The Missing Years of Jesus: The Greatest Story Never Told
Dennis Price
Hay House £12.99
A few weeks ago, an archaeologist named Dennis Price came to call on me in my home in Cornwall. His purpose was to interview me while a friend filmed our exchange. But he was also kind enough to present me with one of his own books, which bore the strange title The Missing Years of Jesus, and the even odder subtitle The Greatest Story Never Told.
When I gathered from the jacket that the book argues that Jesus came to England, my reaction was understandable scepticism. But when I began to read, I saw my doubts were premature.
In the New Testament we learn that when Jesus was12 his family visited Jerusalem (as they did every year), and Jesus was found one day in the Temple, discussing the scriptures with rabbis, who were impressed by his knowledge. What seems clear is that Jesus was even then some kind of religious genius. Such people are seldom stay-at-homes.
In fact, come to think of it, I recall how that same story fascinated me when I was a teenager, and how one of my earliest attempts at a literary work, written at the age of about 15, was a kind of play called Behold the Man, in which I dramatised the same episode of Jesus arguing with the priests in the temple. What he went on to expound, of course, was an early example of Wilsonian philosophy.
Of course, Dennis Price is right. The likelihood of Jesus remaining in Nazareth as a carpenter is surely low. Such a person would have been anxious to travel. And since he was a member of a fairly large family, with brothers and sisters – and therefore not his parents' sole support - nothing is more likely than that he would take to the road.
Now it so happens that Dennis Price has worked as an archaeologist and has engrossed himself in the subject for the past 40 years. He has studied Stonehenge and other Wiltshire monuments – he has even been inside Silbury Hill – and knows all about the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the tin mines of Cornwall. He is aware of the symbol of a Mycenean dagger found on one of the megaliths of Stonehenge that seems to connect it with the Mediterranean.
Now we know that, by the time of Jesus, Stonehenge was a famous religious monument. If I had lived in Judea in 15BC, it would certainly have been at the top of my own list of sites I wanted to visit (as it was, I first made my way there when I was 18, in 1949, equipped with a sleeping bag).
Oddly enough, the southern counties of England, from Cornwall to Bath and Wiltshire, are full of traditions of Jesus visiting England – Price mentions three 19th-century clergymen who wrote books about it. A place called Priddy, in the Mendips near Bath, has a tradition of the "Lord's path", and a folklorist named Ruth Tongue described how an old man who visited her family in 1901 gave instructions for getting there. And Dennis Price mentions many other archaeological oddities in the area that sound worth exploring.
Am I convinced? That is the wrong word, since there is no actual evidence that Jesus visited Cornwall, Stonehenge or Glastonbury. But certainly, this is a book I would recommend to everyone who is interested in archaeology and in the history of religion.