What did Jesus do as a teenager?

The short answer

The Gospels say nothing about Jesus as a teenager. The best clue is that his hometown later called him “the carpenter,” so he most likely spent those years working with his hands in Nazareth.

What the record says

After the Temple story at age twelve, Luke says only, “And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth. He was subject to them, and his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” (Luke 2:51)

Years later, when he taught in Nazareth, the people there asked, “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3)

Some churches read “brothers and sisters” as cousins, or as Joseph’s children from before.

That one verse tells us a lot. He had a trade. He had brothers and sisters. The town knew him as a working man. The word for carpenter could also mean a builder who worked with wood and stone.

Joseph appears in the childhood stories and then is not mentioned again. Many people think Joseph died before Jesus began teaching, but the Gospels never say when or how.

How Son of Man tells it

Son of Man is a novel. It imagines the years the Gospels skip. In chapter seven, “The Catastrophe”, the novel imagines Joseph dying in a building accident when Yeshua is fourteen. Yeshua feeds his younger brothers and sisters, holds his mother and takes over the shop. When Mary reminds him how young he is, he answers:

“I know. But I can do the work. He taught me.”

The next chapter follows him as he turns fifteen, caring for a newborn sister and paying down the family’s debts.