The whole allegory of the humble but royal birth in a cave or stable was based upon the archetypal idea of the kingly nature of the crowning of our evolutionary development by the advent of self-reflective consciousness. The concept of a Messianic or Christly “coming” therefore is the result of the ancient sages meditating upon this new and higher degree of intelligence and self-awareness. The former, purely animalistic mode of life gave way to the potential inherent in a seed of divine mind implanted in the order of nature from “above,” that is, by the mysterious omnipresence we call God. In reality, then, Christmas itself is, as the carol triumphantly announces, “the birthday of a king.” But this “king” is not a single individual who is believed to have lived in Palestine some two thousand years ago, but the glorious birth within each one of us of divine Incarnation. As St. Paul puts it: “Christ in you; the hope of glory.”
Thus, all the rites and practices of the churches at Christmastime are truly efficacious and meaningful only if the birth of the “Saviour Jesus” is understood as a symbol of the glorious “virgin” birth within ourselves. The joyful message is that Transcendence has broken into history and become part of every one of us. What we need is to have the eyes to see this glory within and all around. It is when we truly recognize who and what we really are that we are born again. As Hermes Trismegistus (“thrice great”) says to his son Tat in the passage of the Hermetica already referred to: “I am not now the man I was. I have been born again in spirit.”
At the Age of Twelve
One of the most obvious clues that in the Gospel narratives we are not dealing with anything resembling a biography of a historical person called Jesus or Yeshua of Nazareth is the fact that in all the Gospels except Luke there is a total silence about the entire period from Jesus’ infancy until the beginning of his public ministry at about age thirty. This is wholly unlike any other biography ever written, and is a bedrock fact that the historicizers and other literalizers of all schools must face at some point. We are asked by them to believe that the Gospel authors and editors knew in minute detail what Jesus is alleged to have said and to have done over a space of from one year to about three years, but that at the same time they could not remember one single incident, occasion or saying from all the years between! It defies reason.
In his two-volume work Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World, the scholar Gerald Massey makes the telling point that this same vacuum occurs in the various accounts of many other mythical Messiahs. For example, there is no recorded deed or history of the Egyptian “Christ,” Horus, between the ages of twelve and thirty years. Luke’s exception, the story of Jesus being taken to the temple in Jerusalem when he was twelve, the approximate age of incipient adulthood and personal responsibility to the Torah, deserves a closer look. It is a highly instructive stage in the unfolding drama:
Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travellers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour. (Luke 2:41–52)
This passage reads clearly enough on the surface, but few stories in the overall drama are more frequently misunderstood and distorted in the retelling, whether in sermons, popular writing or Bible study, than this. It would be impossible to count the number of times I have heard it skewed by clergy and others. In mistaken zeal they cite the passage as evidence of Jesus’ presumed unique sonship and omniscience. We are told by them that he was found in the temple instructing the teachers and the authorities there. But such was not the case at all. Luke says simply that he was both listening to these experts and “asking them questions.” True, we are told they were very surprised at his intelligence and at his answers to questions in the discussion.10 But he wasn’t teaching the teachers, as is so often supposed.
Luke himself gives his readers a hint that the story is symbolical/allegorical by using the formulaic, symbolical number three. Jesus’ parents only notice he is missing and discover him in the temple after three days. In the Ritual of Egypt, Isis, the mother of the sun god Horus, searches for three days to find her son. As was noted in my earlier work, the number three gained its esoteric, symbolic meaning from the observed fact that for three days and two nights each month the moon is not visible from Earth. The moon was thought of symbolically as having congress with the sun at that time and as conceiving the new moon. Consequently, three became a symbol of any potent period of change or renewal. Hence the three days of Christ’s entombment prior to the Resurrection.
But there are some other features deserving comment. What kind of parents, one might ask, would allow their twelve-year-old son, in what purportedly was his very first grown-up visit to an unfamiliar city and territory, such freedom of movement and lack of supervision as to not even notice he was absent for a whole day? The situation is all the more puzzling in that the text says they were actually on the move, returning through the dangerous country around Jerusalem (mainly wilderness or “badlands”), well before they began to search for Jesus in earnest.
Then there is the larger issue of historical credibility raised by the fact that, while Luke tells us Mary mused on her son’s behaviour and treasured all these things in her heart, the subsequent narrative shows that she and his family in general had no idea of who he was really supposed to be. You would think that, having experienced a virgin birth herself and then observed her son’s conduct and learned about his answers in the temple, Mary at least would have been well aware that something very remarkable was going on. Yet—especially in Mark, where on one occasion we are told his family came to get Jesus and take him home, “for, they said, he is beside himself ” (is not well and may come to harm)—in the Gospels the immediate family are not shown as truly believing in him until after the Resurrection. This, of course, fits in completely with Mark’s overall intention of showing that certain prophecies are being fulfilled. It was foretold that the Messiah would be rejected by even his closest friends and kin. Notice that some conservatives like to reason that, if this account were not really historical, the author would have left these negative details out through embarrassment. Why would anyone making up a story put in such a “clanger”? they query. However, they miss the point. As noted, the family’s seemingly obtuse objections actually help make Mark’s case. Only the true Messiah would be treated like that.
Fundamentally, however, the story relates to a deeper truth. What it reveals is that, as the age of responsibility is reached, one’s deeper commitment, to the voice and stirrings of God both within and over all, comes to the fore of consciousness. The individual soul here radically begins its real “business,” that of seeking to know and do the will of “the Father.” “Jesus says to Joseph and Mary: ‘Don’t you realize I must be focused on my Father’s concerns?’” (My translation.) In the ancient wisdom, the “father” was often a symbol of spirit and mind, while the “mother” symbolized the womb out of which spirit was born. But there was no hint of valuing maleness over the feminine. Far from it. Indeed, wisdom, personified—or hypostatized,