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The Third Lesson: The Mystic Youth of Jesus.967
that I must be in my Father’s House? I must be about the things of my Father.”
And the parents, feeling themselves in the presence of the Mystery that had
ever been about the child, followed Him silently from the Temple grounds.
And here closes the New Testament story of the boy Jesus at the age of
thirteen, which story is not resumed until His appearance at the place of
the preaching of John the Baptist, over seventeen years later, when the boy
had reached the age of a man of thirty years. When and how did he spend
those seventeen years? The New Testament is totally silent on this score.
Can anyone who has read the above imagine that Jesus spent these years
as a growing youth and young man, working at His father’s carpenter bench
in the village of Nazareth? Would not the Master, having found his strength
and power, have insisted upon developing the same? Could the Divine
Genius once self-recognized be content to be obscured amid material
pursuits? The New Testament is silent, but the Occult Traditions and Mystic
Legends tell us the story of the missing seventeen years, and these we shall
now give to you.
* * *
The legends and traditions of the mystic and occult organizations and
brotherhoods tell us that after the occurrence of Jesus and the Elders in
the Temple, and his recovery by his parents, the latter were approached
by members of the secret organization to which the Magi belonged, who
pointed out to the parents the injustice of the plan of keeping the lad at
the carpenter’s bench when He had shown evidences of such a marvelous
spiritual development and such a wonderful intellectual grasp of weighty
subjects. It is told that after a long and serious consideration of the matter
the parents finally consented to the plan advanced by the Magi, and allowed
them to take the lad with them into their own land and retreats that He
might there receive the instructions for which His soul craved, and for which
His mind was fitted.
It is true that the New Testament does not corroborate these occult
legends, but it is likewise true that it says nothing to the contrary. It is silent