The Transition Years

134:7.1When Je­sus re­turned from the jour­ney to the Caspian Sea, he knew that his world trav­els were about fin­ished. He made only one more trip out­side of Pales­tine, and that was into Syria. Af­ter a brief visit to Ca­per­naum, he went to Naz­a­reth, stop­ping over a few days to visit. In the mid­dle of April he left Naz­a­reth for Tyre. From there he jour­neyed on north, tar­ry­ing for a few days at Sidon, but his des­ti­na­tion was An­ti­och.

134:7.2This is the year of Je­sus’ soli­tary wan­der­ings through Pales­tine and Syria. Through­out this year of travel he was known by var­i­ous names in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try: the car­pen­ter of Naz­a­reth, the boat­builder of Ca­per­naum, the scribe of Da­mas­cus, and the teacher of Alexan­dria.

134:7.3At An­ti­och the Son of Man lived for over two months, work­ing, ob­serv­ing, study­ing, vis­it­ing, min­is­ter­ing, and all the while learn­ing how man lives, how he thinks, feels, and re­acts to the en­vi­ron­ment of hu­man ex­is­tence. For three weeks of this pe­riod he worked as a tent­maker. He re­mained longer in An­ti­och than at any other place he vis­ited on this trip. Ten years later, when the Apos­tle Paul was preach­ing in An­ti­och and heard his fol­low­ers speak of the doc­trines of the Da­mas­cus scribe, he lit­tle knew that his pupils had heard the voice, and lis­tened to the teach­ings, of the Mas­ter him­self.

134:7.4From An­ti­och Je­sus jour­neyed south along the coast to Cae­sarea, where he tar­ried for a few weeks, con­tin­u­ing down the coast to Joppa. From Joppa he trav­eled in­land to Jam­nia, Ash­dod, and Gaza. From Gaza he took the in­land trail to Beer­sheba, where he re­mained for a week.

134:7.5Je­sus then started on his fi­nal tour, as a pri­vate in­di­vid­ual, through the heart of Pales­tine, go­ing from Beer­sheba in the south to Dan in the north. On this jour­ney north­ward he stopped at He­bron, Beth­le­hem (where he saw his birth­place), Je­ru­sa­lem (he did not visit Beth­any), Beeroth, Lebonah, Sy­char, Shechem, Samaria, Geba, En-Gan­nim, En­dor, Madon; pass­ing through Mag­dala and Ca­per­naum, he jour­neyed on north; and pass­ing east of the Wa­ters of Merom, he went by Karahta to Dan, or Cae­sarea-Phi­lippi.

134:7.6The in­dwelling Thought Ad­juster now led Je­sus to for­sake the dwell­ing places of men and be­take him­self up to Mount Her­mon that he might fin­ish his work of mas­ter­ing his hu­man mind and com­plete the task of ef­fect­ing his full con­se­cra­tion to the re­main­der of his life­work on earth.

134:7.7This was one of those un­usual and ex­traor­di­nary epochs in the Mas­ter’s earth life on Uran­tia. An­other and very sim­i­lar one was the ex­pe­ri­ence he passed through when alone in the hills near Pella just sub­se­quent to his bap­tism. This pe­riod of iso­la­tion on Mount Her­mon marked the ter­mi­na­tion of his purely hu­man ca­reer, that is, the tech­ni­cal ter­mi­na­tion of the mor­tal be­stowal, while the later iso­la­tion marked the be­gin­ning of the more di­vine phase of the be­stowal. And Je­sus lived alone with God for six weeks on the slopes of Mount Her­mon.