What did Jesus do between the ages of twelve and thirty? The eighteen years the Bible does not recount.

I’m going to start with a confession. I have been studying the gospels for years and There’s a question that never stopped worry me Not because I didn’t have answers, but because the answers always seemed available to me too comfortable, too fast, like no one wants to stop too much time on the real problem. The real problem is this.

The four gospels that we have, written by people who considered Jesus the most important event of human history, they dedicated collectively less than two chapters a the first 30 years of his life. Matthew describes the birth and the flight to Egypt. Lucas adds the visit to temple at 12 years old. Juan begins directly with the eternity before any birth.

And Mark, the oldest of all, does not mentions childhood at all. It begins directly with baptism in the Jordan. From the 12th year to the 30th year of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the gospels keep silence. 18 years, more than half of his life, the period from adolescence to full maturity, the years in which any human being forms his character, develops his convictions, learn his trade, fail and learn from your failures, build friendships and wounds that will accompany him the rest of his life.

Of all this, the most sacred texts of the Christianity says almost nothing. Because? And most importantly, what do we know or we can know with intellectual honesty about what happened in those 18 years? To answer these questions we must start by understanding the world in which Jesus grew up. Not the abstract world of theology, but the concrete and physical world of Galilee of the 4th century AD.

Nazareth was a small village. the archaeological excavations carried out in the 20th century and in the early years of the 21st century, particularly those carried carried out by archaeologist Ken Dark of the University of Reading and by the team of the Studium Bíblicum Franciscanum have revealed that Nazareth at the time of Jesús had between 400 and 600 inhabitants.

It was not a city, it was what in the modern world we would call a town. No is mentioned in the ancient Testament. It does not appear in the writings of historian Flavius Josephus, who mentions 45 cities and villages of Galilee without include it. It does not appear in the Babylonian Talmud. The derogatory phrase that the gospel of John puts it in Nathanael’s mouth.

Something good can come out of Nazareth. reflects the opinion that the inhabitants of the most important cities of Galilee they had from that peripheral village, but it was a place with a characteristic that is often overlooked. It was just 6 km from Sephoris. Sepphoris was the capital of Galilee in the time of childhood and adolescence Jesus, a Hellenistic city built and rebuilt under Herod’s reign Antipas with theater, covered market, mosaics on the floors, architecture Roman style columns, a town cosmopolitan that included Jews, Greeks

and Romans. Historian Richard Beaty has argued that the reconstruction of Sephoris, which was at its peak during the childhood and youth of Jesus, would have attracted artisans from all over the region, probably including the of Nazareth. The Greek word that gospels use to describe the office of Joseph and that Mark extends to his own Jesus is tecton, usually translated as a carpenter.

 But tecton in the 3rd century Greek does not mean exclusively carpenter in the sense modern, means builder, craftsman that works with solid materials, which can include wood, but also stone. In the Galilee of the third century, where wood was scarce and expensive, many tectons were working mainly with stone. If Jesus and José worked as builders in the region, the reconstruction of Sepphoris to 6 km from Nazareth, a journey of about an hour and a half walk, would have been exactly the kind of project that would have employed artisans

of the surrounding towns during years. We can’t prove it, there is no text that affirms it, but it is not baseless speculation. It is the reasonable inference of who knows the geography, the economy and the labor patterns of the Galilee of the 1st century And if Jesus worked on Sepphoris during part of his years of training, that means it grew exposed to a cultural mix that image of the ignorant rural carpenter everything that happened beyond their village cannot capture.

 I would have seen theater Greek, I would have listened to debates philosophers on the market, it would have had contact with people from cultures and traditions other than Jewish Galilee in which he had been raised. That’s not It is a statement about the divinity of Jesus nor about the origin of his teaching.

 It’s just the description of the human environment in which he grew up. The only story that the Gospels canonical offer of the years intermediates is the episode of the temple of Jerusalem narrated by Luke in the chapter 2 of his gospel. Jesus is 12 years old. The family has gone to Jerusalem for Easter, as he did every year according to the text.

On the return trip to Nazareth, the parents have been on the road for a day before realize that Jesus is not in the pilgrim caravan. They return to Jerusalem, they search for him three days and they find him in the temple sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him said Lucas, were amazed at his intelligence and its responses.

María tells him what any mother would would tell a 12 year old son who has caused three days of anguish. Son, why have you done this to us? You Father and I have looked for you in anguish. And Jesus responds with a question that he Greek text makes it more enigmatic than most translations capture. Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that in my affairs Father, do I need to be there? And then Luke’s text adds something that It is significant precisely because its brevity.

It says that Jesus went down with them to Nazareth and was subject to them and that his mother kept all these things in his heart and that Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in grace before God and before men. It grew. The verb is imperfect in Greek original, indicating a continuous process and gradual, not instantaneous illumination, progressive growth and then 18 years of silence.

 The text does not say that those 18 years didn’t happen, he says they didn’t narrates. The difference is crucial. Lucas, who in the prologue of his gospel states have investigated everything carefully from the beginning, he chose deliberately not including what occurred in that period, not because existed, because he did not consider it necessary for the purpose of your story.

 Why not? The most answer It is probably also the simplest. The first readers of the gospels They didn’t have the same interest that we have us in the complete biography of the important characters. The culture of the ancient world did not value the biographical narrative of the way that modern culture does. The lives of great men were told through his decisive acts and his memorable words.

The training period was not the point. The timing of the mission was the point. But that historical explanation, although correct, it does not completely satisfy the curiosity that silence produces. The traditions that filled that silence They are as old as silence itself and they deserve to be examined honestly about what they are and what they are not.

The Apocryphal Infancy Gospel Tomás, who should not be confused with the gospel of Thomas, from Nag Hamadi, is probably the oldest text that narrates episodes from Jesus’ childhood. It is generally dated to the century second of our era and exists in multiple versions in Greek Latin, Syriac, Georgian and Ethiopian.

Narrates miracles that Jesus would have made in his childhood. give life to clay birds, lengthen a beam that His father had cut it too short, resurrect a child who had died of a fall Modern scholars consider these texts as late elaborations without direct historical value, not because the miracles are impossible in principle, but because the narrative style, the underlying theology and parallels with other texts of religious literature of the period point to a composition later that responded to curiosity popular about the teacher’s childhood

rather than the transmission of memories authentic historical The protoevangelium of Santiago. Another apocryphal text from the second century. It tells the story of Mary from her own childhood and adolescence until birth of Jesus. It is a source important to understand devotion Marian of the second and third centuries, but it is not considered by the historians as a testimony reliable history about the events that narrates.

 What these texts do reveal is the intensity of the interest that 2nd century Christian communities they had in the years that the gospels canonicals did not narrate. Curiosity is not It was new, it was as old as the silence that I was trying to fill. There is a series of theories about the lost years of Jesus that have circulated outside the academic field with a persistence which deserves examination, precisely to be honest about what they have credible and what they have of fantasy.

The most popular proposes that Jesus traveled to India during those 18 years. studied with Buddhist teachers and brought back to Palestine teachings that would be the basis of the sermon on the mount. This theory It was popularized in the 19th century by Russian journalist Nicolas Notovic, who claimed to have discovered in a buddhist monastery in dac a manuscript that narrated the visit of Prophet Isa to India.

 The manuscript was never verified by anyone else researcher. Max Müller, the greatest orientalist of his time, investigated Notovic’s claim and concluded that it was a fabrication. The abbot of the monastery that Notovich claimed to have visited denied that such manuscript existed. Notovic’s story is today considered by the academic community practically unanimously falsification.

There are deeper reasons for skepticism about travel theory India. The teachings of Jesus are deeply rooted in tradition Jewish Your references are references beans. Moses, the prophets, the temple, the synagogue, the Torah, the psalms. Your debates are debates with Pharisees and scribes on interpretations of the Jewish law.

 His language of images, the shepherd and the sheep, the farmer and the seed, new wine and wineskins old It is the language of Galilee Jewish rural area of the 1st century. There is no in his teachings no trace detectable of Buddhist influence that cannot better explained by traditions beans he grew up on. Other theories They propose that Jesus studied with the those of Kumran.

 This hypothesis has something more based on reality than of the trip to India. The Essenes They existed. Kumran was in the same geographic region. And there are parallels between some texts of the Dead Sea scrolls and certain teachings of the New Testament. But parallels also have significant differences. The Essenes were celibate and Jesus was not.

was. According to no text of the period. The Essenes were ritually exclusive and Jesus was notoriously inclusive towards which the religious groups of their time they excluded. The hypothesis is interesting as ask, but have no evidence directly to support it. What yes we can say with reasonable confidence about 18 years of silence is more mundane than any of those theories and, in my opinion, more significant.

Jesus of Nazareth lived in Nazareth. He worked as a builder. He learned his his father’s job. attended the local synagogue, as did any observant Jew, where the texts of the Torah and the prophets were read and They explained week after week. He learned to read what he didn’t in the 2nd century. was by no means universal and that Gospel of Luke confirms when describes Jesus reading in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry public.

 He knew the agricultural cycle of the region whose influence in its parables later is unmistakable. The seed and the soil, the harvest and the tares, the fig trees and the vines, the shepherd and the flock. He probably spoke Aramaic as mother tongue, Hebrew as a liturgical language that he learned in synagogue and possibly some Greek If you worked on the projects construction of Sepphoris or other Hellenized cities of the region.

 The New Testament was written in Greek and There are academic debates about whether Jesus occasionally preached in Greek or if all traditions in Greek are translations from the original Aramaic. lived with his family. The gospels mention to his brothers named Santiago, Joseph, Simon and Judas and sisters without name.

 The precise identity of these brothers has been debated theologically for centuries. They were children of Mary and Joseph, born after Jesus, as the Protestant traditions. They were Joseph’s children from a marriage above, as a tradition maintains ancient preserved in the protoevangelium from Santiago? Were they cousins? As Jerome argued in the second century.

The Greek text of the gospels uses the word adelfos, which means brother in the full sense, although the defenders of the other interpretations have arguments for each of them. What is undoubtable is that Jesus grew in a large family in a village small that was known by its neighbors like the artisan’s son, that his mother Her name was Maria and her brothers were known in the community.

When he returned to Nazareth during his public ministry, those who had known since childhood, they wondered genuine perplexity where it came from that he taught. Isn’t this the son of Mary, the brother of James, of Joseph, of Judas and Simon? Aren’t they also here with us your sisters? Mark 6:3. The question is not about people who remember a prodigious child, is that of people who remember someone perfectly ordinary.

 That data Gospel of Mark seems to me to be one of the most honest and most revealing of all the literature of the New Testament. The neighbors of Nazareth did not remember Jesus as a child who performed miracles or what he taught the teachers in the synagogue. They remembered him as the son of the artisan, someone who had grown up among them without being visibly distinguished from any other young man in the village.

Which raises a question that no one theology can completely dodge. What does it mean that the gospels They present how the son of God will pass 18 years of his life being before the eyes of who knew him completely ordinary? That question has implications that range far beyond curiosity biographical. Classical Christian theology states that Jesus was fully human and fully divine simultaneously, not half human and half divine, not human in appearance and divine in reality.

fully both things at the same time what theologians call the union hypostatic, defined at the council of Chalcedon in the year 451. The 18 years of silence are, in certain sense, the most concrete manifestation of what that statement implies in the real life. If Jesus was fully human, then he learned to walk like all children learn, falling and getting up He learned the Hebrew alphabet, letter by letter.

 Learned to use the tools of his trade under the supervision of his father. He had his first clumsiness with wood or the stone, his first works well finished. his first satisfactions as a craftsman who see the results of their work. He suffered the heat of the Galilean summer and the cold of its winters, which are more raw than most Renaissance paintings suggest.

He was hungry, he was tired. He probably had childhood friends. whose names we do not know. probably experienced the death of people I loved because in the world of the 9th century, with its life expectancy 30 years old, death was a presence regular in any human community. If that is so, then the 18 years of Silence is not a void in history, They are the longest part and, in certain most fundamental way in history.

These are the years in which he who would preach about the seed and the soil he learned to distinguish the types of land from the region. The years when the one who would talk about the vineyard workers knew the city labor market nearby. The years in which would accurately describe the process of kneading bread, he saw his mother doing it in the kitchen of his house in Nazareth.

 The incarnation, if one takes seriously what Christian theology affirms about it, It didn’t just happen at the time of birth. It happened over 30 years Daily life in a village in Galilee. And the 18 years that the gospels do not perhaps they narrate the years more intensely embodied by all. There is a scene in the gospel of Mark that serves as reference point to understand how much we know and how much we don’t know about those years.

 When Jesus returned to Nazareth during his public ministry and taught in the synagogue, the reaction of his neighbors has a double dimension that It is fascinating. On the one hand, they are amazed, on the other, they are offended. Where do these things come from? they asked. What wisdom is this that has it been given to you? And the text adds that Jesus himself was amazed at the their disbelief.

 what is scene reveals about 18 years old indirect but significant. The neighbors of Nazareth had not seen anything in the previous life of Jesus that prepare for what they were now hearing. If there had been memorable episodes, extraordinary signs, moments when the young carpenter would have expressed something that surpassed the ordinary, those who knew it They would have remembered him all their lives.

They wouldn’t be asking where they come from these things. The silence of the neighbors about the Jesus’ past is, in a way, the more solid confirmation of the silence of the gospels. It’s not that the evangelists didn’t know what had happened is that there probably wasn’t much to tell in terms of the extraordinary and the visible.

What had happened was the formation of a human being. The slow and unspectacular process of a person who grows, learns, thinks, pray, work, observe, listen and go silently developing what would only become visible when the time of public disclosure. John the Baptist is the catalyst for that moment.

 The four gospels They agree that the public ministry of Jesus began with his baptism in the Jordan. And the baptism of John was a baptism of conversion and repentance to which people came who wanted to do a new beginning. The Baptism Dinner Jesus. Raise a theological question that the gospel of Matthew records explicitly. Juan tried to prevent it, saying that it was he who needed to be baptized by Jesus, not the other way around.

And Jesus responded that it was advisable to do so so to fulfill all justice. What happened at the Jordan, regardless of interpretation theological that each one gives him, was the public start of something that had been training privately for 30 years. The moment when what had grown silently it became visible.

Let me say something about the silence of the gospels that goes beyond the history and touches on something that seems more important. I have found in the course of my years studying this material that the silence of the gospels on the middle years of Jesus bothers Mainly two types of people. To those who want a supernatural Jesus from the beginning, you never learned nothing because I already knew everything, that I never grew because it was already perfect, that 18 years of silence are simply the period when I waited patiently

the moment to reveal itself. For these people, the concrete humanity of Jesus In those years, the apprentice craftsman, the neighbor of Nazareth, the son of Mary, It is a problem that must be minimized. and to those who want a Jesus purely human, whose teaching can be explained completely due to the influences that received the children, the Pharisees, the Indian Buddhism, Neoplatonism alexandrian, anything except one originality that cannot be reduced to their sources.

 For these people, the Silence is an opportunity to fill the empty with the influences that explain what is otherwise difficult to explain. Neither of the two types of discomfort seems well founded to me. It that the gospels narrate with consistency is a human being who lived 30 years in complete condition external normality and then, during approximately 3 years pronounced teachings and performed actions that his contemporaries did not know how categorize.

 Those who knew him since child they did not find in their past any key that explained what they saw in the present. Those who listened to him for the first time they recognized in their teaching an authority that they did not find in the conventional teachers. and the texts that narrate all this were written by people who were convinced that what had happened could not be explained only by the human influences received in 30 years of life in Nazareth.

 That tension between normality of 30 years and exceptionality of the three, among the carpenter of Nazareth and the one who spoke with authority over the kingdom of God. It is the center of the mystery that gospels do not resolve, but rather present. And perhaps it is precisely his refusal to resolve it, his honesty about what they don’t tell and their silence about the years that do not narrate, what makes those texts continue to be more honest than many of the answers that have been given in his name.

The 18 years of silence are also, yes you think about it calmly, one of the deeper theological claims of the gospels, although it is not formulated as an affirmation. In the ancient world, divine figures They didn’t have ordinary childhoods. The Greek and Roman gods were born adults or in circumstances extraordinary.

Mythical heroes showed signs of his greatness from the cradle. The Alexander from ancient biographies, already as a child, he tamed untamed horses and responded to the Persian ambassadors with the acuity of a statesman the canonical Gospels, particularly Mark, who does not narrate no childhood, and Lucas, who concludes the story of childhood with the image of the child in the temple, and then jumps directly to adult ministry.

They present a figure whose greatness cannot be gradually manifested from the cradle, but burst into public life, way that surprised even those who They had known him all their lives. That’s it theologically very different from the presentation of the gods of the pantheon Greco-Roman. It is closer to the presentation of the Old Testament prophets They didn’t have mythical childhoods either, but who received your call in a moment certain of their adult lives.

Moses in the desert before the bush fiery. Isaiah in the temple before the vision of the glory of God. Jeremiah with the word that reaches him at a specific time in your life. But there is also a difference with the prophets. None of them are presented as having existed before his birth, nor as having had a identity that transcended its mission prophetic.

 The prologue of the Gospel of Juan, who jumps over the childhood and adolescence to go right at the beginning, before everything beginning. In the beginning it was the verb. Pose a continuity between the Jesus of the 30s years and something that existed before any human birth. What the 18 years of silence are located in the intersection of those two statements.

between the eternal preexistence that the prologue of John proclaims and the ministry public of 3 years that the four gospels narrate between the verb that was in the beginning and the teacher who He taught in the synagogues of Galilee, among him who was before Abraham, as would later say in the gospel of John, and the one who learned his trade in the workshop from an artisan from Nazareth.

 That intersection cannot be resolved with no theory about what Jesus did in those years. It remains open and perhaps must remain open because the question you ask has no answer on the biographical level, but only on the plan of each person’s decisions about what he believes Jesus was. I finish where I started with a confession.

 After of years studying this topic, what most I’m impressed not by the theories trips to India, nor speculations about the Essenes, nor even the fascinating inferences archaeological sites on Sephoris and the artisans of the region. What I most Impressive is the image that the own canonical gospels project without explicitly propose it of those 18 years.

 A young man in a village of 600 people in a province peripheral of an empire that did not have the Little idea that this young man existed, working with your hands, learning the writings of his people in the Sabbath synagogue, watching the seasons, knowing the hardness of the work and job satisfaction well done, living the ordinary life that the majority of human beings have existed have lived.

 And then, 30 years after being born, going down to the river Jordan, where a prophet preached the repentance and leaving those waters to inaugurate what his followers would consider the event more significant of all history human. What happened in the 18 years that mediate between childhood and that moment in the river is, ultimately Ultimately, what happens in the life of anyone who has not arrived still at the moment when what is is makes it visible to others.

 I don’t know if That says something about the nature of Jesus, but he says something true about the human nature that is difficult ignore. The years that no one sees are not the years in that nothing happens, are often the most important to everyone. to understand well 18 years old, it is necessary to carefully examine more detail something that the commentators of the gospels frequently mentioned in passing, but it deserves a more sustained attention.

The religious formation of a Jewish child in Galilee of the 3rd century. Religious education began in home. Torah was taught in the family before any formal institution. The Ashema, the central prayer of Judaism which declares the oneness of God. listen Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord one is.

 They were recited tomorrow and afternoon. Deuteronomy prescribed that Parents will teach these words to their children when they were at home and when they walked down the road, when they went to bed and when they got up. It was an oral and daily transmission that permeated every aspect of life domestic. At 5 years old, according to the tradition of tractate Abot of the Talmud, a child The study of the Scriptures began.

At 10 the study of the mishna, the oral interpretation of the law. At 13, the full responsibility of the commandments. The Barmitzba, although in its form modern ceremonial is an institution later, reflects this tradition of adult religious responsibility to 13 years old. The synagogue was the center of that training in the communities of the 1st century Every Saturday a passage from the Torah and a passage from the prophets.

It was translated into Aramaic. Because for many Jews in the diaspora and rural communities of Palestine, the Biblical Hebrew was no longer the language everyday. It was commented and interpreted. The child who attended that reading weekly from his early childhood he was exposed over the years to practically the entire text of the Old Testament in its read, annotated form and debated.

The ability to read that the gospel of Luke confirms that Jesus had when describes the scene in the synagogue Nazareth, where he takes the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, was the result of that process of training. It was not universal. The historian of New Testament, Bart Erman, has argued that the majority of inhabitants of the 3rd century in Palestine They were illiterate.

But the Jewish community, with its emphasis specific in the text and in the study, had higher literacy rates that the surrounding towns, particularly among men. If Jesus was an observant Jew artisan family that attended regularly to the synagogue and all clues from the text point to that address. So, in the 18 years of silence, was exposed week after week to prophets, to the psalms, to the stories of the Torah.

What would later appear in his teachings such as quotes and images of the Hebrew scriptures, it didn’t come out of nowhere at the time of his baptism. It was the result of years of familiarity with those texts in the context of a community that read, debated and lived them. There is something in the geography of Galilee that also deserves attention, because the land where Jesus grew up appears in his teachings in ways that only he has meaning if he knew her intimately of the one who has lived there for years.

Galilee, in the third century was a region of pronounced contrasts. The lake of Genezareth, also known as the sea of Galilee, was the economic center of the region and a source of employment for fishermen, but also for craftsmen who built and repaired the boats. The hills that surrounded the lake were covered with vineyards and olive groves.

 The valleys produced wheat and barley. The shepherds carried their flocks along the same paths as the merchants who connected cities of the region. The parables of Jesus show a familiarity with all those worlds. The sower who goes out to sow and whose seed falls into different types of land accurately describes the agriculture of the region, where the rock mother emerged in some places and the land was deep and fertile in others.

The shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep for search for the lost, describes a reality concrete economic A sheep represented a part significant part of the assets of a humble family The woman who seeks lost coin, the prodigal son who asks his inheritance and goes to a far country, the father who awaits his return.

All these images have the texture from someone who has seen those situations in real life, who has observed them with attention for years, who knows the emotional and economic weight of each one, because he has lived in the same world in that occur. Nazareth was in a geographical position that made it possible a broad vision of the region.

From the hills above the village I could see Mount Carmel to the west, Mount Tabor to the east, the valley of Jesreel to the south and on clear days even the Mediterranean in the distance. A young man who grew up in that place, who He climbed those hills with his flocks or just to get away from the noise of the village, he would have had before his eyes the visual map of a region you would know intimately.

The question of whether Jesus could have studied with specific teachers during those 18 years is one that historians cannot answer with certainty, but they cannot ignore. In the period between childhood and the public ministry, the Judaism of Palestine had two great schools of interpretation of the law that they dominated rabbinic thought, the school of Shammai and the school of Gilel.

 Shammai tended towards interpretations more strictness of the law. Hillel towards more flexible interpretations and compassionate Gilel was famous for his response to a gentle man who asked him to teach him all the Torah while standing on one foot. Don’t do to your neighbor what you don’t want that they do to you. That is the entire Torah.

The rest is comment. Now go study. The teachings of Jesus show a deep familiarity with these debates. When Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, but I tell you, he is using the exact form of rabbinic debate that contrasted the interpretations of different teachers. Your answers to questions about divorce, about the Sabbath, about the fasting, on taxes, reveal to someone who knows the positions of the existing schools and taking a position respect to them, sometimes aligning with one, sometimes surpassing both.

Where did you acquire that knowledge? The simplest and most plausible is the synagogue of Nazareth, where school debates They came through the teachers locals and visitors passing by for the region. He did not need to travel to Jerusalem to study in the academies formal to be exposed to that material.

 The oral tradition of Judaism was remarkably efficient for transmit the thoughts of the most important teachers at smaller communities. But there is a scene in the gospel of Luke that suggests that Jesus may have had more direct contact with teachers Jerusalem than is usually assumed. The temple episode at age 12 is not just the narration of an incident familiar, it is the description of a child who sat among the most masters important of his time, he listened to them and He asked them questions and whose answers They amazed them. For that to happen

only once in the context of a trip annual to Jerusalem for Passover. is what what the text says. But nothing prevents on other annual trips to the city, which Luke’s text indicates that the family did regularly, Jesus continued frequenting the area of temple and its teachers. It is not wild speculation, is the inference of someone who knows the practice so much Jewish religious of the period such as habit described in the text.

 There is a last element of the 18 years that deserves attention and what has to do with death. In the life of Jesus before his public ministry is absent what the gospel texts do progressively more notable for the way they treat the character should be present. Joseph, the father of Jesus, disappears from story after the temple episode.

It is not mentioned again in any episode of the public ministry of Jesus. When Jesus returns to Nazareth, the text He talks about his mother and his brothers, without mention his father on the cross, when Jesus entrusts his mother to the disciple beloved, the gesture only has full meaning if Mary has been widowed and needs who takes care of her.

Most scholars conclude that Joseph died before the ministry public of Jesus. The chronology is uncertain, but if Jesus He was 30 years old when he started ministry and Joseph had married Mary when Jesus was born, for that moment José could have had between 45 and 60 years. In the context of life expectancy of the third century, that was enough for having died of illness or any of the ordinary causes that They claimed lives in that world.

If Joseph died during the 18 years of silence, that means that at some point moment of those years Jesus experienced the loss of his father, that there was a funeral, a period of mourning, additional responsibilities that fall about the eldest son when the head of family dies. that Mary was left a widow with several children and that Jesus as the firstborn, would have assumed a senior role responsibility in maintaining the family No text says it explicitly, but José’s absence is too much consistent throughout all

gospels to be accidental. and the experience of losing a father during adolescence or early youth. If that’s what happened, it would be part of the training human nature of Jesus, in a way that no theory about spiritual journeys to remote places it can replicate. The experience of grief, responsibility towards a widowed mother and younger brothers, the work that cannot stop because artisan families do not have social safety nets.

 nor funds reserve. The life that continues after the loss because it has to continue. All of that is also training, too It is the material from which the people who then have something to say about human suffering with authority of one who has known him since inside. The years that no one sees. That phrase I used at the end of the first part of the episode still seems like the most honest description of 18 years old of silence.

Not because it didn’t happen in those years nothing, but because what happened was exactly the kind of thing you don’t know recorded or transmitted. daily work, daily prayer, the Saturday readings, the debates in the synagogue, the hot summers and the cold winters of Galilee, death of the Father, the growth of brothers, the learning that accumulates year after year without producing any moment dramatic that deserves to be remembered.

The incarnation, if one believes in it, does not It was a 3 year event, it was a process of 30. And the 18 years that no one narrated are perhaps the most embodied of all, the that more deeply submerged the one the gospels present him as the son of God in the human condition who came to inhabit That seems significant to me, regardless of what each person believe about the nature of Jesus, because it talks about something that is not exclusively theological.

 Talk about how formation occurs, that people that they really have something important to say they don’t say it from the first moment, that there are years of invisible work that precedes any public demonstration of that that person carries inside. The gospels in their silence about those years maybe they are saying something that is not they know what they are saying or maybe they do they know.

There is something else I want to add about the only episode that the gospels do They tell of those intervening years, because I think it reads too quickly. The 12-year-old boy in the temple says to his parents, “Did you not know that in my father’s affairs are necessary to me be? pronounces a phrase that has in the original greek an ambiguity deliberate.

 The expression can translate in two ways equally valid in my father’s house or in the my father’s affairs. Neither of the two is wrong. They both capture something from the original. But what I most impressive from that scene is not the phrase of Jesus, is what immediately follows after. Lucas says his parents didn’t understand the words that he spoke to them and that Jesus went down with them to Nazareth and was subject.

 Subject, subjected, obedient The one who has just declared his awareness of an identity and a mission that go beyond the human family, immediately submits to authority of that family and returns with them to the ordinary life. 18 more years of ordinary life. That sequence seems to me to be one of the data most disconcerting and richest of all the childhood of Jesus.

Not the statement about the Father, but the return to Nazareth after the statement, as if the 18 years that followed were, in some sense that the text does not explains, but suggests, part of the answer to the question what does it mean be about the Father’s business. Not only in the temple of Jerusalem debating with teachers, also in the Nazareth workshop, learning to carve stone and handle the wood.

Also in the town synagogue, listening to the Torah week after week, also at the family table, sharing bread with his mother and his brothers, also in the years that no one saw and that perhaps, that is exactly why they were the place where it should be. Before completely closing this episode, I want to refer to something that modern biblical archeology has provided in recent years and what changes significantly the image that we had from Nazareth and from the childhood of Jesus.

For a long time, skeptics They argued that Nazareth did not exist in the time of Jesus, which was a literary invention of the gospels. The argument was based precisely on the absence of mentions of Nazareth in the Jewish texts of the period and in the lack of clear archaeological evidence. That argument can no longer be sustained.

The excavations carried out since decade of the 90s of the 20th century and especially those carried out by the Ken Dark team from the years 2000, have revealed clear evidence of human occupation at the site of Nazareth during the second temple period, that is, exactly at the time that Jesus would have lived there.

Pottery, tools have been found and characteristic domestic structures of the period. In 2009, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of a 1st century house next to the Basilica of the Annunciation in the center of Nazareth, the first home domestic of the time of Jesus identified in the area.

 The house was humble Limestone walls with shined with mud, a space of few rooms, exactly what would fit wait in a village of artisans and farmers of the Galilee of the century iero. The material world in which Jesus grew up was neither romantic nor grandiose. It was the world of families workers of a province peripheral.

 A world of hard work, of cold winters, hot summers, of local markets where artisans They sold their work and the farmers their crops. Of synagogues, where communities met every Saturday to listen to the same texts as your ancestors had heard for centuries. And in that world completely ordinary Jesus of Nazareth spent the 18 years that the Bible does not count.

 Not because nothing happened, but because what what was happening was exactly that, a life ordinary. The life that most human beings who have existed on this planet they have lived without documentation, without witnesses considered worthy of recording, without no outward sign that something extraordinary was forming in his interior.

There is something about that that seems more significant that any theory about trips to India or studies with Essenes. The idea that the most important thing that has occurred in human history, if one believe that that is what it was, it was created for 18 years in a village of 600 people in a province that the Empire Romano considered it too small to deserve mention.

 That says something about where things happen matter and maybe also something about where we can expect to find them.