a skilled tradesman who builds and repairs by hand in hard materials: a builder, craftsman, or carpenter
This word names a trade, not a rank. A tekton was the tradesman a village called on when something had to be built or mended: the man who cut and set a roof beam, shaped a door frame, squared a block of stone for a wall, or made the wooden ploughs and yokes a farmer could not work without. Greek had narrower words when a writer wanted one, for the metalworker (χαλκεύς) or for the man who planned a building project and directed its crew (ἀρχιτέκτων). Left on its own, this word stayed broad.
How broad shows up in the Greek Old Testament, where it stands in for the Hebrew word for a craftsman (חָרָשׁ) and regularly has to be pinned down by naming the material. When Hiram sends workers to David, the text has to specify craftsmen "of wood" and craftsmen "of stone" in the same breath, which tells you the bare word would not have said which. First-century usage points the same way: Josephus, describing a siege he lived through, uses it for the men who raised a city wall and for the crews who marched with Roman armies carrying building tools.
That breadth matters for the two places the New Testament uses the word, because Galilean villages were built of stone and timber was scarce. The man Nazareth called a tekton most likely worked whatever a job called for, wood one week and stone the next, and probably carried his tools to sites beyond his own village.
Both uses come from one scene, a hometown crowd refusing to take Jesus seriously. Mark has the neighbors ask whether this is not "the craftsman"; Matthew has them ask whether this is not "the craftsman's son." In a world that looked down on manual labor, that was not a neutral observation. It was their way of saying that a man out of a tradesman's household had no business teaching them with authority.
Disputed
Whether τέκτων in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55 denotes a woodworker by default or a builder-craftsman whose materials include stone, and which English rendering is therefore accurate.
- contestedThe word is a general term for a builder-craftsman covering stone and occasionally metal as well as wood, so "builder" is the most accurate rendering for a first-century Galilean village of stone construction; Josephus's contemporary usage in the Jewish War, the LXX's need to qualify τέκτων with a genitive of material, and the papyri all point this way.; Ken M. Campbell, "What Was Jesus' Occupation?" JETS 48/3 (2005): 501-519; J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed., §45.11; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1 (Doubleday, 1991), 280-281
- contestedWoodworking remains the word's default when no material is named, since Greek writers regularly set τέκτων against χαλκεύς and λιθολόγος, the documentary papyri support the narrower use, and the earliest external memory of Jesus's trade (Justin, Dialogue 88.8) names wooden ploughs and yokes; "carpenter" therefore stands, with the wider range acknowledged.; J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, 628-629, s.v. τέκτων; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8 (Anchor Yale Bible 27; Doubleday, 2000), 375; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 2002), 242-243