There’s a mosaic that archaeologists unearthed in the ancient city of Sepphoris in Israel. Colloquially it’s called “the Mona Lisa of Sepphoris.”
The city was destroyed by the Romans for rebellion sometime around the switch from B.C. to A.D. Later Herod Antipas, the head-chopper of John the Baptist, came along and rebuilt the city to make it his capital for Galilee. He built a huge metropolis (by the standards of the time).
This occurred during the childhood and young adulthood of Jesus, and Nazareth was six miles away from Sepphoris.
The King James Bible says Joseph and Jesus were carpenters. That’s a translation of the Greek word tekton, which actually has a more general meaning of “builder” with a likely emphasis on stone masonry. After all, vast forests of trees are not exactly a common feature in Palestine to supply wood for carpenters.
With the massive building projects going on in nearby Sepphoris, it’s extremely likely that Joseph and Jesus were recruited to take part in them. That means, while we traditionally think of Jesus as having a primarily rural influence in his life, he must also have had a strong urban influence as well.
If you go back and check his parables, you can see that urban influence in some of them. It could very well be that, when he refers to kings in them, he’s patterning them after King Antipas, just six miles away.
There’s also a small theoretical possibly—very small!—that Joseph and Jesus worked on the very building this mosaic was found in. Possibly they even created the mosaic itself?
This is all highly speculative and unlikely. But I’m God (i.e. a storyteller), and I declare that it’s absolutely true that they did work on this mosaic, at least in my screenplay’s world, because that would be cool. And that the face they used for the woman in the mosaic was the face of the woman who was their wife and mother, Mary.
That’s what dramatic license is all about: putting cool things into your story that maybe might be theoretically possible. Things that never would have occurred to you if you hadn’t done research.