Thread by @firstladyship

1. “The lost years of Jesus.”

With Herod gone, the gospel tells about how Jesus & his family, left Egypt & settled in Nazareth. Then Jesus, Mary & Joseph abruptly vanished from history books. There is almost no mention of Jesus’s boyhood & upbringing.

2. These are Jesus’s formative years, the period that shaped the radical beliefs he would later preach. Scholars call them, “the lost years of Jesus.”

What happened during these lost years of Jesus? Jesus’s boyhood was recorded in the first century Judea.

3. The real Jesus lived in Nazareth for most of his life, until the moment he launched his ministry

Unfortunately however, the gospels tell us very little about Jesus’s early life. The artistic blue-eyed Jesus, portrayed in movies, is a far cry from a typical Middle Eastern Jew.

4. Imagine the world that Jesus grew up in. In the first century Nazareth, many were Shepards & farmers. So Jesus used seeds & vineyards as metaphors in most of his parables.

We know for sure that Jesus & Joseph were carpenters but from archaeological digs in the Holy Land,

5. it is clear that woods were used very very slightly. The primary building materials at the time, was stone. When you correlate that with Jesus’s teachings, or in the epistles, you will find that he mostly talked about buildings built out of stones, not woods.

Matthew 21: 42.

6. So one of our iconic images of Jesus; “Jesus the Carpenter,” cud be a misconception. From text, it appears, we may have to picture a new image. That of “Jesus the Apprentice Stone Mason”

Nazareth in the first century was a typical Galilean village, Jesus lived a typical life.

6. His family were pious Jews. There were no atheists in the first century. However, one thing we know for sure was that Jesus was not a Christian

Many people forget that Christianity is the religion about Jesus, it was not the religion of Jesus himself. Jesus was in fact a Jew.