The itinerant ministry of Jesus and his disciples in Galilee includes a visit to Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth, some twenty-five miles to the southwest of Capernaum (6:1–6a). Nazareth lacked both distinction and importance. It is not mentioned in the Old Testament or in Josephus or rabbinic literature; even in Christian literature it is not mentioned until two hundred years after Jesus’s day. According to archaeological evidence, first-century Nazareth was an obscure hamlet of earthen dwellings cut into sixty acres of rocky hillside, with a population of no more than five hundred peasants. The reference to Jesus as a “carpenter” (6:3) is not overtly demeaning, for the m…