The Gospel According to the Son

3

At the age of twenty-seven I finished my apprentice . ship and became a master, but still worked with Joseph. In my youth, other apprentices had been jealous of me because they looked upon him as my father, but I could have told them that Joseph served God by treating all of his workers with as much respect as he gave to his work. When I was scrupulous in my labors, Joseph would nod and say, "You would make a good carpenter if God had wanted you to be one." What did Joseph mean? As he said such things, he would turn his head away as though to press his lips upon a secret. Being old, his memory was weak, and he could not recall that he had told me this secret, the true story of my birth, when I was twelve. Yet I remembered even less, for he had related these events to me on our journey back to Nazareth from the Great Temple in Jerusalem, and what I learned was so far from the understanding of a boy that soon after our return, I fell into a long fever. All that Joseph told me seemed lost. Still, I do not think it was the fever that made me forget, but rather that I did not wish to remember. It was only after eighteen years had passed and I was thirty and mourning Joseph's death that I could recall what he told me when I was twelve.

In those years my family, together with other Essenes from Nazareth, rich and poor, would walk to Jerusalem in the week before Passover, all of us dressed in white, and we traveled in such numbers that we did not fear thieves on the road. The journey took three days from dawn to dark over the hills and valleys and deserts between Nazareth and Jerusalem, but after my twelfth year, however, they never went again.

For on that visit, even as they passed through the last gate of Jerusalem on their way home, I slipped out of the procession and ran all the way back to the Great Temple. Because all the children from Nazareth had stayed together, my mother did not notice my absence until later that morning.

When they didn't find me among friends, kinfolk, or neighbors, Mary and Joseph hastened back to the Great Temple, and there they found me in one of the courtyards, with a number of priests and doctors. To the astonishment of my parents, I not only sat comfortably among these wise men but was speaking with them.

According to Joseph and Mary, my words were worthy of a prophet: a miracle.

Later, after the death of Joseph, I came to believe that I must preach and asked my mother what I had said on that day in the Temple eighteen years ago. But she would tell me no more than that my words were so holy she could not repeat them, no more than she could speak the name of the Lord aloud. Yet even as she refused, so did a better memory of that moment come back to me, and I, too, was delighted with my wisdom.

What, then, had I been saying? My spoken thoughts were not holy so much as difficult to comprehend. For in those years wise men in the synagogue often had learned discussions with each other about the Word. Had the Word always been with God?

Later, the Gospel of John commenced by saying: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God." But that was written many years after I was gone. When I was twelve, the question was still in dispute. Had God made our flesh to be like the flesh of animals, or had He created us by His utterance alone?

Now, I could recall telling these learned elders that the Word had lived first in water even as the breath that carries our speech comes forth from our mouths in a cloud on a cold winter morning. Yet clouds also bring rain, I had said, and so the Word lives in the water of our breath. Thereby we belong to God. For all the waters, we know, are His, even as all the rivers go down to the sea.

In that hour, the priests told my mother, "Never in one so young have we heard such wisdom," and I would suppose that this praise decided Joseph to tell me the story of my birth in the course of our return to Nazareth.

What I now relate is how the story came back to me in my thirtieth year while praying at Joseph's funeral. Indeed, even as I prayed, I could still see the strain on his face on the day he told me that he was not my father.