The canonical gospels are silent on the period from Jesus’ childhood until the beginning of his public preaching, about two years before his death. So that one can only sketch of him a dotted portrait.
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This is not the least paradoxes: if Jesus – undoubtedly involuntarily – changed the face of the world, his message having given birth to a religion whose vocation is “universal” (such is the meaning of the word “catholic”), the story of his life is very largely unknown to us. The canonical Gospels are silent on the period from… from his childhood to the age at which he began his public preaching, about two years before his death. These thirty-some years, the evangelist Luke sums them up as follows: “The child grew, was strengthened and filled with wisdom” (2, 40). This is laconic to say the least…
Sources outside Christianity (from classic authors such as Tacitus or Suetonius to Jewish writings), if they do mention Jesus, do not provide much information on his biography . And archeology is, for its part, silent: for such ancient times, the remains bear witness to the great of this world, and not to the anonymous – what the prophet of Galilee was then.
Astronomers were not born in year zero
So what exactly do we know about the life of Jesus? Let’s start by shattering a received idea: Jesus was not born “year zero” of astronomers, contrary to what the monk Dionysius the Little, in the 6th century, had deduced from his calculations. It is rather between the year 7 and the year 4 before our era (probably in 6) that a certain Mary gives birth to an infant named Yeshua, “God save”, in Hebrew.
Likewise, it probably did not come into the world on December 25, a symbolic day of the winter solstice and prelude to the return of spring. And finally, Jesus would not have died in 33, but a few years earlier – presumably on April 7, 30, at the age of 36.
Doubt remains as to the place of this birth. According to the evangelists Matthew and Luke, the child was not born in Nazareth, the city of his parents, but in Bethlehem – city of King David whose reign, in the X th century before our era, is fantasized as a golden age for Israel. A classic process, no doubt aimed at idealizing the biography of the founder of Christianity.
Jesus was most certainly born in Nazareth, in Galilee. In any case, it was there that he spent all his childhood and youth – hence, no doubt, the nickname “Nazarene” given to him. According to Jewish law, Jesus is circumcised eight days after his birth. The child would have manifested very early the desire to attend the Temple of Jerusalem, as evidenced by the episode of “Jesus among the doctors” (Luke 2, 41-50).
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