What are we to make of Jesus' eighteen-year absence from the scriptural accounts? Aside from the pseudopigraphical account of the so-called Infant Gospel of Thomas, which reads like a blundering juvenile superhero tale out of the comic books, we know only (from the Gospel of Luke) of Jesus' trip to Jerusalem at around Bar Mitzvah age, where he indulges in a day-long discussion with Judaic scholars there, losing his sense of time in the intellectual ecstasy of philosophical disputation, and thereby unintentionally causing his parents great worry as to his whereabouts. Then we have the long blank until at age thirty Jesus seeks out John the Baptist, receives holy baptism into John's radical sect of Judaism, goes into the desert to test his soul's fitness for a higher calling in life, and then begins his fateful ministry. So what happened in between all this?
Many have pragmatically suggested that Jesus simply worked in his father's carpentry shop (or in alternate translations, "stonemason" shop) during that whole intervening period of nearly two decades. If he did pursue the life of a skilled artisan of the peasant class, we must assume the strong likelihood that Jesus would have married, as any male Jew living in a village community and of gainful employment inevitably would have. There is actually evidence for his married state in the non-canonical Gospels of Mary Magdalene and of the Apostle Phillip. In these, Jesus treats one of his female disciples with an intimate level of familiarity that Jewish custom would only have permitted between a husband and wife. Others have argued that the gestures and speech that would seem to indicate this indicate rather that this woman was not a wife but a platonic sister in a socially revolutionary cult bent on upending the imposed gender limitations of a traditional society now thought to be corrupted by its backward patriarchalism.
It is interesting that, though the canonical gospels only make peripheral mention of women (except in the discovery of the empty tomb) as "followers" of Jesus (e.g., Martha, Susanna, et al.), a rank below that of his intimate Twelve Disciples, the non-canonical gospels of Jesus, such as the Gospel of Thomas, contextually recount without any rebellious fanfare toward orthodoxy but with historical matter-of-fact equanimity as obvious the place of women in Jesus' ministry in the functional role of actual disciples. One of these non-canonical gospels (First Apocalypse of James) describes Jesus as having seven women disciples in addition to the twelve male disciples, revealing the gender equality and wholeness of his ministry as remembered by Gnostic Christians.
However, putting aside for the moment the role of women in Jesus' ministry, there is only one way in social historical terms that we can have an unmarried Jesus by the time he begins his life as a rabbi. During those "blank" years, Jesus might have left his family sooner than when he began his independent ministry. There are three known Jewish separatist communities during the time Jesus lived, wherein some of their members forwent marriage and adopted the spiritual asceticism of celibacy. These were the Therapeutae and the Qumran Sectarians. In these, there were both women and men members -- they were not sexually antagonistic monastic communities. If you want to believe that Jesus' soul came down upon the Earth and became incarnated in real human flesh and had to live in the actual body of a human being under all the stresses and temptations to which such a sentient and sensual body is subject in this sphere of existence, the youthful Jesus would have had to have practiced ascetic meditative disciplines within a supportive social community, which created for its members an alternate set of priorities and objectives than those otherwise fundamentally practiced even by virtuous people everywhere else.
It would then follow that, once Jesus had achieved a sufficient level of self-mastery over the twin forces of fear and desire, he might then have been attracted to the religious activist message of John the Baptist, an ascetic hermit, who left his self-isolation to pit himself against the corrupt forces of the secular world. After being inducted into John the Baptist's radical Judaic cult, the already ascetically-minded Jesus would have determined to test the last doubts he may have harbored about his spiritual capacities and rigor. Here he would have followed John the Baptist's own example. Jesus took the path of the hermit and faced his demons alone in solitary meditation for his fabled forty days in the wilderness (recounted in the Gospel of Matthew). This is something Jesus would not have done had he already once belonged to one of the separatist communities, where the ascetic practices took a communal rather than anchoritic form.
A recently recovered letter of the early Church Father, Bishop Clement of Alexandria, gives supporting evidence of a form of separatist cult ritual during Jesus' ministry. The Bishop tells his correspondent, a fellow churchman, that some Gnostic Christians have been sharing with their congregations a secret version of the story of Lazarus (Hebrew: "El'azar"), and enacting it as a "higher" initiation rite for Christianity, above the regular "initial" rite for acceptance into the faith used by orthodox Churches, which was simply baptism. The story the Gnostics were preaching was that Jesus had not literally raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, Jesus had actually sealed a fully alive Lazarus temporarily in a cave with instructions for his disciple to meditate and let himself "die" to his worldly desires. When the cave was unsealed three days later, Lazarus was commanded by Jesus to be reborn to world in his "higher self". Thus Lazarus' death and rebirth were not literal but figurative in the ascetic sense of those terms as metaphors for spiritual liberation from the psychological chains of worldly concern, desire and physical attachments.
But we need not wholly rely on extra-canonical scriptures for this possible understanding of Jesus' formative years. A memory of Jesus breaking with the normal fabric of Jewish life is even contained in the canonical gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, there is an incident where Jesus abjures kinship, declaring he has severed himself from being obligated to fulfill family duties to his mother or siblings because he has embraced the spiritual welfare of the world, taking the broader community of humankind as his metaphorical yet practical family of concern, which he then recommends as an attitude his disciples should adopt. This ideological premise would fit in well with the doctrines of the separatist religious communities enumerated above, in terms of its break with blood-relations who are committed to a more worldly existence, as well as with John the Baptist's call for people to spiritually engage with the whole of society, which John saw as having been led astray spiritually by invasive worldly forces.
Thus, it is possible to have a celibate Jesus who at the same time held women as equals (i.e., a non-misogynistic/non-misanthropic form of celibacy, wherein sexual desire itself was seen as a distraction from complete spiritual enlightenment, rather than being derived from any sort of idea that either gender was spiritually corrosive to the other, as the Church later taught). That Jesus had ultimate compassion for women and the lot they faced in his day is evidenced (though not immediately obviously) in his indictment of the approved practice of divorce in Mosaic Law. In his time, Jewish society was living under oppressive socioeconomic conditions from financially onerous and socially exploitative Roman overlords, and a corrupt and insouciant puppet dynasty of Idumaean client kings, whose Judaism was superficial and not of deep heritage. Under such circumstances, a Jewish man of humble means was quite vulnerable to the political web this created, and a Jewish woman of humble means was doubly so. The old system of broad kinship support for family members who had fallen into destitution due to the vicissitudes of life were breaking down, as everyone of common means faced the looming threat of politically enacted privation. Therefore in Jesus' time, a woman cast off by divorce was immediately thrust into highly desperate circumstances.
So Jesus castigates the man who would divorce his wife, because, in essence, he was abandoning her to the wolves. For women there were even fewer gainful and legitimate forms of employment than there were for men capable only of unskilled labor. And in the Roman Age which Jesus knew, women could no longer always depend upon their birth families to take them back after a divorce, due to the financial limitations most common families now endured. Such a desperate situation for the native subjects of the Roman protectorate of Judaea serves to help one understand how a man like Jesus, already precociously interested in the deeper moral questions of the Torah at the cusp of his adolescence, might have grown up during those "missing years" to reject the whole miserable set-up of a subjugated society. Had he been born into a better time when his people were free, Jesus might have been less radical in the formation of his spiritual doctrine, but still no doubt have addressed himself to the perennial moral issues that societies must face even in relatively good times.
However, the endemic suffering of his people he actually came into contact with historically would have led a person of his nature to ask deeper questions, probe for more fundamental answers. Was it merely the Romans and the lackadaisical Idumaean Court that was causing or allowing all this unwarranted physical and spiritual hardship? Or was there something more basically wrong with the whole secular enterprise of the human race? What, indeed, made humankind vulnerable to the exploitative and exclusionary cultural practices that resulted in so much social injustice? Such questions as these would have led Jesus not only to formulate a radical rejection of secular culture (with or without the Roman hegemony), but also to conceive his idea of the Kingdom of God, a utopian spiritual society on Earth. Such a religious utopia could be the only solution for a world (at least the one Jesus knew in Late Herodian Judaea) that gave every evidence of being on the brink of self-destruction -- at least in terms of how it had come to define itself over the then past twelve hundred years since the arrival of the Israelites from their forty years of wandering in the Sinai.
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