The Early Childhood of Jesus

123:1.1On the fourth day of the jour­ney the party reached its des­ti­na­tion in safety. They ar­rived unan­nounced at the Naz­a­reth home, which had been oc­cu­pied for more than three years by one of Joseph’s mar­ried broth­ers, who was in­deed sur­prised to see them; so qui­etly had they gone about their busi­ness that nei­ther the fam­ily of Joseph nor that of Mary knew they had even left Alexan­dria. The next day Joseph’s brother moved his fam­ily, and Mary, for the first time since Je­sus’ birth, set­tled down with her lit­tle fam­ily to en­joy life in their own home. In less than a week Joseph se­cured work as a car­pen­ter, and they were su­premely happy.

123:1.2Je­sus was about three years and two months old at the time of their re­turn to Naz­a­reth. He had stood all these trav­els very well and was in ex­cel­lent health and full of child­ish glee and ex­cite­ment at hav­ing premises of his own to run about in and to en­joy. But he greatly missed the as­so­ci­a­tion of his Alexan­drian play­mates.

123:1.3On the way to Naz­a­reth Joseph had per­suaded Mary that it would be un­wise to spread the word among their Galilean friends and rel­a­tives that Je­sus was a child of prom­ise. They agreed to re­frain from all men­tion of these mat­ters to any­one. And they were both very faith­ful in keep­ing this prom­ise.

123:1.4Je­sus’ en­tire fourth year was a pe­riod of nor­mal phys­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and of un­usual men­tal ac­tiv­ity. Mean­time he had formed a very close at­tach­ment for a neigh­bor boy about his own age named Ja­cob. Je­sus and Ja­cob were al­ways happy in their play, and they grew up to be great friends and loyal com­pan­ions.

123:1.5The next im­por­tant event in the life of this Naz­a­reth fam­ily was the birth of the sec­ond child, James, in the early morn­ing hours of April 2, 3 B.C. Je­sus was thrilled by the thought of hav­ing a baby brother, and he would stand around by the hour just to ob­serve the baby’s early ac­tiv­i­ties.

123:1.6It was mid­sum­mer of this same year that Joseph built a small work­shop close to the vil­lage spring and near the car­a­van tar­ry­ing lot. Af­ter this he did very lit­tle car­pen­ter work by the day. He had as as­so­ciates two of his broth­ers and sev­eral other me­chan­ics, whom he sent out to work while he re­mained at the shop mak­ing yokes and plows and do­ing other wood­work. He also did some work in leather and with rope and can­vas. And Je­sus, as he grew up, when not at school, spent his time about equally be­tween help­ing his mother with home du­ties and watch­ing his fa­ther work at the shop, mean­while lis­ten­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion and gos­sip of the car­a­van con­duc­tors and pas­sen­gers from the four cor­ners of the earth.

123:1.7In July of this year, one month be­fore Je­sus was four years old, an out­break of ma­lig­nant in­testi­nal trou­ble spread over all Naz­a­reth from con­tact with the car­a­van trav­el­ers. Mary be­came so alarmed by the dan­ger of Je­sus be­ing ex­posed to this epi­demic of dis­ease that she bun­dled up both her chil­dren and fled to the coun­try home of her brother, sev­eral miles south of Naz­a­reth on the Megiddo road near Sarid. They did not re­turn to Naz­a­reth for more than two months; Je­sus greatly en­joyed this, his first ex­pe­ri­ence on a farm.