Welcome back to Shemus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. Happy New Year. I want to talk about the

finding in the temple. It's a strange event in the Bible that many of us just heard about this past

Sunday. Specifically, I want to ask, how and why did Joseph and Mary lose Jesus in the temple in the

first place? I've actually seen people argue that this event proves that Mary must have had other

kids. As one Twitter user put it, if Mary only had one child, she would not have lost track of Jesus. That's the obvious observation from anyone who's had the responsibility for their own children that belong in a group. This guy calls it the Home Alone hypothesis because of that scene in Home Alone where Kevin's sisters are in a headcount and doesn't realize she's counted one of the neighbor kids instead of her missing brother.

One, two, three, nine two, twelve.

Buzz.

Don't be a moron.

Six.

Seven, eight, nine, ten.

And look, it's a clever theory, and it actually does get one detail half right, which we're going to get to in a minute.

But the overall theory is actually contradicted, I would say both by the layout of the temple and by the wording of Luke chapter 2.

So a little background here.

Deuteronomy 16 requires that three times a year, including on Passover, all your males would appear before God in one place.

In the first century, that one place was the temple in Jerusalem.

Now, this commandment was understood to apply only to men, although it's clear from historical

evidence, including Luke to itself, that women and children would also join on these pilgrimages.

And so, as the Navar biblical commentary points out, on pilgrimages to Jerusalem,

the Jews used to go in two groups, one of men, the other of women. Children could go up with either

group. This explains how they could go a day's journey before they discovered the child was missing

when the family's regrouped to camp. Now, one of the reasons for men and women making

the final part of the pilgrimage separately, it involves the physical layout of the temple

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