From that time, the fourth chapter of the chronicle of St. Issa
corresponds exactly in its condensed form to the most prominent
chronology of the Old Testament. With the beginning of the next chapter,
the Divine Infant, through whom the salvation of the world was to come,
appears upon the scene, as the first born of a poor but highly connected
family, referring, presumably, to the ancestry of Joseph and Mary.

The remarkable wisdom of the child in earlier years is chronicled in our
ancient parchment with as much care as in the vellum-bound volume of our
church scriptures. At the age of twelve, the last glimpse we have of
Jesus in the New Testament, is as a precocious boy, seated in the
Temple, expounding the Scriptures to the learned members of the
Sanhedrin. After that, we have no further sight of him, until sixteen
years later, he re-appears at the marriage in Cana, a grown and serious
man, already with well-formulated plans for the furtherance of his
father's kingdom. This broad lapse in the Scriptures is filled by one
simple sentence in the gospel of St. Luke. "And he was in the desert
till the day of his showing into Israel." Where he was, why he had gone,
and what he was doing are left to the imagination of the scholar and
commentator.

Many theories have been advanced, and the one most accepted, was that he
had followed the trade of his terrestrial father, Joseph, and was near
Jerusalem among the tools of carpentry, helping his parents to feed the
hungry mouths of his brothers and sisters.

But there appears another plausible theory advanced by the Buddhist
historians, and sustained by the Buddhist traditions, that as Moses had
fled into the wilderness to spend forty years in fasting and preparation
for his life work, so Jesus had fled, not to the wilderness, but to the