Beyond the fact that Joseph and Mary occupied a respectable position in Nazareth, we can say little of them. The lineage of both was plainly unknown to the compilers of the Gospels, since Joseph has been endowed with two different fathers, while the parentage of Mary has not even been alluded to. All that we can venture to assert is, that neither of them were reputed to be of the family of David, for Jesus took pains to prove that the Messiah need not, as was commonly believed, be descended from that monarch (Mt. xxii. 41-46; Mk. xii. 35-37; Lu. xx. 41-44). There would have been no occasion for his ingenious suggestion that David, by calling the Messiah Lord, disproved the theory that this Lord must be his son, unless he had felt that his belonging to a family which could not claim such a pedigree might be used as an argument against his Messianic character. We may confidently conclude then that his lineage was obscure. That his birth took place at Nazareth is abundantly obvious from the very contrivances resorted to in Matthew and Luke to take his parents to Bethlehem for that event. According to either of these narratives one fact is plain: that the habitual dwelling-place of the family was Nazareth; while Matthew has preserved the valuable information that he was called a Nazarene (Mt. ii. 23), a statement which is confirmed by the manner in which he is alluded to in John, as "Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph" (Jo. i. 45). Jesus therefore passed in his life-time for a native of Nazareth, and as it does not appear that he ever contradicted the current assumption, as moreover the only two authorities which are at issue with this assumption are also at issue with one another on all but the bare fact of the birth at Bethlehem, we need not hesitate to draw the inference that he was born at Nazareth. In his youth the son of Joseph was apprenticed to his father's trade, and he may have practiced it for many years before he took to his more special vocation of a public teacher. He was at any rate known to his neighbors as "the carpenter," and his abandonment of that calling for one in which he seemed to pretend to a position of authority over others, caused both astonishment and indignation among his old acquaintances.