Chapter 5: Nazareth

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part One–Child
                                      

The whole group of them returned to Galilee, knowing from another dream Joseph had that Herod the Great was dead.

At first they avoided Nazareth. Because Herod’s son, Herod Antipas, was now ruling that region, they felt it safe only to settle in a more populated area where they could escape notice. Herod’s son had been told that both children were dead. And he certainly seemed to consider such stories of kingly babies unimportant anyway. But the group, and their Essene advisors, wished to take no chances. They had had a close enough call with King Herod. They settled for a time in Capernaum, the rich little fishing port on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Capernaum was a small but fast-growing town even then. It has a Roman tax collection post established only a few decades before Jesus’ birth. It is on–or just to the east of–the great trade routes from both Damascus and Tyre. The farmers south of it even now, almost a century after Jesus’ birth, have some of the best-producing land in the whole Roman empire, and send much of their wines, their fruits, and their vegetables through Capernaum as they do other nearby towns.

Jesus grew up for several years in that environment. He was at the age when first impressions of our surrounds are strongest–old enough to notice everything in the world as new, and to explore it and become familiar with it, but not so old as to grow bored with it. It was in Capernaum that he first grew fond of the wonderful hills that suddenly fall from the wide skies to the rocky coast and the jewel-like Sea itself. He used to watch the wide, sturdy wood fishing boats come and go in small fleets, and farmers bring to market the rich and abundant foods and flowers that overflow the fertile plain of Gennesaret nearby.

He also became used to the constant in and out of traders and merchants through the town, not to mention the sea and land breezes that accompanied them. Though Capernaum is no great city as Alexandria is, still it remains a place where many people from many occupations and nations meet and mingle.

In Capernaum and Alexandria, the two places of Jesus’ childhood, he grew used to living in the midst of a worldly and busy empire. He had little contact with Romans. But he grew up with others–Greeks, Phoenicians, Syrians, Egyptians, Hellenized Jews, and Hebrews of all kinds–and looked upon their children as his equals.

He, along with his parents, Josi, Elizabeth, John, and others, stayed there several years. It was only when he was nine that the group decided to divide and return to their home towns. Elizabeth wished to take John back to their home in the hills near Hebron in southern Judea. John was wild and almost a bully except that his passion to protect children smaller than himself made him the hero of the young ones throughout the town. She wanted him to learn more discipline and, guided by her intuitive knowing of the best ways for her son, she enrolled him as a pupil in the more ascetic and rigid desert Essenes’ retreat near Hebron, on the Dead Sea.

Joseph wanted to return to Nazareth. The Essenes judged it a good move politically, for Herod Antipas, King of Galilee and Perea, was beginning to concentrate his awareness more on the Sea of Galilee area. Antipas still was not looking for John or Jesus. But the Essenes felt Jesus would actually be safer by this time if his whole family returned to Nazareth. Besides, Jesus was already old enough to be taught. Judy, the leader of the Mount Carmel Essenes, had been teaching him simple stories and Laws. Since Nazareth was much closer to Mount Carmel, her job would be easier. Jesus would even be able to visit her in the mountainous retreat now and then.

The family, with Josi, moved to Nazareth.

It was a big change for all of them, especially Jesus. He was an alert and intelligent boy whose curiosity and unusual reddish hair had involved him in many discussions with traders and Jewish travelers passing through Capernaum.

In Nazareth, though there was little to see or do. His father, instead of accompanying him around the marketplace and the hills and seashore as he had done in Capernaum, suddenly became a full-time carpenter again.

“Why must you work so much now, Poppa?” Jesus asked.

Joseph smiled down on the boy as he pushed his planning tool along a raised timber to smooth it. Behind his ear was a chip of wood, the badge of his trade.

“Because,” he answered, “I like this work. And you are old enough to wander through the hills alone and with your friends.”

“I have no friends.” Jesus hoped his father would put down his plane right there and come with him.

Joseph shook his head. “We have just moved here. You can make friends any time you want.”

“You don’t need to earn money for us, Poppa.” Jesus shifted restlessly. “You still have the money the Magi gave us. Come with me for just a little while.” He had been told how the Magi had visited him at his birth, bringing presents and gold. He had not been told who he was–Israel’s Messiah. He had only been told that he was born for a special reason.

Joseph smiled at his son’s persistence. “We talk together of our Jewish traditions in the evenings, Son, and often I take you to the synagogue to teach you the Laws.”

“That is not playing, Poppa! It is not exciting!”

“If a man is to be recognized as a regular member of his trade,” Joseph explained, “he must keep regular hours and receive customers throughout the day. It is my work, and also my play. As for the Magi’s money, Jesus, it is not to support us in wealth and luxury. Part of it is meant for when you are older.” Joseph paused. “You may be traveling, after you come of age in several years.”

“Traveling?” The boy’s eyes lit up. From the first day they had arrived in Nazareth, he had been bored with the village. He had politely avoided mentioning this, knowing that his own wishes were less important than his parents’ and his teacher Judy’s. But at this mention of travel, he became excited.

“Where to, Poppa? As far as Jerusalem?”

Joseph did smile this time. “Yes, that far. And perhaps other places.”

Jesus’ face became quiet. He was a serious boy. Often the people around him had to look at his eyes to read his feelings. Joseph did so now, and saw his son was very happy.

“Go find some friends now to play with,” Joseph suggested.

Jesus nodded solemnly. “Yes sir. I will wear my cloak.”

As the boy ran off, pleased, to find playmates, Joseph thought about the lucky charm of his cloak. It was one of the few unusual things about Jesus that, if anything could, might be considered psychic. Somehow, when sick children wore a part of Jesus’ clothes such as the cloak, they sometimes improved. A few actually got well long before they should have.

“It is not very important,” Judy had told the rest of them several years before in Capernaum. “Healers long have considered the garment of an exceedingly well man to help cure sickness.”

“But it’s something!” Josi had exclaimed.

Judy had nodded her grey-haired, old head. She was older than Joseph by several years, and was considered his elder at Essene councils. “Yes,” she answered. “It is something. It probably means that he is a natural-born healer. He may have the gift of laying hands on people to cure them.”

Josi shuddered excitedly. Mary and Joseph simply looked at each other significantly.

“If you are thinking it is proof he is the Messiah,” Judy said, “don’t count on it.”

She looked out through the door to the street where Jesus was playing with a neighbor boy. “There will be other proofs of that,” she said softly. “They will come later.”

As Jesus grew into his tenth year, the first of several great changes in his immediate life began. This first change was subtle–not one he actually knew was happening. Nevertheless, it quietly changed the whole atmosphere of the family’s feelings among each other.

Mary and Joseph were becoming much closer to each other.

It started one spring evening when Jesus was off playing with other children near the synagogue and Josi was away in Jerusalem for several days, visiting her cousin. Mary had just finished cleaning up after their meal of fish, leeks, and millet.

She and Joseph were standing quietly in front of their three-room home of mud bricks. The breeze was blowing now and then through the goat skin hanging across the doorway behind them. It blew into the front room where Joseph worked. Gusting against the underside of the reeds in the roof, it gently rattled them.

Joseph put his arm quietly behind Mary’s waist as they looked out upon the hills covered with new green grass. He had been holding Mary like this for several years now, though they still did not have a normal physical relationship. It was unusual for a man and woman to live together without blooding their bed; yet they did so. It was acceptable to Essenes, which they were. And both of them had become so used to the idea of chastity before they were together, that they would not have known how to change it during the first years of their marriage even if they had wanted to.

Signs of physical affection, though, had gradually increased in their married life.

He left his arm around her waist for several minutes, feeling her warm flesh beneath her robe. Then, unexpectedly, he placed his large and worn carpenter’s hand on the spine of her back.

“Mary,” he said. “The scribe of the Essenes was passing through the village today. He left a message. The elders and Judy among them have been reading the stars concerning our family. The elders have decided that we may pursue a normal married life.”

She jerked her around and looked at him with surprise.

He nodded. “They said it must be in our hearts first, though, to do this thing.”

She blushed from the top of her forehead to her leather-wrapped toes.

He looked away quickly. “It is in my heart, my dear one,” he said. “But only if it is so with you.”

She did not answer him. But suddenly he could feel her standing closer beside him, the heat from her breath warming his shoulder.

He looked at her again. She was gazing off into the hills that began at the end of their street.

“I am afraid,” she said.

He watched her profile. Her chin was sharp and strong, her skin like the lightest of pure olives. She had always been beautiful. She would soon be middle-aged by Jewish standards. But she had born only one child, and Josi had always been there to help her with the hard work of keeping a family. Because of these things she looked more like a woman of eighteen in her fullest ripeness than the woman of twenty-six that she was.

“I will help you,” he said.

“Come inside,” she answered and, quickly turning, went behind the goat skin.

His heart began beating fast. He followed her. She was just inside the doorway, waiting. He could not understand the look in her eyes. “What is it you want, my dearest?” he asked her. “I am not afraid, either to help you with this thing or to wait ten more years if you desire it.”

“I wanted you to come inside,” she answered. Quickly she stretched up and kissed his mouth. Then she rested her head on his chest.

He felt the kiss down to his toes. He was a man. Though an old man, his sexual force was unabated. Even so, he had not been kissed in this manner for very many years. He lifted her chin and gently returned the kiss, but longer.

She clung to him tightly. “My husband, aren’t you afraid it will prove too difficult for you?”

He almost laughed. The proof against this was, that very moment, stirring in his loins. “Moses died at 120 years of age,” he told her. He smiled. “Yet he was still able to enter his dark Cushite woman. You shall be my woman of light, and I shall be your Moses.”

She blushed deeply again. “You had better give me a few more days at least,” she said. Her voice was husky. “I want to be completely ready.”

He stroked her long, dark hair, which had fallen loose from her linen head cloth. “We have weeks,” he told her. “Months. I will wait.”

“Help me prepare,” she answered. She jerkily lifted her lips to his mouth once more. The kiss brought forth physical feelings in her that she had never allowed in herself before. She fought her first impulse to push them down. She tried to let them stay. Gradually, as she held herself tightly against him, the stirrings and risings increased.

She finally broke from their embrace with a gasp. “It is not as easy as we had supposed,” she said, when she had caught her breath. She smiled.

“But it is good,” he said.

she raised her eyebrow and gave him a sideways glance. “You seem to know what you’re doing,” she told him.

“I am an uninstructed man.” He smiled. “They do not teach such things among the Essenes”
“Well, we can continue tomorrow evening when Jesus is out.” She straightened her linen head cloth and began aimlessly brushing at her robe.

He watched her fondly.

“I think I will like this,” she told him.

Then she hurried to the back rooms, blushing once again.

James, Jesus’ brother, was born a year later. The change for Joseph and Mary was great. They now had in fact what they only had in name before–a union of two people in a marriage of both flesh and spirit.

For Jesus the change was even greater, if less obvious. He wasn’t quite sure what happened, but suddenly his whole world had shifted slightly away from the center of what he had considered normal.

For one thing, he felt a little bit like an outsider. Before Mary and Joseph had come together in the flesh, Jesus grew up feeling he and they were all equal friends, along with Josi, all of them having their job to do. His job had been to grow up.

But suddenly, in a swift change, sometimes he found himself and Josi being sent on long errands right after supper. When the two would return, his momma and poppa seemed distant from him, as if they shared a secret.

He didn’t like that.

Suddenly he also had his own separate place to sleep. Formerly, everyone had slept together in the sleeping room. The other two rooms had been the day room and Joseph’s workshop. One afternoon after coming back with his father from inspecting a new shipment of wood, he had found his sleeping things moved to a comfortable corner of the workshop. And Josi’s were at the far end of the day room.

Of course his mother had explained it. “Your father and I are taking up a regular way of marriage, just like most married people do, my son.”

“Does that mean I’ll have brothers and sisters?” he asked. He knew that most marriages produced lots of children.

“We shall see,” Mary answered.

That pleased him. But it still didn’t make his uneasiness any better. He felt like he was being excluded from some important part of life by people whose sharing and trust he had always taken for granted.

“It has something to do with our bodies, doesn’t it?” he asked Josi one evening, in the day room. His parents were out in front, watching the stars rise. Outside, the locusts were chirruping. Josi was sewing.

“Ssh, they will hear you,” she said. “Yes. You are right.”

“How are babies made?” he asked.

Josi blushed. “I am not married, Jesus. I do not understand these things. What did your poppa tell you?”

Jesus shrugged. “He has told me to watch the beasts of the field, and that when I come of age he will tell me how it is with a husband and wife.”

Josi sighed. “Then you must wait as your poppa has told you.” She concentrated on her sewing.

He stared at her unhappily, then lit a candle and picked up his book roll. Besides the Laws his father studied with him, they also were reading the prophets and the various commentaries by other ancient Hebrews on the holy books. Sometimes Judy visited and also taught him.

These studies confused him more. In some ways they were worse than the secret his momma and poppa were sharing. That secret, at least, would lead to something he could touch and feel–a baby, he hoped.

But his studies–somehow they were creating a vague unease in him. It was worse than any unease he had felt before. It gnawed at him. The histories of Moses and Joshua, for example, excited him as if he had really been there. He came out of these stories feeling like he was an ancient Hebrew suddenly jumping forward into a future that had become strange and modern. His home, his parents and Josi, and all of Nazareth would then feel odd and out of place to him, as if ancient Palestine was the only true home he could have known.

The prophets were another great source of disturbance to him. They left him feeling restless and impatient, as if he were on the edge of knowing the whole truth of his life but somehow lacked the key to unlock the final door. The prophets’ predictions of a future messiah especially did this to him.

Instinctively he avoided asking his parents about this Messiah. No one in his household ever talked about it, so far as he knew, except when he brought up the subject. He thought they didn’t like to talk about it, even though they tried to answer all his questions.

His friends, on the other hand, had long arguments about the Messiah. They argued about whether he would come as a king, as a high priest, or as the leader of a great army of Jews. They seemed to think the subject was worth endless talk.

He asked Judy about it one day when they were bent over the old books, studying in the family day room.

“Teacher,” he asked. This was her title of respect. It was unusual to use it for a woman. Women rarely were Teachers. But Judy was more capable than even most men in explaining the Laws and the prophets. if she had been born a man, his parents liked to tell him, she might have become of Israel’s greatest Doctors of the law.

“Who is the Messiah?” he asked her. “Will he really come soon?” He was sitting beside her in the day room.

Judy’s kind old face smiled at him. Her hairs were beginning to turn white, but her body still had the pleasant fullness of middle age and her skin the smoothness of youth.

“Is this what your friends say, that the Messiah comes soon?” she asked.

Jesus nodded. “Some of them say he is already here. Some say he is the High Priest in Jerusalem. Others say he is a man who hides in the hills and is preparing an army to throw the Romans out of our lands!”

“Do you believe either of these stories, Jesus?” she asked. She picked up the hot drink before her. Mary made it for her from roasted barley whenever the older woman visited.

Jesus shook his head. “I do not know what to believe, Teacher. I–” he suddenly looked away and through the open window to the green hills beyond. The sun shone on them brightly.

Judy leaned over and put her hand on his. “You are confused,” she said.

Jesus nodded eagerly. “I feel like he is alive and I get excited when I think about him. But then I get scared, too. And I feel like I should know who he is. But then I don’t want to know him. It gets dark, and–”

He put his head down and stared into his lap. The day room suddenly blurred in his vision as tears welled out of his eyes. He wiped the tears and fiercely willed them to stop.

“Relax, child,” Judy said. She patted his hand. The wind rustled the reeds in the roof over her head. The breeze touched her face. “When you are older,” she said, “you will understand why you feel this way.”

Jesus looked up stubbornly. “Will I understand who the Messiah is?” he asked.

“you will understand,” she answered.

He grabbed a book roll from the shelf of scrolls against the wall. “Help me learn the laws some more,” he told her. Then he added, more softly, “Teacher.”

Judy took the roll from him. Through the door, only half-covered by its goat sin, she could hear Joseph chipping away at a knot on a thick board.

“Have you memorized this third section, yet?” she asked.

“Almost.” He began reciting.

Judy had recently discovered that the boy possessed an unusually excellent memory. He could not, like a very few scribes and other men of learning, read a book roll once and recite it perfectly from memory. However, she had noticed that by the third time he had looked over a book roll carefully, and understood its meaning, he could remember most of it.

She realized he could memorize almost all the important holy books of the Hebrews, and then go on to foreign writings, as well. She was already teaching him Greek, with Mary and Josi’s help. with Joseph’s help she was teaching him classical Hebrew. Sanskrit, High Egyptian, and other languages would follow.

She nodded her head and closed her eyes, rocking slightly back and forth on the thick mat Josi always left for her visits. She listened to Jesus’ voice fill the day room as he recited. She had many plans for this child whom she had been chosen to teach. Not all the plans had to do with languages and laws, either. She knew he had to learn methods of using inner power, too–much more than she alone could ever teach him.

When Jesus finished, they both prepared for supper with his family.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.