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Ginny Kubitz Moyer Answers:
Why did Jesus disobey his mother and leave her only to be found in the temple? I thought Jesus didn’t sin and disobedience to one’s parents seems sinful to me!
When discussing Bible stories, it’s always good to carefully re-read the text in question. Fact is, the story doesn’t say for sure that Jesus was being disobedient. Luke 2: 43-45 says that “the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, 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.” It’s very likely that the entire situation was a misunderstanding rather than a case of Jesus deliberately defying his parents’ instructions.
It’s also worth looking at what Jesus says when Mary and Joseph do find him: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (49) By staying and speaking with the teachers in the temple, he was fulfilling the will of his father – God. Looked at from that point of view, Jesus was actually showing filial obedience rather than disobedience.
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It’s also possible from the context that Jesus accidentally got left behind but wasn’t worried that his parents wouldn’t find him. The Temple would be a reasonably safe place for a lost child to go to wait to be found. Jerusalem was quite crowded and it would have fairly easy to get separated from your group.
Wait a minute. This is in an age when people didn’t hop in the Van, drive 5 hours and then realize they left someone behind. This is in an age when you had some pack animals and walked to where you were going. It took his mother 3 days to realize her only (?) son was missing? And jesus, as smart as he was, wouldn’t realize that it’s courteous to say something?
In reality, we must see this story for what it is – a fabrication to highlight the specialness of Jesus and how his life was more like a traditional Hero figure in mythology.
@ooberman
The Gospels were written in close enough time to the life of Jesus that someone could dispute the myth if it didn’t really happen. It would be like if you wrote your biography and in it you write about your family from a thanksgiving in 1980, and you mentioned how the cat levitated around the room three times. In reality the cat walked around the table, but you’re raising the bar and making a myth for whatever reason. Someone in your family would discredit your writing because the cat didn’t really levitate around the room. Where are the disputes from those time periods that show that Jesus didn’t do the works he did?
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