His is a challenging introduction. The records of his life are fragments. The world equates him with religion and his mystery has grown to myth. But suppose your questions could be answered. The Urantia Book reveals, in hundreds of pages, details of the life of Jesus and his teachings.
From his conception, Jesus was a human being. He was also a divine son of God sharing and experiencing the life of Jesus. His life is the image of what we can make of our lives by choosing to live as he lived. His way of living was to internally discern how goodness, mercy, and love would behave and then to carry that into the physical world by doing everything with loving, gentle, and serving action.
Jesus’ life before he began his public ministry in his late twenties is scarcely recounted in Christian scripture. The Urantia Book covers it in great detail and makes clear that Jesus was not simply God in the shape of a human but that he was fully human as well. He experienced the joy and emotions of human relationships, achievement, and disappointment. The Urantia Book provides explanations by celestial authorities of what Jesus was thinking, experiencing, and meaning by what he said and did.
Mary and Joseph had seven younger children as well. After Joseph’s death in a construction accident when Jesus was fourteen, Jesus served as the father to his four brothers and three sisters. The family remained loving and close but slowly drifted into poverty.
During his late teens, Rebecca, the eldest daughter of a wealthy merchant and trader of Nazareth, pressed her father to invite Jesus to wed her. Her father even offered to supply the family with sufficient income fully to compensate for the loss of Jesus’ earnings. Jesus very graciously declined. Nevertheless, she continued to love him. Neither of them ever married. She followed his career and was present as he was crucified and died in Jerusalem.
In his late twenties, Jesus spent a year living in Capernaum with the Zebedee family. He spent his time there as Zebedee’s partner, designing and building boats at Zebedee’s shop at Capernaum near the north end of the Sea of Galilee. Zebedee’s sons, James and John, would become two of his twelve apostles, while a third son, David, would organize Jesus’ teaching camps and create and operate Jesus’ extensive messenger service.
