Every year, Jesus and His parents travel to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. One year, when Jesus is 12 years old, He stays in Jerusalem after His parents have set out for home. Thinking their son is among their fellow travelers, Mary and Joseph do not realize He is missing until a whole day has passed, at which point they return to Jerusalem to look for Him. After three days of searching, they find Him debating with the rabbis in the Temple.

Everyone who listens to Jesus is amazed by Him, but Mary rebukes her son. In an instant, Jesus turns from His debate with the rabbis to address His mother: “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Jesus’s reply confuses His parents, who do not understand that He is revealing His knowledge of His divine lineage.

The author’s use of dramatic irony was probably intended to amuse early Christian readers of Luke. Other literary devices include foreshadowing and allusion: Jesus’s three-day absence from His family anticipates His three days in the grave after His death, and the combination of the Passover setting and Jesus’s claim to be the Son of God allude to the Exodus, in which Israel is also called God’s son (Exodus 4:22). Such devices, and the fact that this is the only depiction of Jesus’s adolescence in the Gospels, lead some scholars to view the episode as theological fiction rather than historical fact, the main purpose of which is to highlight Jesus’s divinity.

In William Holman Hunt’s highly symbolic The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (1860), a blind rabbi (bottom left) clutches the Torah as though he and his religion are under threat.