Jesus at Jerusalem

125:3.1It had been ar­ranged that the Naz­a­reth party should gather in the re­gion of the tem­ple at mid­forenoon on the first day of the week af­ter the Pass­over fes­ti­val had ended. This they did and started out on the re­turn jour­ney to Naz­a­reth. Je­sus had gone into the tem­ple to lis­ten to the dis­cus­sions while his par­ents awaited the as­sem­bly of their fel­low trav­el­ers. Pres­ently the com­pany pre­pared to de­part, the men go­ing in one group and the women in an­other as was their cus­tom in jour­ney­ing to and from the Je­ru­sa­lem fes­ti­vals. Je­sus had gone up to Je­ru­sa­lem in com­pany with his mother and the women. Be­ing now a young man of the con­se­cra­tion, he was sup­posed to jour­ney back to Naz­a­reth in com­pany with his fa­ther and the men. But as the Naz­a­reth party moved on to­ward Beth­any, Je­sus was com­pletely ab­sorbed in the dis­cus­sion of an­gels, in the tem­ple, be­ing wholly un­mind­ful of the pass­ing of the time for the de­par­ture of his par­ents. And he did not re­al­ize that he had been left be­hind un­til the noon­time ad­journ­ment of the tem­ple con­fer­ences.

125:3.2The Naz­a­reth trav­el­ers did not miss Je­sus be­cause Mary sur­mised he jour­neyed with the men, while Joseph thought he trav­eled with the women since he had gone up to Je­ru­sa­lem with the women, lead­ing Mary’s don­key. They did not dis­cover his ab­sence un­til they reached Jeri­cho and pre­pared to tarry for the night. Af­ter mak­ing in­quiry of the last of the party to reach Jeri­cho and learn­ing that none of them had seen their son, they spent a sleep­less night, turn­ing over in their minds what might have hap­pened to him, re­count­ing many of his un­usual re­ac­tions to the events of Pass­over week, and mildly chid­ing each other for not see­ing to it that he was in the group be­fore they left Je­ru­sa­lem.