When the family got to Alexandria, Joseph found work as a carpenter and they lived with his relatives. Mary was a diligent mother, Jesus was healthy, and he had large group of friends. Because of all that had happened, at first Mary tended to be somewhat of a helicopter mom. Who could blame her? Herod was killing babies trying to get to Jesus. But with a little urging from Joseph she finally lightened-up, even though she was always close-by watching over her son.
For the most part, anyone who knew kept quiet about Jesus being a special child. But, as usually happens with secrets, the word got out. Before the family went back to Palestine, some believers in Jesus’ mission came to visit the family. They tried to convince Mary and Joseph that if Jesus really was special, that they should raise him right there in Alexandria. Their argument was that he’d have more influence as a spiritual leader in that great city, than kicking up the dust somewhere out in the boonies of Palestine. But Mary and Joseph were firm: they wouldn’t budge. So in the end, this group gave Jesus a gift of a complete copy of the Jewish religious writings that had been translated into Greek.
The family left Alexandria for Palestine that August, 4 B.C. By the beginning of October, they were back in Nazareth. The arrived with a new donkey and five relatives who had insisted on walking along with them for safety.
Back in Nazareth
When the family got back to Nazareth, they moved back into their little stone house. Joseph found work as a carpenter, and life was going smoothly. At this point Jesus was three years two months old. He was happy and healthy and full of wonder just like all normal kids. Mary and Joseph still agreed to not tell anyone Jesus was special, so none of their neighbors knew anything was different. Around this time Jesus met the kid next door, Jacob. Later when they were older, Jacob became Jesus’ best friend, and at times, avenger. While Jesus’ body was growing like all the other kids around him, his mind was developing faster.
Early the morning of April 2, 3 B.C., Mary had another baby, James. This was the first of Jesus’ brothers, and he was as excited as a boy could be. A couple of months later, Joseph built a small workshop in town. This way he could work for the caravans that were always crisscrossing the desert, and that stopped at Nazareth for rest and repairs. In his shop, Joseph made yokes and plows and other things out of wood that the caravans needed. His brothers were his partners, and he’d work there during the day while they’d take their tools and go out and work around town. It was here that Jesus watched his father and learned his own trade as a carpenter.
In July of that year, a month before Jesus turned four, the people in Nazareth started getting sick. One of the travelers that came in on the caravans had picked up a stomach flu and spread it around the whole town. Mary got so worried that she snatched up her two boys and went to live with her brother on his farm in the country. They hung out there for two months. It was Jesus’ first experience living on a farm, and of course the kid had a ball the whole time.
The Fifth Year (2 B.C.)
Michael, the creator of our universe and our very existence, came to Earth as a human for several reasons. The most important of these tasks was to clarify people’s understanding of their relationship to God. He was to let humanity know that our link to God is personal. That God is, in a very real sense, in you and when possible, guiding you. When our Adam and Eve failed humanity and the Lucifer Rebellion resulted in our planet being quarantined from the rest of the universe, we lost the basic knowledge that we’re one with God. We fell into confusion.
God is not something far away. There is no journey to God; no separation between us and God. When we show the potential to become an eternal soul, God finds us and then partners with us in the making of that soul.
For those of you who missed it earlier, people are born just like any other animal. But different from other animals, most of us are born with a mind that can mature to know the difference between something that’s right or wrong, for lack of better words. That means the person has the ability to make a moral choice between something that’s God-like, and something that isn’t. And we’re not talking about some huge complicated decision: This event happens for the first time when kids are about four or five years old. It could be something as simple as a little girl sharing her toys for the first time. That kind of thing.
Now, in that case, as soon as the little girl choses to share her toys, God knows it. Immediately, a part of God called a Thought Adjuster enters her young mind. Then over a long process, the new developing human personality and the Thought Adjuster from God blend together into a new eternal soul unique from all others.
So, the saying that all are One is true since we’re all part of this one God. Remember, all Thought Adjusters are in fact one and the same with God, and they are in each one of us. But that’s not the end point. Each of us at the same time also has our own human personality that is unique across the entire kosmos of billions on billions of worlds. So when a Thought Adjuster that’s one with God pairs up with something that is unique in the kosmos, the result is both, all are One, and yet all are unique. We’re all our own flavor of God, and as such we all have our own purpose and unlimited potential for creating things God-like: In other words, truth, beauty, and goodness.
To be clear. Not every person that’s born develops a mind that can choose between right and wrong. For whatever reason the ability to make a moral choice just isn’t there in some cases. Thought Adjusters don’t enter these minds. These people live and die with no connection to God just like all other animals, and never form an eternal soul.
And another point: The humans that do receive a Thought Adjuster are not forced into becoming a soul. Each of us has to choose to join with God, and for whatever reason, some people choose to decline. In these cases, when the person dies the Thought Adjuster takes all of value from that life and returns to the Father, and the person’s energy dissipates back into the greater kosmos. Kind of like a drop of water in the ocean. No hell or punishment, just annihilation by choice.
Forming our eternal soul is a long process. The idea that we can go from being mere humans to divine spiritual beings just by dying is a little simplistic. We have many more worlds to live through before becoming a soul. But with Jesus, it was different. As a creator son fulfilling his final submission to the Paradise Trinity, Michael completed this entire process of achieving perfection with God in his one life time on Earth.
Jesus made his first moral decision as a child and then received his Thought Adjuster on February 11, 2 B.C. He was four and a half years old. And just like with the rest of us, the kid didn’t know that anything had happened.
Five months later, July 11, Jesus’ first sister was born. They named her Mariam. By this age, Jesus was asking questions about everything around him. Mary and Joseph couldn’t always give him an answer, but they always tried their best. With the birth of Mariam, Joseph got to tell Jesus about how people and animals were conceived and born into the world.
Jesus turned five years old that August. Back then, the Jews’ custom was to raise their children in stages. Up until the kids were five years old the mother was in charge. Then with the boys, the dad takes over. He has the responsibility of teaching his son to become a man and take his place in Jewish society. So, on Jesus’ birthday, August 21, Mary handed the job of guiding Jesus over to his father, Joseph.
Now this doesn’t mean that Mary was out of the picture. She continued to teach Jesus about plants, nature, and caring for their family’s garden and animals. And on top of the flat roof of their house, Mary made him a place covered in sand to practice his writing and drawing maps of their world.
All in all, except for the never-ending hard questions Jesus was always asking his mom and dad, he was growing up just like all other kids of that time.
Events of the Sixth Year (1 B.C.)
The summer before Jesus turned six years old, Elizabeth and Zacharias brought John to Nazareth to visit with him for a couple of days. The two kids got along well, and John told Jesus stories about Jerusalem and what happened at the temple. So Jesus, of course, started asking Joseph a lot of questions about Jewish history, their religion, and why the Jews were always having feasts and celebrations. Throughout it all his dad did his best to teach, and Jesus did his best to learn.
At this young age, Jesus, like other kids, thought his mom and dad knew everything. But then one day there was a small earthquake in Palestine. When Jesus asked Joseph what had just happened, his dad told him the truth. That he didn’t know. That was quite a shock for Jesus. Joseph had thought about telling Jesus that it was either God or the devil that caused the tremor, but he was smart enough not to. That would’ve just opened up the door to more questions, and Joseph didn’t want to deal with them.
Jesus was a smart kid, and by six years old Joseph had started to teach him Greek. For a textbook, they used the religious writings that the people from Alexandria had given Jesus when he was younger. Jesus was also becoming a master of Jewish law, history, and religious philosophy. And since in Nazareth there were only two copies of these writings in Greek, Jesus got to meet with the others who’d come by their house to also study them.
While this arrangement was great for Jesus and it fueled his passion about God, it caused a bit of stress for his mom and dad. Jesus was already coming to the realization that God wasn’t something far away, but in fact right there present in his own mind. And, for that matter, everyone else’s minds.
So why wasn’t it logical to talk with God the Father inside his mind, just like he talked to Joseph is father on Earth? But this was against how the Jews believed, and they were very strict about how they prayed. Yet no matter how hard his mom and dad tried, they couldn’t keep Jesus from having his own little talk with his Father after he’d said his formal prayers.
This year life improved for the family. Joseph became a contractor and started building house all around Palestine. He turned his shop in Nazareth over to his brothers. The family’s income tripled, and Joseph was able to provide well for everyone. Jesus either spent his time with his dad, or studying the plants and flowers around the house with his mom. And in the evening after being told to go to sleep, he’d lay there gazing up at the stairs long into night, his young mind searching for answers.
The Seventh Year (A.D. 1)
Jesus was a happy kid. He loved playing with his buddies and his brother James. The kids had a little space in the back of his dad’s carpenter shop where they played with the scraps of wood scattered on the floor. But I think you’re getting the idea that the Jews were a pretty serious people, and they had rules for everything in their lives, even how their kids could play. This set them apart from the other people, and kept the Jews under the control of their religious leaders. So instead of fun and games, the Jewish kids played at things they saw their parents do, like weddings, funerals, and religious parties. While Jesus didn’t understand the why of all of these rules, he always obeyed his mom and dad.
That July Jesus fell coming down off of the roof during a heavy sandstorm. He didn’t get hurt, but Mary got shook up and started playing helicopter mom again. She told Joseph to get some handrails put on the stairs leading up to the roof, which he did. When Mary was irked, she was a force in her own right.
When Jesus fell off the stairs, it was just an accident. This stuff happens to the rest of us all of the time. Even the invisible beings watching over Jesus were caught off guard and couldn’t stop it from happening. But even if those unseen guardians could have stopped Jesus from falling, they wouldn’t have. Jesus’s mission was to grow up just like everyone else does. No miracles. So, as curious and energetic as Jesus was, it meant that from time to time he was going to get scraped up a bit. And that kept Mary on her toes.
This year Jesus’ second brother, Joseph, was born on a Wednesday morning, March 1, A.D. 1.
School Days in Nazareth
The Jews started school when they were seven years old. The first three years were spent in elementary school, and then three more years in what we’d call high-school. By the time Jesus started school, he already had a good handle on writing, speaking, and reading in both Aramaic and Greek. On the first day of school, all of the kids had to choose a favorite scripture to guide them through the next six years of elementary school. The scripture that Jesus chose was from the Prophet Isaiah. It said that God had sent him to bring good news, to comfort those sad, and to free people of false ideas about God.
Jesus started to learn Hebrew. The were no school books back then so the teacher, called the chazan, would recite a scripture and then the kids would repeat it over and over until they memorized it. Religious scriptures were the only thing taught in school until the kids were twelve years old. When the boy was thirteen years old, he graduated and was then a “son of the commandment.” This meant that he was a young man who’s been indoctrinated in the Jewish laws and customs, and now he had to meet his adult responsibilities.
Jesus spent his free time hanging out where the caravans stopped. As said earlier, back then Palestine was the cross-roads of the world. People from far off lands would come in from across the desert and mix with the Jews in Nazareth. These people were gentiles. Usually the Jews were pretty strict about not having anything to do with them. But since so many gentiles were always coming into Nazareth from the desert, and Jews had to do business with them, the people in Nazareth were a bit more relaxed about following the rules. This is why the rest of the Jews tended to look down on them.
This mixing of the Jews and gentiles was good for Jesus. Talking with people from around the world opened his mind to other ways of life. By spending time with the conductors and travelers from the caravans, Jesus learned to love people. And with what he learned from the Jewish teachers that came and spoke at the temple, and he was preparing himself well for his later work in life.
On the sabbath Joseph would take Jesus out for walks in the country, where he learned to love and know nature. There was a high hill where they had a 360-degree view of all of the land around them. To the north they could see the snow coved peak of Mt. Hermon. To the east was the Jordan Valley, and way off on the horizon were the rocky hills of Moab. On a bright day, to the south-east they could see the white walls of the Greco-Roman cities of the Decapolis. When the sun went down in the west, they could just make out the sails of the boats far off on the Mediterranean Sea.
By the time Jesus was eight years-old, he was milking the cows and taking care of the other animals. He was also starting to learn to weave and to make cheese. He was well known and well liked in town.
His Eighth Year (A.D. 2)
While Jesus didn’t have the highest grades in class, he was in the top one-third. This meant he was excused from school one week out of every month. During this time off he’d either visit his uncle who had the farm, or his other uncle fishing in the Sea of Galilee near Magdala.
Jesus met a teacher from Damascus who taught him a different way to do arithmetic, and over the next several years Jesus became an expert at math. He started playing the harp, and teaching his little brother, James, the alphabet. But he was still making waves with the adults. He just wouldn’t stop asking questions. Especially about things like science, religion, geography, and astronomy. He was a smart kid and these were questions the adults couldn’t answer without bringing in God or the devil or some sort of evil spirits. And even at eight years old, Jesus knew that those answers were nonsense.
In February, a rabbi named Nahor from Jerusalem showed up at the house. He was there to convince Mary and Joseph to let him raise Jesus in Jerusalem. Again, his argument was that Nazareth was to liberal. Mary and Joseph said no. Finally, in a last-ditch effort Nahor asked them to let Jesus decide. After Jesus listened to both sides, he thought it over for two days. Then Jesus said he couldn’t decide, so he asked his father in heaven. The answer he got was to stay there in Nazareth with him mom and dad. He said his mom and dad’s love would guide and guard him better than any strangers could do who didn’t know him. That convinced Nahor and he went back to Jerusalem. After that, it was a long time before anyone else tried to get Jesus out of Nazareth.
Okay folks, that’s it for Son of Man, Chapter 2, “The Early Childhood of Jesus.”
Next week’s Chapter 3 is titled, “The Later Childhood of Jesus.”
Have a great week, everyone.