Age twelve
The novel’s Covenant of the Cord
Inspired by Zoroastrian initiation, but no source links Jesus to navjote or the kusti.
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Ages twelve to fifteen
House of Questions and early Magian instruction
Good Mind, Asha, Daniel, parables, and the Father beyond borders.
Ages fourteen to eighteen
Journeys through gardens, wells, Gerizim, and Babylonian diaspora communities
Real historical settings used for invented travel stories.
Ages sixteen to twenty
Healing apprenticeship and development of parabolic teaching
The Gospel’s later themes are foreshadowed without claiming direct sources.
Contemporary with Jesus’s youth
Saul’s formation in Tarsus and Jerusalem
Paul’s self-descriptions ground the parallel; childhood scenes are invented.
Ages twenty-three to twenty-seven
Encounters with Pharisaic, Sadducean, Samaritan, and apocalyptic worlds
Historically real disagreements carried through fictional individuals.
Ages twenty-six to twenty-eight
The Magian Council tests the expected helper
Jesus rejects worship, political machinery, and the throne.
Late twenties
Joseph’s fictional death and the crisis of paradise
The canonical texts do not narrate Joseph’s death.
c. 29–30 CE
The final journey east and the archive of failed signs
Jesus meets the final imagined survivor of Matthew’s Magi.
Jesus’ undocumented years
The Magi’s student hypothesis
Diesel investigates whether the opening relationship continued during the years the canonical narratives do not describe.