Who taught Jesus as a Boy?

UpAndAtom

Was it the Essenes? Edgar Cayce says they were, but is there anything else besides Edgar to back this up?

First his mother...then his father...and the local rabbi along with all the men of the village who attended synagogue...and took turns teaching the children Hebrew and scripture...and Talmud...as of then still not written down...that's who taught Jesus. Edgar Cayce was a Jack Ass! There are some gnostic works that say Jesus was tied up with the Eastern Wisdon religions...that he spent part of his childhood in India...but there's nothing in the accepted Gospels and works on his life to suggest this.

Everything Jesus taught was firlmy grounded in Judaism of it's day.

Yerusalyim

OK,

It was me darn it... I TAUGHT THE BOY...and I'd do it againnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!! Got a problem with that???

Mary

There's very little in written history that describes Jesus' youth. I know there's the scripture that talks about when he was 12 years old, he gets left behind at the synagogue and when his family returns to get him, he was talking to the priests and they were "amazed" at what he was saying.

As a Jewish boy, Jesus would have been taught the Torah probably both by Mary and Joseph and possibly by other 'older men' in the Faith. He obviously would have been very familiar with all the laws of the Pharisees, which is why He condemned them later on in life.

(you don't really believe anything Edgar Cayce said do you? This guy was a con-artist)

Ravyn2

hmmm well if you only accept the Biblical cannon, then Jesus never went to the bathroom either--since it never says he did. And if you are Protestant then you don't accept all of Biblical cannon. Big controversy there!

However, in the Eastern Catholic, gnostic, and even ancient Western Catholic TRADITIONS there are many many legends about Jesus' childhood and where he went and who taught him. One of the most widely accepted is that Joseph of Arimathea was his uncle and a merchant in tin who travelled to Cornwall and Salisbury plain and the general vicinity of Wales and the Mendip mines and Jesus went with him and studied at the feet of some of the most learned druids of the day. Many many legends and myths are tied up in this--including the grail stories and Camelot. The Eastern Catholics and the Coptics believe he studied in Alexandria where the great library was(and incidentally one of the repositories for the Atlantean records that Cayce claims were saved after the disaster.) To this day, some areas of France are sanctioned by the RC Church to celebrate feast days that are downright strange linking the Three Marys and the Black Madonna and the Merovingian Dynasty to the south of France and the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were the ones married at Cana and she was pregnant with twins(or had two children) when he died(the gnostics do not believe he did die) and they all settled in France, again with Joseph of Arimathea.

There are so many many holes in the Gospels when it comes to the history of Jesus. The Infancy Gospel of James is a fascinating piece of work. The Mormons of course believe Jesus appeared before his ascension in the Americas. I never understood why these legends were not seized upon by the Church in an effort to evangelize more fully. I know one of my biggest hangups is the foreigness of the Bible and the fact that I am not Jewish and feel no ancestral connection to it.

a good book for reference and interesting reading is The Other Bible by Willis Barnstone. It contains Gnostic Gospels, Dead Sea Scrolls, Visionary Wisdom Texts, Christian Apocrypha, Jewish Pseudopigrapha and Kabbalah. It was published in 1984, pre-Elaine Pagels and all her work on the Nag Hammadi, but along with that< and a Jerusalem Bible(not a NEW Jerusalem Bible) and you are pretty much set for Biblical references. I also own a separate copy of Dead Sea Scrolls and The Way of the Pilgrim. oh and the Mormon books--Pearl of Great Price and Book of Abraham-- should also be part of this library. (I have all of Cayce's books too.)

I LOVE this subject. I LOVE mythos and mysticism.

Ravyn

ignorance is strength

Hate to go in face of tradition but Jesus was very poor and so was the entire town of Nazereth, he probably would not have had much of an education at all (probably mostly from Mary and other members of his family, Joseph died early in Jesus' life). This is probably the reason why Mary and Joseph were so suprised to see him discussing theology with the Doctors of the Law.

run dont walk

sssssshhhhhhhh !!!!! don't tell anybody ...................

the watchtower and awake magazines, back then they were only 1 cent for the two !!!!

William Penwell

Jesus in India I found a link to that, although it is not about Jesus as a youth but much older.

http://www.tombofjesus.com/Conclusion.htm#bavish

How much of the Gospel stories can we believe?

This controversy has existed from the very beginning, and the writings of the "Church Fathers" themselves reveal that they were constantly forced by the pagan intelligentsia to defend what the non-Christians and other Christians ("heretics")4 alike saw as a preposterous and fabricated yarn with absolutely no evidence of it ever having taken place in history. As Rev. Robert Taylor says, "And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied."5 Emperor Julian, who, coming after the reign of the fanatical and murderous "good Christian" Constantine, returned rights to pagan worshippers, stated, "If anyone should wish to know the truth with respect to you Christians, he will find your impiety to be made up partly of the Jewish audacity, and partly of the indifference and confusion of the Gentiles, and that you have put together not the best, but the worst characteristics of them both."6 According to these learned dissenters, the New Testament could rightly be called, "Gospel Fictions."7

A century ago, mythicist Albert Churchward said, "The canonical gospels can be shown to be a collection of sayings from the Egyptian Mythos and Eschatology. "8 In Forgery in Christianity, Joseph Wheless states, "The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates."9 Those who concocted some of the hundreds of "alternative" gospels and epistles that were being kicked about during the first several centuries C.E. have even admitted that they had forged the documents.10 Forgery during the first centuries of the Church's existence was admittedly rampant, so common in fact that a new phrase was coined to describe it: "pious fraud."11 Such prevarication is confessed to repeatedly in the Catholic Encyclopedia.12 Some of the "great" church fathers, such as Eusebius13, were determined by their own peers to be unbelievable liars who regularly wrote their own fictions of what "the Lord" said and did during "his" alleged sojourn upon the earth.14

http://www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm

CruithneLaLuna

Interesting that you bring that into the discussion, Penwell. I've read the whole story from which you quote a couple of paragraphs, and intend one day soon to read the entire book by Acharya S. Being at this point in my life a non-Christian, I have nothing to fear from reading material that challenges the historical existence of Jesus. Besides Acharya's book, there is The Jesus Puzzle http://jesuspuzzle.com and The Bible Fraud http://biblefraud.com , which I anticpate all being interesting and possibly enlightening in some respects.

I suppose, to be fair, one should interleave reading several books of these sort with reading scholarly books by Christian authors, that try to prove that Jesus did exist, the gospels and their writers were honest, etc.

A problem I see with reading this sort of stuff is that in doing so, we aren't really much better off than we were reading WTS publications. We're doing something like "tertiary" research, as opposed to secondary, or primary (which unless someone is paying one to do it, or one is independently wealthy and has pratically unlimited money and time, one is not likely to do). The author says that some other author says so-and-so, and without doing additional reading and analysis, you don't know how much of what that other author says is based on fact, and how much on bias.

Cruithne, who wishes he had time in this life to be a REAL scholar.

UpAndAtom

Yerusalyim & Mary:
Information revealled by Cayce concerning Jesus and the Essences predated the Dead Sea Scroll discovery; thus your opinions of Cayce actually revealled more about yourselves than you perhaps intended. Ravyn2:
“Jesus never went to the bathroom either”… well put. You certainly seem well read (I’m currently reading a Cayce biography by Harmon Hartzell Bro – quite interesting). You have obviously more information of this subject that I do… however I did you a serious study of the book of Mormon many years ago. I stopped my studies when I pointed out to the “sisters” that their book of mormon was referring to Jesus (by name) is the past tence, almost 600 years before he was born. I’ve never met a faith so easily proven false.

Who taught Jesus as a Boy?

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