits, nuts, and vegetables.  It was in a forested area with olive trees, oak, terebinth and some pine.

Households would have had their own plots of land to grow what they needed to survive; all family members who could (men, women, and old-enough children) would have worked the fields.  Some of the adults would have engaged in craftwork on the side to meet the needs of for others in the community.  There would have been need for metal work (for tools and such), rough stone work, wood work, and so on.  These would have been “occasional” jobs, in addition to the farming, and primarily done on a bartering system (archaeologists have found some coins, but not a lot).

It is striking that the people of Nazareth refer to Jesus as “the” carpenter (Mark 6:3).  That suggests what otherwise simply makes sense, that the village needed only one.  And doing what, specifically?

In a book written around 150 CE, the Christian author Justin Martyr indicates that Jesus made “yokes and plows” (Dialogue with Trypho, 88).  That completely plausible.  It’s not that Justin had some inside information about Jesus; it’s just that he knew what carpenters in that kind of setting made.  Farmers need yokes and plows.”  They also need hand tools (often with wood handles).  They would have probably needed gates (both made and repaired).  Many doors in Israel were solid stone on stone hinges; but there were wooden doors as well – so these too may have been included in the wood-inventory.   In addition, thatched roofs required wooden beams to hold them.

So let’s say Jesus made those things on occasion, as they were needed.  Back to my original question.  Where did he get the wood?  Since Nazareth was in a forested area, timber was certainly available available.  He probably harvested it himself.  Unlike small villages, in urban settings where there were large building projects, the woodworkers (carpenters and/or joiners) could purchase wood from woodcutters who actually felled the trees.  But in rural areas, the woodworker (say, Jesus) almost certainly was also the wielder of the axe.

They normally did use axes for that, and for de-barking.  Saws were available (though it’s not clear if they would have been in a small place like Nazareth) but were used mainly for sectioning the fallen tree.  Wedges and mallets were suitable for splitting.  After that, adzes, mallets, chisels, planes etc. would have been used.  Again, for rural villages, that would not have been fine cabinetry, but gates, possibly doors, roof beams, yokes, plows, handles for tools, etc.

Why can't Jesus be a capitalist? He's living in a different universe.

And so, if Jesus was “the” carpenter in town, apprenticed, say, to his father Joseph. he would have taken on jobs as requested and probably worked by himself – cutting down the tree, stripping it, sectioning it, splitting it, and going from there.  How many gates could he make in a day?  Well, none.  How many days would it take?  I don’t know.  Maybe one of you will try it yourself and see (time yourself from start to finish and divide by, say, four (?) to see what someone who did it regularly could do).

Now then.  What if Jesus had a vision of the future and realized there could be a better way.  He decided to started a company with ten other hardy fellows from Nazareth to “mass produce” the yokes and gates and what nots.   Suppose they were extremely efficient, each with their specialized individual tasks.  Suppose they could crank out five gates a week.  Twenty a month.  Month after month. OK, that opens up the option for capitalist ventures.  But, well, who are they going to sell them to?  There are only 40 houses in town, and they already have gates and yokes and plows.

To make a “profitable business” out of it, they would have to see them outside of Nazareth.  So would they export them?  How?  Carry them?  There aren’t railroads.  And places nearby already have their own carpenters.

Production in a capitalist economy requires both advanced technology and specialized division of labor along with (relatively large) markets with people who have money to spend, as well as modes and systems of efficient transportation for distribution.  None of that was conceived of in Jesus’ day, let alone in a small village in rural Galilee not even connected with a major road.  There was no modern technology; no significant markets; no transportation systems.

Why can’t Jesus be a capitalist?  He’s living in a different universe.

What would he have thought about capitalist principles and practices.  That is another story.  Or possibly two other stories.