We may thus agree fully with Crossan (and others) that peasant culture is an essential part of the background for the Gospels. Regardless of how one defines “peasant,” Jesus of Nazareth grew up in a rural village setting. As we shall note again in ch. 12, Nazareth is too insignificant a site67 for tradition to have invented.68 Indeed, detractors might even count this location against Jesus’ credibility (cf. Jn 1:46).69 (It is rarely disputed today; that Jesus was from Nazareth is multiply, independently attested.)70
Much of Jesus’ audience must have also consisted of rural, agrarian peasants. In contrast to the settings of later rabbinic parables, the settings of the majority of Jesus’ extant parables reflect an agrarian environment.71 That such a setting generates perspectives that differ from an urban setting should go without saying. (For example, my wife, a Congolese professor who spent much of her childhood in rural village settings, was able to make more sense of many details in Genesis’ patriarchal narratives on the basis of her personal background than I was with my academic training in biblical studies.)
But was Jesus himself a peasant? Leaders of movements do not always arise from the same socioeconomic status as most of their followers (although they sometimes do). The answer to the question of Jesus’ peasanthood may depend largely on how we define “peasant,” but if we define it in its basic sense as an agrarian laborer, Jesus was probably not a peasant himself.72
Our only concrete sources for Jesus’ occupation preceding his teaching career portray him as a carpenter, a woodworker. This was not a despised profession like some others,73 but neither was it a sufficiently prestigious occupation (such as, say, a scribe) to suggest that later members of the Jesus movement would have invented it. Conjoined with the near certainty that Jesus spent most of his childhood in Nazareth, this occupation readily fits what we know of Jesus’ period and location, knowledge probably absent to most non-Galilean Christians. From 6 CE, when Jesus was perhaps a boy approaching adolescence, Antipas immediately began rebuilding the devastated Galilean capital of Sepphoris74 — from which Nazareth was a distance of only four miles.75 That Joseph (Matt 13:55) and Jesus (Mk 6:3)76 were carpenters fits this situation quite well, since precisely that work (along with stonemasons) would have been in high demand.77 Yet carpenters were artisans, not peasants, and many assign them to the upper ten percent of nonaristocratic Galilean society.78
The few disciples whose backgrounds are mentioned in the Gospels are also not agrarian peasants: four fishermen and one or more tax gatherers (Mk 1:16, 19; 2:14; cf. Lk 19:8).79 Perhaps the Gospels specify only those with striking occupations; or perhaps fishermen could better afford to follow Jesus than farmers could (though the latter could probably travel seasonally, especially outside harvest and planting times).80 In the final analysis, the dominant element in the crowds that followed Jesus most likely consisted of peasants; but they did not comprise all of Jesus’ followers, at least not if we mean “peasant” in any technical sense.
Thus, although general studies of peasant culture shed some light on Galilean agriculturalists,81 the picture of Jesus as a “peasant”82 is not very nuanced, dependent as it is on a rather broad definition of “peasant.”83 Some could also use the title to detract from more specifically Jewish characteristics of Jesus’ identity.84
