Chapter 2, Jesus’ Early Childhood

“Son of Man: Urantia,” 2nd edition

Jesus’ Early Childhood

After the family arrived in Alexandria they stayed with Joseph’s relatives. Mary was a diligent mother, and Jesus was healthy and had large group of friends. Because of all that had occurred Mary was at first over protective, but with some urging from Joseph she finally relaxed. For the most part everyone kept quiet about Jesus being a special child, but eventually the word leaked out. Before the family left to return to Palestine a group of people tried to convince Mary and Joseph that if Jesus really was special they should raise him right there in Alexandria. They argued that he would have more influence as a spiritual leader in that grand city than in some small town in Palestine. Mary and Joseph were not convinced, and after the group finally gave up trying to change their minds they instead gifted Jesus with a complete copy of the Jewish scriptures that had been translated into Greek. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus left Alexandria for Palestine in August, 4 B.C. By the beginning of October they were back in Nazareth: they arrived with a new donkey and five relatives who had insisted on walking along with them for their safety.

Back in Nazareth

In Nazareth the family moved back into their small stone house and Joseph found work as a carpenter: life was good. Jesus was now three years, two months old. He was happy, healthy, and full of wonder like all normal boys. None of their neighbors knew anything was different about the family. During this time Jesus became friends with the boy next door, Jacob. Later when they were older, Jacob became Jesus’ best friend and at times his avenger. While Jesus’ body was growing like all of the other children around him, his mind was developing faster.

Early the morning of April 2^nd, 3 B.C. Mary had her second child, James. This was the first of Jesus’ siblings and he was excited to be an older brother. A couple of months later Joseph built a small carpenter shop in town so he could take work from the caravans that stopped at Nazareth for repairs after crisscrossing the desert. His brothers were his partners, and while Joseph would work in the shop making yokes and plows his brothers took their tools and worked around town. Watching his father and then later working with him was how Jesus learned his trade working with wood.

In July, a month before Jesus turned four years old, people in Nazareth suddenly became ill. One of the travelers from the caravans had picked up a stomach flu and it was infecting the whole town. Mary was worried so she took Jesus and James to her brother’s farm in the country and they all stayed there for two months.

The Fifth Year (2 B.C.)

Michael incarnated as the mortal Jesus on Earth for several reasons. His purpose was to clarify that God is an actual spiritual presence in our minds, and that when possible God guides us toward perfection—toward oneness with him, the First Source and Center. After Adam and Eve failed in their mission to uplift humanity and the Earth became one of planets quarantined from the rest of the universe, our world fell into spiritual confusion; we lost the knowledge that the spirit of God is inside every person’s mind: the saving grace that there is no separation between us and God and that the brotherhood of humanity is united through that presence became hidden.

People are born into the animal kingdom, but different than other animals we have minds complex enough that they allow us to make moral choices between something God-like and something not. For most people this potential is demonstrated for the first time when they are about four or five years old; it could be an act as simple as sharing a toy, a decision that contains more truth, beauty, and goodness than the alternative of being selfish and not sharing. As soon as the mortal child makes that choice a spirit of God that is one and the same as God yet unique from all other similar spirits of God enters that child’s mind. This spirit of God is called a Thought Adjuster, and this event begins the process that can result in the melding of this spirit with the human personality to form a new eternal soul in God’s kingdom.

To be clear. Not every person is born with a mind that can choose between right and wrong: for whatever reason some people do not have the ability to make a moral choice. Thought Adjusters do not enter these minds. These people live and die with no connection to God just like all other animals, and they never form an eternal soul.

Furthermore, the humans that do receive a Thought Adjuster are not forced into forming an immortal soul or accepting their gift of eternal life. Each of us has the free will to become one with God or not, and some people decline the opportunity to continue after this first life in the flesh. In those cases, at death the Thought Adjuster that was resident in the person’s mind takes all that was of value in that person’s life and returns with those acts of truth, beauty, and goodness to the Father. What had been the person’s mortal personality then dissipates back into the greater universe like a drop of water would spread throughout the ocean. There is no hell or punishment for those people who do not go on to eternal life, just the cessation of existence by choice.

Jesus made his first moral choice and received his Thought Adjuster on February 11, 2 B.C. when he was four and a half years old. Just like with all other mortals he did not know that anything special had occurred. Five months later on July 11^th Jesus’ first sister, Mariam, was born. By this age Jesus was constantly asking questions. Mary and Joseph tried their best, but they could not always give him an answer. With the arrival of Mariam, Joseph took the opportunity to teach Jesus about how people were conceived and born into the world.

Jesus turned five years old that August. It was the Jews’ custom to raise their children in stages, and up until the child was five years old the mother was in charge. Then with the boys, the father took over and he had the responsibility of raising his son into a man that could assume his place in Jewish society. Accordingly, on Jesus’ birthday, August 21^stMary passed the responsibility for Jesus’ to Joseph. This did not mean that Mary had no part of Jesus’ later education: she continued to teach him about plants and nature and how to care for their family’s garden and animals, and on top of the flat roof of their house Mary covered a section with sand so he could practice his writing and drawing maps of their world. All in all except for his never ending questions that were becoming harder to answer over time, Jesus was growing up just like the other children in Nazareth.

The Sixth Year (1 B.C.)

The summer before Jesus turned six years old, Elizabeth and Zacharias took their son, John, to visit him in Nazareth. The two children got along well and John told Jesus stories about Jerusalem and the happenings in the temple. This led to Jesus then asking Joseph many questions about Jewish history, their religion, and why the Jews were always holding feasts and celebrations. Throughout it all his father did his best to teach, and Jesus did his best to learn.

At this young age, Jesus like other children thought his parents knew everything. But when there was a small earthquake in Palestine that changed. When Jesus asked Joseph what had just happened, his father told him the truth: he did not know. That answer shocked Jesus. Joseph had thought about telling is son that it was either God or the devil that had caused the tremor, but by then he was smart enough not to: that kind of response would have just opened up the door to more questions.

By six years old Joseph had started to teach Jesus Greek. They used the scriptures that had been given to Jesus when he was younger. Joseph was also teaching him Jewish law, history, and religious philosophy. Since there were only two copies of the scriptures in Greek in Nazareth, Jesus had the opportunity to meet with the other people who would come to their house to also study them. While this arrangement helped Jesus because it fueled his passion for God, it put Mary and Joseph in a predicament—Jesus was already realizing that God was not someone far away that he had to go to, but rather that God was right there present in his own mind, and in fact everyone else’s minds.

Given that God was in his mind, Jesus assumed it was logical to talk inside his mind with God his eternal Father just like he talked in person with Joseph his mortal father. But that idea was contrary to Jewish theology. The Jews believed that God was separate from the person, far away, and they were inordinately strict about how they prayed. Mary and Joseph tried to convince Jesus that what he was doing was wrong, but no matter how hard they tried Jesus insisted on having what he called his own little talk with his Father in heaven after he had said his formal Jewish prayers.

This year life was improving for the family. Joseph became a contractor, turned his shop in Nazareth over to his brothers, and started building houses throughout Palestine. The family’s income tripled and Joseph was able to provide well for everyone’s needs. Jesus either spent his time with his father or studying the plants and flowers around the house with his mother; in the evening after being told to go to sleep he would gaze up at the stairs long into the night, his young mind searching for answers.

The Seventh Year (A.D. 1)

The children had a small space in the back of Joseph’s carpenter shop where they played on the floor with scraps of wood. The Jews were a serious people and there were rules governing everything in their lives, including how their children played. These laws governing how the Jews lived their personal lives set them apart from the other cultures, and kept the people under the strict control of the religious leaders. Instead of the normal games other children played, the Jewish children imitated what they saw their parents do: events like weddings, funerals, and religious parties. While Jesus did not understand the reason for all of these rules, he always obeyed his parents.

That July there was a heavy sandstorm, and when Jesus was coming down from the roof he fell. Jesus did not get hurt, but Mary was upset and reverted to being overly protective. She told Joseph to put handrails on the stairs, which he did. This was just an accident like happens to people all the time. Even the invisible beings watching over Jesus were caught off guard and could not have stopped him from falling. But even if those unseen guardians could have interceded, they would not have done so. So as curious and energetic as little Jesus was, it meant that from time to time he was going to take a fall and that kept Mary alert.

This year Jesus’ second brother, Joseph, was born on Wednesday morning, March 1, A.D. 1.

School Days in Nazareth

Jewish boys started school when they were seven years old. The first three years were spent in elementary school, and then they attended three more years in the advanced class. By the time Jesus started school he was already versed in reading, writing, and speaking Greek and Aramaic. On the first day of classes all of the young students had to choose a favorite scripture to guide them through the next six years of learning. Jesus chose his from the Prophet Isaiah: it said that God had sent him to bring good news, to comfort those who were sad, and to free people of false ideas about God.

There were no school books at that time so the teacher, called the chazan, would recite a scripture and then the boys would repeat it until memorized. Religious scriptures were all that were taught in school. When the boy was thirteen years old he graduated, and he was then considered a son of the commandment—a young man indoctrinated in the Jewish faith who was now ready to meet his responsibilities as an adult.

Jesus spent his free time in the area where the caravans camped. Palestine was the hub of the world, and people coming from far off lands across the desert mixed with the Jews in Nazareth. The caravan people were gentiles, and normally Jews would not mingle with them. But since so many people were coming into Nazareth from the desert and the Jews had to do business with them, the Jews in Nazareth had become more relaxed about the rules than the Jews in other towns. That is why the rest of the Jews tended to look down on the people from Nazareth.

This mixing of Jews and gentiles benefited Jesus. Talking with people from around the world opened his mind to other ways of life. By spending time with the travelers and conductors from the caravans, Jesus learned to love people. These conversations, along with what he learned from the various rabbis that spoke at the temple, well prepared him for his later life’s work.

On the Sabbath Joseph would take Jesus for walks in the country where he developed his love for nature. There was a high hill they would climb that had a 360-degree view of the surrounding area. To the north they could see the snow coved peak of Mount Hermon; to the east was the Jordan Valley and way off on the horizon were the rocky hills of Moab. On a bright day if looking to the south-east they could see the white walls of the Greco-Roman cities of the Decapolis, and when the sun went down in the west they could just make out the sails far off on the Mediterranean Sea.

By the time Jesus was eight years-old he was learning to weave, make cheese, milk the cows and take care of the family’s other animals. He was well liked in town.

Jesus’ Eighth Year (A.D. 2)

Jesus was not the best student in class, but he was in the top one-third and his grades allowed him to be excused from school one week out of every month. During his breaks he would either visit his uncle with the farm, or his other uncle who fished in the Sea of Galilee near Magdala. Jesus met a teacher from Damascus who taught him arithmetic, and over the next several years Jesus became an expert at math. He started playing the harp and teaching his younger brother, James the alphabet. His questions about things like science, religion, geography, and astronomy were still causing problems with the adults. They could not answer his questions without referring to God or the devil or some sort of evil spirit, and even at eight years old Jesus knew those answers were nonsense.

In February a rabbi from Jerusalem named Nahor arrived at the house. He had come to convince Mary and Joseph to let him take Jesus back with him to raise in Jerusalem. He argued that Nazareth was to liberal, but Mary and Joseph said no. Nahor in his final effort to convince them, asked Mary and Joseph to let Jesus decide. After Jesus had listened to both sides he thought about the idea for two days. Finally, Jesus told them that he could not decide so he had asked his father in heaven. The answer he received was to stay in Nazareth with his parents. Jesus said his mother and father’s love would guide and guard him better than any stranger’s love could. That convinced Nahor and he went back to Jerusalem. After that it was a long time before anyone else tried to take Jesus out of Nazareth.