The first thirty years of Jesus' life are practically a blank in our sources, so that they are often called the "hidden years." Luke includes the only direct story, a tale of Jesus going to the Temple in Jerusalem at the age of twelve, a quite likely occurrence in the life of a young Jewish boy. Further than this, we do know that Jesus was a member of a large family, with four brothers and at least two sisters ( Mark 6: 3; Matt. 13: 55, 56). We know that it was his custom to attend services on the Sabbath ( Luke 4: 16). And since he later displays such an intimate knowledge of the Old Testament, we can infer that he went to a synagogue school as a boy in Nazareth. We know that Jesus' father was a carpenter and it appears likely that Jesus was a village carpenter until he was about thirty. If, as is sometimes presumed, Joseph died when Jesus was young, Jesus was probably the breadwinner for a large family.
About our only other source of even indirect information for this period is found in Jesus' stories or parables, which give us a picture of what his early life may have been like. He undoubtedly saw children playing in the market place ( Luke 7: 31-35), or women sewing patches on old clothes (ch. 5: 36), or men attempting to put new wine in old wineskins and having the wineskins burst (vs. 37-39), or a woman who had found a lost coin calling her friends in to rejoice (ch. 15: 8-10), or a shepherd telling how he had gotten back to the sheepfold and had found one sheep missing and had gone out into the night to find it (vs. 1-7).
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