Before such problems, the method of "liberal" accommodation here as always breaks down. To the eye of the evolutionist there is no great mystery. The avowal that the Founder either could not or did not work wonders at Nazareth might serve any one of several conceivable purposes. It might meet the cavils of those who in a later day found and said that nothing was known at Nazareth of a wonder-working Jesus who had dwelt there; even as the often-repeated story of the command to healed persons to keep silence could avail to turn the attacks of investigating doubters in regard to the miraculous cures. Or it might serve either to impugn the pretensions of those who at one stage of the movement called themselves "Nazarenes" in the sense of followers of the man of Nazareth, or to include the birthplace with the family and the disciples in that disparagement of the Jewish surroundings which would arise step for step with the spread of the Gentile movement. Any of these explanations is reasonable beside the thesis that a man gifted with marvellous healing powers, suddenly developed without any previous sign of them, could either find no one in his own village to let him try them, or to recognize them even when applied there, while the country round about, ex hypothesi, was ringing with his fame. And the criticism which puts us off with such solutions is really not well entitled to impute "superficiality" to those who reject it.
The whole "carpenter" story, in which M. Loisy sees no difficulty, is one of the weakest of the Gospel attempts at circumstantiality. A trade or calling for the Messiah, as a true Jew, was perhaps as requisite in the eyes of some Jews as either a Davidic descent or an argument to prove that Davidic descent was for the Messiah unnecessary--both of which requirements the Gospels meet. Every good Jew, we are told, was required to have a handicraft or profession. A "Ben-Joseph," again, was called-for to meet the requirement, common among the Samaritans but not confined to them, of a Messiah so named. [146] But how came it that "the carpenter" of Mark is only "the carpenter's son" in Matthew? We can conceive the Gentilizing Luke putting both statements aside as ill-suited to his purpose, his Jesus being a God competing with Gentile Gods; but if there really was an early knowledge that Jesus was a carpenter, why should Matthew minimize it? And how came it that Origen [147] knew of no Gospel "current in the churches" in which Jesus was described as a carpenter?