© 2005 The Brotherhood of Man Library
For Urantia Book readers, and assuming the absence of the Urantia revelation, it is both interesting and educational to realise how little is known about the pre-baptismal phase of Jesus’ life. Without The Urantia Book not even the date or year of Jesus’ birth is known.
The revelation also provides us with a detailed account of those formative years of Jesus in which he was fully a mortal man, one having no knowledge of his own divinity and scarcely an inkling of the post-baptismal life that would confront him as both God and man.
Again without The Urantia Book, what could we have known about that early life? Other than the few scraps of information contained within the Gospels of the New Testament, our only recourse is to assume that Jesus would have received the same kind of training as any other Galilean child having parents such as Mary and Joseph, living in a town such as Nazareth in Galilee where Joseph was a carpenter.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus’ birth took place at Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph had gone to participate in a census ordered by the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus. But while in Bethlehem an “angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt and be thou there until I bring you word, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.” (Matthew 2:13)
Later, when Herod was dead, an angel of the Lord again appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying: Arise, and take the young child and his mother and go into the land of Israel. For they are dead which sought the young child’s life." (Matthew 2; Luke 2). Finally Joseph, Mary, and Jesus settled in Nazareth.
Outside of this birth scene and the Egyptian sojourn, all we know for certain about the very early life of Jesus at Nazareth is contained in a single verse from Luke’s Gospel: “And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.”
Of Jesus as a young adolescent we are again beholden to Luke for detail. Every year Joseph and Mary attended the annual Passover festival in Jerusalem. When Jesus was twelve years old and it was time to return from Jerusalem to Nazareth along with a party of kinsfolk, Jesus was accidentally left behind. But the fact that he was missing was not noticed until the party had travelled a full day’s journey.
Mary and Joseph immediately left their kinsfolk to return to Jerusalem and search for Jesus. However three fruitless days passed before they tried looking in the Temple where Jesus was found. Mary immediately asked Jesus why he had treated them so–to which Luke has Jesus say, “How is it that you sought after me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49)
All four Gospels commence their next phase first with an introduction to John the Baptist, followed by John’s baptism of Jesus. For further possibilities upon how Jesus may have passed his childhood we turn to the accounts of historians who tell us how male children of practicing Jews were brought up in provincial Galilee.
One such historian[^1] states that: “nowhere does the historical background of Jesus betray any influence from the general atmosphere of Greek culture or Roman civilization of his day. There is no evidence he was acquainted with the Greek language. His mother tongue was a provincial dialect, Aramaic, the peculiar speech that betrayed the Galilean origin of his disciples. It was in this dialect that Jesus thought, taught, preached, and prayed–and cried to God in his direst need–Abba in Gethsemane, Eloi, Eloi on the cross.”
Another historian, Alfred Edersheim,[^2] looks at Jesus’ early life from a different perspective. He informs us about the kind of upbringing and education young Jewish boys would most likely have received in a province such as Galilee at the time of Jesus.
“For study at school from the age of five up to ten years, the Bible was exclusively the text-book. From ten to fifteen years it was the ”Mishner" or traditional law; after that age the student entered on those theological studies as were held in the higher acadamies of the Rabbis.
“Study of the Bible commenced with Leviticus. Then it passed on to other parts of the Pentateuch–the first five books of the Bible–and finally to the Talmud, the oral law, but only to those students over fifteen years of age.”
The “Bible” or “Old Testament” and the “Mishna” were usually in Hebrew, the Talmud in Aramaean.
There is no record in the Gospels for Jesus having proceeded to studies in the Academies. However it is obvious from the content of the Gospels that he had a highly advanced knowledge of both the law and the prophets. Edersheim claims Jesus spoke Hebrew, Greek, possibly Latin, and Aramaean.
Thus there is a vast difference between Jesus’ early life according to what is known from the Gospels and that which is given in The Urantia Book. Particularly this is true for writers such as Bundy1 who assumes that Jesus was an uneducated provincial with no knowledge of the Greek and Roman worlds beyond Galilee.
Missing from both the biblical account and that of our selected historians is the fact that during Jesus’ childhood the capital city of provincial Galilee was Sepphoris. The capital moved to Tiberias on the shores of the lake in A.D. 21, but Sepphoris remained as an important Greco-Roman city. This ancient city site was being excavated in 1985 in a joint project between the Hebrew and Duke Universities. It is situated on a hill less than five miles from Nazareth, and was a relatively large city complete with amphitheatre, palace, etc. as would be expected for a city built by one as vain as Herod Antipas.
Sepphoris does not get a mention in connection with Jesus and is not mentioned either in the Old or New Testaments but Edersheim confirms its early historicity by a comment that it was captured by Jewish nationalists early in the first century2. This is surprising since Edersheim’s one thousand page book was not published until 1993, long after archaeological explorations had given that city much publicity at least in relevant academic circles.
Such a large city in close proximity to Nazareth where Jesus appears to have spent much of his early life but nevertheless failing to get a mention either in the Gospel literature or by modern historians is an unexplained mystery. However it appears to be highly unlikely that Jesus could have lived within easy walking distance of the provincial capital and not be influenced by its presence.
Certainly the omission has been remedied in The Urantia Book (published 1955) which informs us that not only did Jesus spend several years full time working in Sepphoris, but also that his earthly father, Joseph, was killed there while working on one of Herod’s building projects.
Thus Jesus was not a country yokel who had never been exposed to Greco-Roman civilization1. According to The Urantia Book, his father, Joseph, spoke both fluent Aramaic and fluent Greek, and taught the young Jesus Greek from a Greek language version of the scriptures that was presented to Jesus by a family friend when a child in Egypt.