Dennis Price

The missing years of Jesus - part two

March 6, 2009 |  2 comments
Image Credit: sxc.hu The idea that the missing years of Jesus constitute an unfathomable mystery is widespread, so it’s perfectly natural that many people should expect my forthcoming book to be long on speculation and short on detail. Whether or not you ultimately choose to read it is up to you, of course, but I’ll use this week’s column to give you some idea of the degree of detail I went into during the course of my investigation.

The ‘famous last words’ written about Jesus after the age of 12 are “And He grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and with men” – this statement is so seemingly vague that it’s been referred to countless times as some kind of definitive proof that there’s nothing of value to be found in the Bible concerning the missing years of Jesus; indeed, it’s become an oft-expressed mantra of hopelessness, if that’s the correct expression.

Another way of looking at it would be to compare it to the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where no one questions a patently absurd notion for the simple reason that it originated from a supposedly authoritative source. If we’re told often enough that the only thing that the Bible has to tell us about the missing years of Jesus is “And He grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and with men”, with the implication that it contains nothing whatsoever of value, then it’s inevitable we’ll come to accept it as meaningless. Very well – let’s have a closer look at these apparently vague words.

At the age of 12, Jesus was already renowned as a scriptural prodigy, capable of amazing the elders in the temple with whom he was discoursing, so how do you improve on being a prodigy? Well, it’s one thing to have a complete command of a set of scriptures, but quite another to acquire the other form of wisdom that Jesus displayed throughout the gospels, the kind that cannot be learned from books. He presented a radical new message to the world, entering into verbal confrontations that he never lost, championing the rights of women and so forth, so this was a form of wisdom that he acquired or formulated as he grew to maturity.

He acquired a formidable ability as an orator who was capable of addressing huge crowds and he was capable of using the most enchanting language, to give just two further examples, so this would reasonably constitute ‘growing in wisdom’. He was demonstrably not in his homeland between the ages of 12 and 30, so while the Bible is correct to point out that he grew in wisdom, we should also be looking for a physical location where he could have credibly acquired the many notable characteristics with which he returned to his homeland.

We’re also told that he grew in stature, which can mean physical stature and/or standing among his fellows. He clearly grew from a 12 year old boy into a man, but again, we must look for a location other than his homeland where this took place and when we consider some of the detailed legends of Jesus in the West of England, we learn that he worked with miners in the Mendip Hills and that he built a church in Glastonbury to honour his mother Mary. The stories could simply have told of the wanderings and preachings of some ascetic, but they specifically tell of a young man who possesses sufficient physical stature to construct a wooden building that was said to have survived for some centuries and who was furthermore capable of the arduous and prolonged labour of mining, two feats entirely compatible with growing in stature in every sense of the expression.

As for growing in favour, he’s first said to have grown in favour with God, something which has many implications, one of which is that he inevitably ‘grew in favour’ by building the world’s first church to honour his mother, a specific act that the legends credit him with that’s also supported by ecclesiastical sources and present-day royal traditions. Otherwise, the gospels are at pains to point out that in life and in death, Jesus fulfilled many Biblical prophecies of the Messiah, but there are some striking predictions that receive no mention or acknowledgment in the New Testament. Are we to suppose that some prophecies were more important than others? Or could it be that these other prophecies were also fulfilled, but during the period in Jesus’s life where he’s absent from the Biblical record?I don’t wish to give the game away ahead of publication, but it’s worth pointing out that some Old Testament prophecies specifically refer to what I’ll call a ‘northern place’ that many informed commentators have taken as being Britain. In addition, other prophecies go into great detail concerning the activities of the coming Messiah; not only are these prophecies entirely consistent with the location of Britain, but they also tally with specific details to be found in certain legends of Jesus in Britain to the extent that they pinpoint an area of a few square miles. A coincidence it may be, but if it is, it’s a striking one, while it’s reinforced by still more evidence of a different nature that I’ve dealt with in great detail in my book.

Finally for now, what are we to make of the observation that Jesus ‘grew in favour....with men?’ In English, this seems to be about as general a statement as it’s possible to make, but when we take the trouble to look at the original Greek, a different picture emerges. The word used to describe men is ‘anthropos’ (in the ablative case) and this word means Mankind in general, men and women, or the human race. If the writer of the gospel had meant to write that Jesus grew in favour with a certain group of people living in a given locality, the words certainly exist to describe this circumstance, but instead, we’re told that he grew in favour with men and women in general, not just those in his homeland. It’s clearly ridiculous to suggest that he toured every inhabited country on Earth, but when we consider the prophecies I’ve dealt with briefly above, the ‘famous last words’ at the very least allow for the possibility that he grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and with men in the West of England and South Wales – among others - ‘in ancient times.’

Furthermore, the final words of the gospel of John tell us that “there were many other things that Jesus did” and whoever the author of this gospel was, he made clear that if all these things were written down, the whole world would not be enough to contain all the books that would be written. Jesus did not spend 18 years of his life working as a carpenter (or anything else, for that matter) in Nazareth, but even if he did, it’s very difficult indeed to see how, before his famous ministry, such a life could include and give rise to so many deeds that the whole world would be filled with books relating these actions.

However, if we consider that Jesus once embarked on a journey by sea to the West of England and stayed there for as long as 18 years, formulating his ministry, meeting with the inhabitants and working among them, then the picture changes radically. One of the great epics of the ancient world was Homer’s Odyssey, which details the travels and adventures of Odysseus as he attempted to make his way home from Troy, and I suggest that the story of the missing years of Jesus is far more likely to resemble the wanderings of this ancient Greek mariner than it is to echo the mundane existence of a carpenter working in a small and unremarkable village for 18 years.

I suggest that when we ignore our preconceptions and closely examine the famous line “And Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and with men”, we will find ample material that points toward and allows for the possibility of a young man growing to maturity and acquiring his fantastic abilities in a northern island that some of the authors of the Old and New Testaments were extremely familiar with; all this without delving into apocryphal gospels, insanely involved Bible Codes and the like.

And all this is just the molehill-sized tip of a Mount Everest-sized iceberg.

[Dennis Price first started working in archaeology in the 1970s; most recently, he’s spent 10 years on Salisbury Plain, just a few miles away from Stonehenge. During his time with Wessex Archaeology, he was intimately involved with the world-famous discoveries of the King of Stonehenge, or Amesbury Archer, and with the Boscombe Bowmen; he was also the last archaeologist allowed inside Silbury Hill, Britain’s only pyramid, before work began to seal if off forever. He runs the Eternal Idol site and is the author of the forthcoming book The Missing Years of Jesus – The Greatest Story Never Told.] Comments (2)

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