What did Jesus do during the "unknown" — or "lost" or "silent" — years, between the ages of 12 and 30?

Here's a Wikipedia article on this gap in the Biblical record, which seems to invite speculation:

Some Arthurian legends hold that Jesus traveled to Britain as a boy, lived at Priddy in the Mendips, and built the first wattle cabin at Glastonbury. William Blake's early 19th century poem And did those feet in ancient time was inspired by the story of Jesus traveling to Britain. ...

In 1908 Levi H. Dowling published the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ which he claimed was channeled to him by a supernatural being called "Akashic Records" as the true story of the life of Jesus, including "the 'lost' eighteen years silent in the New Testament." The narrative follows the young Jesus across India, Tibet, Persia, Assyria, Greece and Egypt....

The usual story is that he "simply lived in Galilee during that period."

Christians have generally taken the statement in Mark 6:3 referring to Jesus as "Is not this the carpenter...?" as an indication that prior to the age of thirty Jesus had been working in the trade as a carpenter. The tone of the passage leading to the question "Is not this the carpenter?" suggests familiarity with Jesus within the area, reinforcing that he had been generally seen as a carpenter in the gospel account prior to the start of his ministry. Matthew 13:55 poses the question as "Is not this the carpenter's son?" suggesting that the profession Tektōn had been a family business and Jesus was engaged in it before starting his preaching and ministry in the gospel accounts.

But was he a good carpenter? He left the business to take up itinerant preaching, and at that, he was divine. But how was his carpentry? What was the back-and-forth between Joseph and Jesus in the carpentry shop? The gap invites speculation, and I picture scenes in which Joseph critiques his son's work, and Jesus gives elegant, elaborate explanations, replete with parables, and Joseph gets irritated at the fine craftsmanship of his son's words, and says it would help if he'd apply a sliver of that craftsmanship to the job at hand, and Jesus thinks I'll show him, I don't need these tools and this wood, the words are my tools and I will craft men.

We see echoes of that old father-and-son debate in the seemingly spontaneous quip to Peter and Andrew in Matthew 4:18-20:

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

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"I have been giving your new no-comments policy a lot of thought since it was implemented."

Emails a long-time reader:

Like most people, I don't respond well to change, and when I found that my favorite online haunt was no longer the nouveau salon that I had come to love, I was taken aback.

The problem for me, first, is that so many of your posts literally invite comments. You write, presenting an event or a situation, and then you comment, and then you question.  You write to provoke thought, and I love that about your blog. But now that comments are turned off, I am much less inclined to take the time to think, because there is no place for me to respond. I still read every post, but I don't think about them as much.

Second, I miss the opportunity to say thank you for posts like one today with Meade giving advice about the mower. I know, I can send an email, but I think it's nice to be appreciative (and appreciated) publicly, and email is private.

My experience of Althouse blog is sadly diminished.

I still read every post, but I don't think about them as much. Here's something to think about, even though you won't think as much. Why don't you think as much? In the old days, when you read books — imagine the greatest books you ever read — did you say to yourself This is all very thought provoking, but unless I can immediately jot down the thoughts it provokes in me, in a place where the author and other readers can see it, I'm really not inclined to pursue those thoughts?

There is a place for your thoughts. It's really the only place for your thoughts: Your head. Do you think What's the point of that, thoughts just in my head, not immediately strewn under the writings of the author who made me think of something just now?

Human connection is valuable, but why must it come — why is it considered better — in the form of immediate expression in response to whatever provoked a thought? I understand the love of spontaneous interaction (and I maintained the "nouveau salon" for 9 years). But there are other time-lines to relationships. There is slowness and gestation. There is the thought as it exists in the purely intimate space of your own head. There is turning to your own writing, in your own place (not the author's). And there is finding another human being to talk to... perhaps about a blog post you read somewhere this morning.

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The 5 believers and the 5 "cons" — the background to Obama's spontaneous remarks about race.

Talk about context — and he did — look where we find ourselves. After the verdict in the George Zimmerman case — otherwise known as the Trayvon Martin case — Obama may have wanted not to speak, but our nation casts its weary eyes toward the face that we (once) imagined would emanate rays of racial healing. Come on, Obama, you've got to do it. He got profiled all the way into office, and now we expect him to perform in accordance with our stereotype.

He resisted for a number of days. Who knows what he was thinking? Was he waiting to see if there would be riots? To hear what others might say (so he could enter the conversation late and seem, perhaps without really saying anything, like the voice of reason)?

Then, on Friday, he made his way out to the lectern in the White House briefing room — "no advance warning and little of the orchestration that usually accompanies presidential speeches" — and spoke without a teleprompter, extemporaneously. As the NYT has it:

After days of angry protests and mounting public pressure, President Obama summoned five of his closest advisers to the Oval Office on Thursday evening. It was time, he told them, for him to speak to the nation about the Trayvon Martin verdict, and he had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.

Summoned! So commanding. He talked to 5 advisers. We're not told who, but one of them talked to summoned the NYT — I'm sure that was okay with Obama — and painted this picture:

For the next 15 minutes, according to a senior aide, Mr. Obama spoke without interruption, laying out his message of why the not-guilty ruling had caused such pain among African-Americans, particularly young black men....

So the man is capable of speaking spontaneously for 15 minutes straight, and his 5 companions — obviously 5 believers — refrained from interrupting him. It's not really that amazing to go on for 15 minutes, and we sayw him do that at the lectern on Friday, presumably because he convinced himself — with the support of the 5 — that talking, just like that, would take us to that higher level that was promised by those Hope posters.



We don't know what he said Thursday night, but we do have the full video and transcript of what that became on Friday.  Listening to the remarks again, I imagine what talking points he had in his head, and my guess is 5 "CONs": CONDOLE, CONTEXT, CONVENE, CONVERSE, CONFIDENCE. Let me show you this in the transcript:

[CONDOLE]  ... First of all... I send my thoughts and prayers... to the family of Trayvon Martin....

[CONTEXT] The second thing... a lot of arguments about the legal issues... But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling... in the African American community... a lot of pain... recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.... those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.... black folks do interpret the reasons... in a historical context.... So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys.... they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied....

[CONVENE] Now... How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction?.. I'm not naïve about the prospects of some grand, new federal program.  I'm not sure that that’s what we're talking about here. But I do recognize that as President, I've got some convening power, and there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front.  And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes, and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African American men feel that they're a full part of this society and that they've got pathways and avenues to succeed....

[CONVERSE] And then, finally... There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations.  They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.  On the other hand...  That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise...

[CONFIDENCE] And let me just leave you with a final thought... Each successive generation seems to be making progress...  we should... have confidence that kids these days... have more sense...

That's it: the 5 "cons." Don't even have to write it on your hand. Maybe in his head, he pictured one "con" superimposed on the face of each of the 5 believers he practiced with. Michelle was "confidence," all about the children and the hope, and so forth. That's just my sense of how he got through the 15 minutes, and he did it pretty well if you think about everything he had to pull together, all the people he needed to appease and inspire, and the theater of seeming to speak from the heart and the mind.

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"Why are black boys expendable?" is the heartwrenching question on the front page at the Washington Post.

But when I click through the link, I just find a column (by Eugene Robinson) that portrays the verdict in the George Zimmerman case to mean: "Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent."

Legally, that makes no sense. If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure Robinson knows that, which is why he said "Our society considers" instead of sticking to the confines of court procedure, even as he appropriated the legal lingo of burden of proof.

If the legal doctrine that governed the jury's decision-making precludes the interpretation that the jury found Trayvon Martin to be dangerous, interchangeable, and expendable, what is the basis for the assertion that our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable? Robinson's next sentence is "This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have — but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid."

Okay, let me attempt that conversation, Mr. Robinson.

Here's my response to what you just said. I think our society demonstrated great care toward Trayvon Martin, even to the point of putting Zimmerman through a trial that should not have happened. That is, it was an excess of care for Martin, a bending-over-backwards to show that we care about Martin and all the young men he was seen to represent. And now, after an extensive, careful trial, and a jury verdict that clearly hewed to well-honed instructions about evidence and burden of proof, you still want to use it to assert that we don't care. If that's the kind of conversation we get when we try to respond to the invitation to have a conversation, can you see why it's something we avoid?

Now, just there, I did not avoid. I tried to be game about conversation, and I said what I truly think, which is probably what other conversation-about-race avoiders think. If you really mean "conversation," then let's continue, with a fair response to that. If what you really mean by "conversation" is let me lecture you until you humbly accede, then could you please stop calling it a "conversation"?

Reading further into the article, I see I've got to take back my overly optimistic statement "I'm sure Robinson knows that." I'm not sure, because to say I believe that Robinson knows that — "If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent" — is to say that Robinson is deliberately deceiving when he writes:

The assumption underlying [the jury's] ho-hum approach to the case was that Zimmerman had the right to self-defense but Martin — young, male, black — did not. The assumption was that Zimmerman would fear for his life in a hand-to-hand struggle but Martin — young, male, black — would not.

That assumption is either ignorant or shamefully deceptive. The accused is the one whose rights are systematically protected in the criminal process. Is that too boring? Ho-hum?! Ho-hum for all the rights of the criminally accused! Even if all Robinson cares about is how young black males are treated, young black males — the ones that still live — need these rights too. If the police — who had already been called — had arrived before Zimmerman saw fit to shoot his gun, if they had caught Trayvon Martin on top of Zimmerman, pinning him down, and knocking his head into concrete, they would have arrested Martin, and Martin would have benefited from those rights you think are ho-hum when they protect Zimmerman.

So there, I've now said 2 things in the "conversation" Robinson wants to have. And I'll say one more, and it's why I found the front-page teaser "Why are black boys expendable?" heart-wrenching. It's because so many young black males do end up shot dead or in prison. Can we talk about that? Or are must we fixate on the one young black male selected to be the conversation piece?

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"Okay, then, I've given Glenn some material to get."

"We'll see how that goes."

Said I, 3 days ago, responding to Instapundit's long post in which he said, "Ann is a thoughtful and open-minded and smart woman, but at some level I feel like she doesn’t really get it." I've heard nothing back, not that Glenn needs to spend his time interacting with me, but by writing a long post in which he accused me of being a not-getting-it — albeit "smart" — woman, he created the impression of an invitation to a back-and-forth. Now, I'm left to interpret silence. I could say: I guess he doesn't get it. But I suspect — as my linked post insinuates repeatedly — that he knows I'm right, and he doesn't want to have to say it.

Confronted by silence over there, I'll link to Roy Edroso:

One of the things I've noticed about the famously libertarian Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds is that, while he claims to be pro-choice, he seems annoyed that anyone would defend abortion rights and delighted whenever someone tries to restrict them. Among recent examples...

Examples elided.

The guy's some advocate.

Partly, I suppose, this comes out of his whole men's-rights schtick about how women are oppressing men, which he recently took to such lengths ("When people talk about 'reproductive freedom,' they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom") that he ticked off his usual fellow traveller [sic] Ann Althouse, leading to a spat and resulting in a rare long Perfesser post full of paranoid gas ("we give women a pass on sexual behavior that would be considered predatory if it were done by males"), whining ("noting the unfairnesses involved, is not 'victimology' — though given how successful women have been in obtaining power via victimology, no one should be surprised if men start to give it a try"), and just plain bullshit ("When Rush Limbaugh suggested that Sandra Fluke should at least pay for her own birth control..."). Someone who actually thinks this way is bound to consider abortion some kind of illegitimate special right because men can't have one.

Roy's perception that I'm Glenn's "usual fellow traveller" is off, but not uncommon. I think this distorted impression has partly come from the comments section, which had become dominated by right-wing voices, perhaps folks who arrived via Instapundit links. Some of these people got very irritable after the same-sex marriage cases came down, and they really couldn't handle my criticism of the "men's reproductive rights" arguments.

Ah, but that's another matter. I'm not going to endlessly discuss why I had to shut off comments on this blog. If anyone wants to argue with me, they can open up their own blog, write their comment there, link to me, and send me the link. I'll interact with them if they write well and say something interesting and not the same old thing that bogged down my comments section. That's essentially what Glenn has done over the years — outsourcing the commenting. The would-be good commenters are to be bloggers themselves, and they need to show their stuff and be linkable, not hop on the high-readership platform that he's built up.

FROM THE EMAIL: Reader A.A. writes:

Sorry you guys had to shut down the playroom. I don't blame you.

I'm no doctrinaire conservative; I'm a libertarian, and share the Professor's views on some of the hot-button issues. But what really rankled me in the last kerfuffle was the tone of misogyny and hatefulness on the part of the usual suspects.

Stuff like:

Women are not essentially honest.

I say this is proof of the superiority of men. We're just better humans, and we vote with our brains.

Do we really expect people who routinely fake orgasms and then brag about it to be honest?

And so on ... and that was just picking out a frew from the first couple screens of the first post about the Slate piece. Things got progressively more vile (and shockingly personal, with attacks on both Meade and Althouse and their first marriages and children).

In all honesty, though I enjoy reading Instapundit, his wife's blog has become a haven for disaffected and angry men, and her book has become a kind of bloody shirt for them to wave. That kind of attitude was what hijacked the commentariat. That viciousness, against women in general and the hosts in particular, kept me away from Althouse until today, and I just wanted to say how very sorry I am that this happened.

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9 things Freeman Hunt said...

... in the comments at "If men did this to women..." (##1-5) and at "A somewhat dismissive response" (##6-9):

1. "When I was growing up, the prevailing sex ed was that you, male or female, were wholly responsible for your own birth control and that you should never assume or believe that the other person was taking care of it. That's not the prevailing wisdom anymore?"

2. "Maybe all those traditionally religious people don't hate sex--maybe they have all those prohibitions on sex outside marriage for some other reason... It's like there was a plan for all of this or something."

3. "Odd. This thread is odd. Are some people furious because (1) Althouse suggests men don't go depositing sperm around women they don't love and would despise having children with or because (2) Althouse/the law being in favor of/upholding abortion rights?"

4. In sarcastic imitation of other commenters: "I don't wanna have babies with the skanks I like to hose down with my sperm. Those disposable tramps I bed should be drawn and quartered if they try to pull a fast one on a fine, upstanding guy like me. Just where do these no-good, dishonest women I make love to get off?"

5. About my supposedly "nasty" taunting of males who claim victimhood over their loss of control over the sperm they've released into the wild: "Heh. Oddly enough, I think that was intended to be encouraging. It's encouraging this idea that a person can be more than an animal who ruts around with whoever, even those he doesn't like or know, more than a careless, appetite feeding beast. I think it was an invitation to the recognition of the divine spark in man."

6. "I'd imagine that Althouse, Instapundit, and Dr. Helen are perfectly capable of arguing intensely about an issue and not taking it personally. Surely anyone who comments here, of all places, does the same on a regular basis!"

7. "How many of us have had it out, ripped each other apart rhetorically and gotten on perfectly well afterward? That's one of the best things about this place."

8. "As for my opinion on this small controversy: This is good. This victim man stuff was hitting a tipping point of absurdity, so the push back is well timed.  I write that as someone who adores men and was raised mostly by her father. And I'm proud to say that my dearly departed father would never have advocated such a base vision for manhood, this vision that sees man as a pathetic beast who throws his sperm about with abandon and needs protecting from the women he beds."

9. "@Freeman: It's actually a venerable academic tradition. I learned about it firsthand from an oldtimer and wrote about it here. I thought about bringing up the fact that it's a hallmark of healthy academia. Whenever you see it slide in academia, the result is less rigorous work and meagerness of mind."

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"As a dogge that turneth aȝen to his spuyng, so is an vnprudent man that rehersith his fooli."

1. So said Wycliffe's Bible, in Middle English, around 1382, translating a proverb that can be more easily understood in the King James form, from 1611: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly." No need to get more modern than that.

2. "Returneth" is nice (and helpful to those who lisp). The double "returneth" may seem more poetic than "turneth... rehersith." But you've got to love "fooli" for "folly." The older form is more accessible. And "spuyng" for "vomit"... surely, we lost something there.

3. "Dog" is a very old word of unknown etymology, according to the (unlinkable) OED, which proceeds to explain this particular unknown at great length. Do you prefer the older form "dogge"? (Which I presume was pronounced "doggie.")

4. I'm rummaging around in the OED under "dog" after writing that first post of the day, about the dog vomit fungus, which was the first post today because it's something that came up on the front lawn overnight. (Some things come up in conversation, and other things come up on the front lawn.) The OED has no entry for the fungus, but I tumbled upon the old aphorism, and thought you might find some use for it.

5. I, of course, was returning to my old fooli, having blogged about dog vomit fungus in 2006, and, in fact, I was inclined to return to another old fooli: dog's breakfast, which sounds like something you could order at The Slime Mold Café, which could have been the name of that first post (since it fits the Althouse blog model of a "café" post, having a photograph and an open-ended invitation to talk).

6. The OED says:

dog's breakfast n. slang (orig. U.S.) a confused mess; = dog's dinner n.

1915   New Castle (Pa.) News 13 Feb. 2/5   They abandoned the plan, went ahead in their own way, and have gotten their side all messed up, like a dog's breakfast.
1959   Times 29 Apr. 10/4   He can't make head or tail of it... It's a complete dog's breakfast.
2004   Classic Rock Oct. 102/3   The 1974 record..is either the furthest-reaching concept album ever made, or the biggest dog's breakfast in the entire history of the state of California.

7. What 1974 record? Can you guess without Googling? I'll give you another excerpt:

Here, no longer held back by the leashes of a mere rock band, Ray wastes no time wading right into a carnival of jazz and samba, synth and rumba, rock-opera and boogie-woogie, all the while wearing golden Tutankhamun facepaint and global new-age influences on his sleeve.

8. Ray was not returning to his old fooli, but moving on to new fooli. How about you?

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