We used to think of Jesus and his Nazareth compatriots as essentially backward uneducated Galilean country folk who probably could not read or write and who were ignorant about the rest of the world. Although the town of Sepphoris was known of down through the middle-ages, it was not rediscovered and explored archeologically until the 20th century. It turns out that this town was and is located just four miles from Nazareth and was the major Roman city in Galilee during Jesus’ time.
Sepphoris was a small metropolis and significant in the Roman view of the land of Palestine. Recently conquered and rebuilt by the Romans during Josephus’ time in the final decades of what we call the pre-Christian era, this city sported a large theater, many business sites as well as a large marketplace. Indeed, it appears to have been rebuilt during the very years covered by the early chapters of the New Testament Gospels. In fact, it would seem likely that Jesus’ father Joseph, who was a carpenter, might well have been employed in the Roman rebuilding of this town. Perhaps even Jesus himself may have worked there as a carpenter during the years prior to the beginning of his preaching ministry.
I had a faculty colleague in the late 1960s who actually spent some summers doing archaeological work at Sepphoris. He, along with other biblical scholars, remain puzzled as to why there is no mention of this town in the Gospels. It would surely seem that carpenters, and other workers like Joseph, would have been employed in the rebuilding of this town, and yet it goes entirely unmentioned in the New Testament. After all, it was just an hour’s walk from Nazareth, and even Josephus the Jewish/Roman historian mentions this little city several times in his Jewish Antiquities.
Indeed, it seems very strange that in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry, when he visits numerous villages around his home of Nazareth, there is no mention of Sepphoris. After all, the two towns were only about four miles apart. If indeed Jesus grew up in this immediate area, one would surely expect there to be some reference to this town, no matter how brief. A quick look at a map of the area in that time reveals that there were numerous towns and villages spotted all around the region northwest of the Sea of Galilee, many of which, such as Capernaum, Tiberias, and Cana, are referenced in the Gospels as having been visited by Jesus.
This geographic mystery concerning an important city being completely neglected in the Gospel accounts is paralleled by the by the absolute lack of any biblical references to Jesus’ early life, specifically the years between his birth and the beginning of his preaching ministry. There were, to be sure, other attempts to fill in the gaps concerning Jesus’ youth and upbringing, but these have all been set aside by biblical scholars as fanciful. They revolve around stories of how Jesus was able to bring his carved animals to life and beat his childhood friends at races. Apparently the Gospel writers deemed any details about Jesus’ early years to be superfluous to the story of his adult preaching and healing ministry.
Still, it remains puzzling that there is no biblical reference at all to any of Jesus’ life as a child or young man. Scholars conjecture that he began his public ministry around the age of 27 or 30. All things prior to those years are seen as this should be enough. irrelevant. We gain some insight into those years by extrapolating from his manner of speech and behavior during his public ministry, but such speculations yield very little. Perhaps for the purposes of conveying the meaning of his message and life these are sufficient. Nevertheless, I remain spiritually curious about the further details and extrapolations.
Without anything more to go on, I nonetheless enjoy speculating about want sort of person Jesus was simply as a person. I can imagine him arriving for work at Seppforis full of life and openness toward others, careful to cut the boards well and nail the nails straight, as well as enjoying the opportunity to contribute to his family ‘s wellbeing. The fact of the town of Sepphoris opens up this possibility.

Believe it or not there once was a popular song with this title. Of course, they were not singing about Rene Descartes the philosopher. I chose this title because there is a real sense in which it applies to the epistemological efforts of Rene Descartes. He started by trying to find out if there is anything we can know as absolutely certain and ended up in a bit of a mess from which he could not walk away. Here’s how his thinking went. (Meditations on First Philosophy)
What is needed is an absolutely certain beginning point from which we can ascertain whether there is anything else we can know with absolute certainty. He set aside any knowledge he thought he had as a result of sensory perception because it is always subject to error. Rather, he took as his point of departure the statement “I think, therefore I am.” He next reasoned that there is no way he could be mistaken about this proposition because even to think that one is wrong, or to be wrong, requires one’s existence. So now he argued that he knows he can trust his reasoning powers because they establish at least one true belief.
From this starting point Descartes went on to reason that since he can trust his reasoning powers whatever presents itself as “clear and distinctly true” must be so. He next reasoned that he cannot deny the existence of God because he as a finite being could never come up with the idea of an infinite being, namely God, Thus God must exist. These ideas Descartes concluded he could affirm because they presented themselves to him “clearly and distinctly”, therefore he went on to concluded that whatever ideas present themselves to his mind clearly and distinctly can be trusted to be true. Therefore, the idea of God must entail God’s existence because the opposite would involve a contradiction, since God is by definition perfect and would not be so if he did not exist.
He also affirmed the existence of matter, namely his own body, because its reality presents itself to his mind “clearly and distinctly. People then can be said to consist of two sorts of reality, namely minds and bodies, although these two realities were in Rene’ view entirely distinct, the one being mental and the other being physical. This presented a serious, and in the end, fatal problem for young Descartes, because at first he could not think of any way to coordinate and integrate these two types of reality.
He did finally come up with a theory as to how the two realities could be understood as existing in one and the same person. He had heard of the existence of the “pineal gland” deep within the brain, and he reasoned that within the brain these two realities somehow intersected so as to enable our thoughts and our gland there was a kind of swivel which was somehow moved by the mind’s thoughts, much as the wind moves a windmill, thus causing the body to respond appropriately. I think of moving my arm and these winds cause the muscles in my arm act correspondingly.
Thus Descartes was unable to explain how the action might work in the opposite direction. Moreover, there was no explanation for how to bring these two aspects of human reality together. So, there was Rene Descartes, a truly great mind, stuck with an unexplainable dilemma. He could not explain how these two obviously real aspects of human life could be coordinated. This was a logical difficulty from which Rene could not walk away. He was destined, in the minds of subsequent thinkers, to remain fundamentally a dualist, unable to explain the relationship between mind and matter.
Two thinkers who followed in Descartes’ Rationalistic tradition, Spinoza and Leibniz, each settled the matter by affirming that mind and matter are simply two sides of the same reality, Spinoza collapsing mind and matter into one substance (Ethics) and Leibniz doing the opposite (Monadology). One might conclude that neither of these other two Rationalist thinkers hardly really solved Rene’s dilemma. Perhaps they must all walk away.