Section XII

the development of Jesus

(Luke 2)

Jesus was, and remained, a Nazarene, till He was over thirty years of age. Hence He passed the greater part of His glorious life in retirement. It is a testimony to the infinite delicacy and secrecy of His divine greatness, to that revealing concealment of true majesty, which can escape the vulgar eye in broad daylight, that no Nazarene was so struck by His appearance as to become the Evangelist of His youth; but it is, at the same time, also a testimony to the dull state of popular life in Nazareth. The only trustworthy information we possess concerning Christ’s development, is probably derived from the reminiscences of Mary. Thus the whole of our Lord’s useful life is covered by a general obscurity; while the one history which Luke has preserved in the narrative of the occurrence of His twelfth year, sheds the only ray which penetrates this darkness, a ray shining, on the one side, as far as the birth of Jesus, and on the other, as His baptism in Jordan.

Situate between the heights of the miraculous birth of Christ, and the solemnization of the perfection of His Messianic consciousness by the testimony of God and the recognition of John the Baptist, only such an incident as that communicated could be in keeping; a sun-enlightened peak, corresponding in its brightness and sublimity with those heights, and displaying by its features and style that it belongs to the same mountain chain.

The Evangelist Luke first gives us a general sketch of the development of Jesus: ‘The child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.’ He then exhibits this development of Jesus in a most speaking fact.

The history of Jesus at twelve years of age represents His whole development. It is the characteristic act of His boyhood, the revelation of His youthful life,—a reflection of the glory of His birth, a token of His future heroic course. It exhibits the childhood of His ideality, and therefore the ideality of childhood in general.

When Jewish boys were twelve years old, they accompanied their kinsfolk to the great festivals at Jerusalem, and were called by a great name: Children of the Thorah, of the Law. Hence the parents of Jesus took Him with them as soon as He had reached this stage of life. When the festival was over, they returned among the Galilean company to Nazareth. But the child remained behind in Jerusalem. The parents first missed their Son when they took up their quarters for the night, after the first day’s journey, and found Him again, after three days’ anxious search, in the temple.

But how was it possible for them, and especially for Mary, to have been thus separated for three days from the child? A single moment would be sufficient for such a contingency—a moment in which the young eagle unconsciously lost sight of His mother; while she, the dependent wife, who was with Joseph and his relations, followed in the beaten track, and under the supposition that her child would also remain in the company of the Galilean travellers, suffered Him to disappear from her immediate circle.

Mary has been reproached with this incident. But this has resulted from want of appreciating its serious, nay, sad, significance Mary was placed under domestic and family ties which exercised a power over her. The bloom of her inner life was of a New Testament character; while, as a Jewess, she was rooted, by both duty and custom, in the Old Testament.

Thus was Mary, who once more in after days betrayed, in presence of her holy Son, traces of womanly weakness, and dependence on Joseph’s family (Mar 3:31), carried forward by the rules of the Nazarene travellers; while the child—He knew not how—fell out of the train of boys, and went on, led by the Spirit, meditating, longing, attracted, and carried along by His own infinite thoughts, until He stood in the temple, in the midst of the Rabbis.

The separation of the mother and child did not therefore require much time. The pilgrims marched in companies or parties, which were again divided into separate bands. The parents of Jesus had seen the band of boys formed, and supposed that their Son had set off with it, according to custom. This mistake of a moment was sufficient to separate them from Him for three days. It was not till the end of the first day’s journey that they could miss Him, when seeking Him at the common resting-place among His companions. The second day was occupied in returning. On the third they found Him in the temple.

They were, however, in the highest degree surprised, nay, amazed, to find the child in such a situation. He was sitting in the midst of a circle of Rabbis, listening to their instructions, and questioning them. A circle of wondering listeners surrounded Him; they were astonished at His understanding and answers.

But how could Jesus come into this connection with the Rabbis? We are informed that the pupils of the Rabbis were not suffered to sit in the presence of their teachers till a period subsequent to this.¹ This information is, however, regarded as doubtful. They suffered this unknown boy to sit in their midst. He was even permitted to question them, and thus to use an agency which might easily be converted into teaching, and which on this occasion probably became a difficult test to the Rabbis. The Rabbis of our days would not perhaps have suffered this; but the Rabbis of those days had not yet lost all feeling for the prophetic spirit, though they were fast stiffening into the death of formalism. They might well remember the boys Joseph, Samuel, and David, when they met with an unusually gifted boy. Besides, they might have been very glad to obtain distinguished pupils. At all events, these Rabbis suffered themselves to be for the moment carried away by the glorious and marvellous boy. The genius of the new human race overcame these heroes of ancient etiquette. Their better Israelite and human feelings made them for the moment delighted with the intelligent and inquiring boy, and they made Him sit in their midst.² He listened to and questioned them, giving a wholesome agitation to their scholastically formed and settled opinions by the expression of His vigorous and childlike thoughts.³

It was thus that His parents found Him. Joseph was truly concerned for the Holy Child who had been entrusted to him; but one can easily understand that he would feel, in a still greater degree, a great and decided reverence for the Rabbis in the temple at Jerusalem. How many a time may he not, more or less, have lost sight of the future divine hero in the poor and often silent boy? And now he finds Him in the midst of the doctors of Jerusalem, perhaps unconsciously pressing upon them both strongly and sharply the great questions of the inner life of religion. He was amazed at the sight, as was Mary also. It is quite consistent with the actual relations between Christ and His parents, that they should not have been able to keep pace with Him in spiritual matters. Yet every incident in which they saw Him on the steep path of life suddenly looking down upon them from a dizzy overhanging height, must have the more struck and surprised them, inasmuch as He was so thoroughly humble and submissive, so silent concerning the wonders of His inner life in His intercourse with them. If we cannot but find in the disposition of Joseph a secret complaisance in the boy’s elevation, we may still more imagine what a terror of joy took possession of Mary. But how did she penetrate beyond the court of the women? and how came it that she anticipated her husband, and was the first to speak in presence of the Rabbis? Fortunately these difficulties have, as yet, escaped our critics. How vivid are these touches! The anxious mother is the first to press forward. Joseph, however, has not yet grown to the comprehension of this scene; he maintains a reverential silence. Mary asks the boy: ‘Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us? behold, Thy father and I have sought Thee, sorrowing.’ And He replies, ‘How is it that ye sought Me? wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?’ And they understood not the saying which He spake unto them.

The boy asked, with most genuine naiveté, ‘Could you then seek Me? Did you not know that I am at home here?’⁴ The temple on Moriah is to Him still identical with His Father’s house, the interpretation of the Old Testament with His Father’s word, and intercourse with the Rabbis with His Father’s presence. This place still exercises upon His religious feeling the full power of a heavenly home; and He cannot understand that His parents should have set off, and then, when they missed Him, not immediately have sought Him here. At all events, He expresses the whole theology of His own nature, yet not in the form of matured consciousness, but in the truest type of the dawning notions of genuine childhood. Time had escaped Him in the happy hours He had spent there; but He now listens and questions from the stand-point of His parents. He does not desire to excuse Himself for having forgotten the whole world in His Father’s house; but He allows Himself to be informed of the anxiety they had suffered, because they did not know of His doings in the temple. Mary speaks of His father Joseph, but He speaks of the irresistible drawing of His Father in heaven. It is the dawning feeling of that sonship which was His alone—a feeling still enveloped, however, in the bud of childlikeness, which expresses, without intending it, the great contrast between the earthly and the heavenly father. The consciousness of His heavenly Father’s omnipresence is still enveloped in the bud of childlike devotion, which seeks the Father in His temple; and His gradual self-reflection upon the depths of the divine life within Him is still veiled under the childlike simplicity with which, impelled by sincere confidence and thirst after knowledge, He proposes His questions to the fathers of Jewish theology.

But the test of a childlike purity corresponding with the presentiment of His great destiny, lies in the fact that He should, when bidden by His parents to depart for Nazareth, so immediately leave the place where He had plunged so deeply into the nature of His Father, and had, in this experience, comprehended His own; the place of which He had but just said: It is here that I am at home. He entered into their ways of life, and freely followed their guidance. Certainly the saying, He was subject to them, means fully as much as this; and how happy must He be esteemed in His humble obedience! Under the shadow of the temple of Jerusalem, He must either have become a disciple of the Pharisees, or rather, since this was an impossibility, He would have reached His goal too early by opposing the pharisaic spirit. In Nazareth, on the contrary, another of His Father’s houses—the greatness, the sacredness of nature—was opened to Him, for the development of His consciousness. Here He could search the Scriptures without the obscuring glosses of the Rabbis; instead of intercourse with spiritually dead scribes, could commune with the ever-living spirits of the prophets; while Mary His mother, the chosen one, who pondered in her heart all that befell Him, was more to Him than all the priests of the temple. She beheld with maternal delight how He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour both with God and man. Though she often sank below that high and perfect state of inspiration in which she had brought forth her holy Son, yet, according to the prevailing feature of her life, she must have risen towards Him, when He went down to Nazareth with her.

If the child had not expressed His ideal of continually dwelling in the temple, He would have been enslaved by the force of Old Testament customs. If, on the contrary, He had insisted on maintaining this ideal, in opposition to the higher ideality of following the divine will, in the performance of domestic duty, He would have trodden the path of self-will. Both were impossible. His free submission is a prelude to the great prayer in Gethsemane. Jesus there, according to the true meaning of the prayer, once more asks of His Father, whether the ideal of a Messiah free from suffering, and dwelling upon Zion, were a possibility; but He finds the answer in the depths of His own breast, and becomes again, with perfect and free submission, the Nazarene, even to death upon the cross.

We have pointed out, in what has been already advanced, the education under which the development of Jesus took place. The notions, that Jesus perhaps picked up somewhat of the far-famed wisdom of Egypt, during His flight thither, while still a sportive child—that He was secretly a disciple of the Essenes,—as well as other similar conjectures, have their foundation in the general tendency of ‘Philisterism,’ to explain the very highest kind of life by mere scholastic reasoning, to attribute the greatest human originality to a compound of the effects of lesser minds. It has been already shown, that the Essenes were anything but genuine Israelites. The Messiah might appear, be crucified, and die in the midst of His people, without their appreciating or observing Him from their schismatic corner.

If education is looked upon as an influence upon the life of the scholar, by which his character receives many elements from the circle of ideas and the reflections of his teacher, and by which his views are variously modified, we may unhesitatingly declare of Jesus, that His healthy nature totally withstood all education of this kind. Himself so powerfully and purely original, He was incapable of taking into His nature false or obscure impressions even of theology and history. It was only the objective and the actual which could find an entrance into His mind: what was false rebounded from the elasticity of His heavenly-minded moral nature, and then appeared before Him objectively, as one of the world’s delusions, as a medium for perfecting His knowledge of the world.

But if we view education as a means of unfolding the inner nature of the scholar by appropriate influences and communications, as the organic excitement of his development, and as feeding his inner life with such a measure of the facts of the outer world as the exigencies of a healthy vital process of assimilation require, no one enjoyed a richer education and cultivation than Jesus.

As Luther once bestowed upon a bird the title of Doctor, because it had taught him confidence, so far rather did Jesus receive from the fowls of heaven and the lilies of the field the most instructive and most cheering of Heaven’s teachings. All nature became to Him a transparent symbol of eternal truth, the developed counter part, the mirror of that divine fulness which was discovering itself within Him; and He found on the hills of Galilee a glorious sanctuary, which compensated Him for the courts of the temple.

Even everyday life was a school of instruction to Him. The price of a sparrow in the market was connected in His mind with the highest interests of the human soul. He beheld all things in their twofold relations; that is, according to their import in the world, and their import in the government and mind of God.

In the stupidity of the people, in all the misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which the manifestation of His purity could not fail to elicit, the dark side of the world, the deep corruption of the human race, was early made manifest to Him. Very early must He, after a glance at Israel and the world, have turned with a sigh to His Father in the sense of those words of gloomy foreboding: a dark spirit runs through this house.

The Old Testament offered Him the same solution which He found in His own mind. ‘The Scriptures testify of Me,’ said He. He found their utterances identical with His own consciousness, nay, even parallel with its development. Their christological development reached its climax in His own life: He was Himself their last word, their key. The progress of His development was a progress through the stages of their life; hence He penetrated their deepest meaning, as proved, e.g., by His explanation of the brazen serpent, of the announcement of God as the God of Abraham, and His masterly quotation of many Old Testament passages against the Pharisees. The Old Testament was to Him the fullest prophecy of His own life.

Undoubtedly the journeys which Christ annually made to Jerusalem after His twelfth year, had great influence in the development of His consciousness. The acquaintance of the boy with the doctors seems not to have increased from year to year. His first visit to Jerusalem was sufficient to enable Him to penetrate the whole corruption of the existing temple-system.

The life of His mother Mary, however, only needed to be understood as His mind could understand it, to appear as a bright picture of a happy life in God. His intercourse with her was the most refined and noblest means of promoting His development. Her humility, love, and faith appeared before Him in a mature, though not a perfect aspect, and therefore could not but exert a powerful influence upon His soul. She was to Him also in a special sense a type of the elect, of that higher and nobler humanity which the Father had given to Him; hence a type of His Church. Certainly the kindly intercourse between Christ and His mother Mary, was the noblest element of His human education and development. Who can portray the great and deep joy of this connection, the words of mutual help and encouragement which could not but be uttered in the intercourse of these hearts, or the unspeakably acute sorrow which must have burned like fire at a white heat in both, when Mary, in weaker moments, could not understand the faith of her Son, when the Jewess opposed the Christian in her breast? In decisive moments, Christ placed her in a high position. Under the rule of His Spirit, she was held sacred in the youthful days of the Gospel, in the youthful days of the Church. But He could not have given a more touching or lovelier testimony to the character of her mind, than He uttered from the cross in His legacy of love, a love infinitely abundant even in the agonies of death—the legacy by which He made John her son, and her his mother. But though Mary might lead the Lord to the entrance of the Holy of Holies, no intercourse could be so promotive of His inner life as intercourse with His Father.

The perfection of His intercourse with the Father, whether displayed in the entire unreserve of face-to-face dialogue, or in those monologues in which His very soul was poured forth, this vitality of prayer casts a bright ray upon the holy night of His childhood, making it clear to us, that in proportion to His development, He could not but be found in His Father’s house, His Father’s bosom, in His love and presence, nay, could not but find His Father in His whole being. His whole life was developed in God—as one prayer of infinite depth—one deep sigh for the world’s salvation—one loud hallelujah for the saving love manifesting itself in Him—one continuous amen of obedience, and surrender to the guidance of His Father. Thus was His development in the life of prayer perfected.

It might then well seem, to modest minds, an infinitely difficult task to define exactly the degree of development which such a mind might attain at the age of twelve. The observations of those who have found the boy placed at too great an elevation, have been met by examples of precociously great minds; the remark has also been made, that an Oriental child of twelve would equal a Western one of fifteen in degree of development; but the opponents of the historic Gospel have not given up their objections.⁵ Though they can hardly recognize a developed Church Christology in the sayings of Christ during the ministrations of His manhood, they find it, strange to say, in the expression: I must be in what is My Father’s. They think that a child of twelve could not have spoken so theologically.⁶ An unprejudiced consideration, however, of the whole expression, shows that the morning dew of childhood still lies upon every word; such complete naiveté, that a sophist could subsequently adduce it in support of the opinion, that this boy spoke in too childish a manner to represent the Prince of mankind at the age of twelve. How indefinitely obscure is the saying: I must be in those (things, places, or affairs) that are my Father’s (ἐν τοῖς τοῦ πατρός μου)! How childlike is the assumption, that this being in the Father’s sphere was identical with a sojourn in the temple! And how sudden is the transition from the genuine Zionite ideal to unlimited obedience! In such alternations of frame, we recognize a genuine childlike nature, though certainly a nature coming up to the standard of ideal childhood, and representing, in its bounding freedom, the young lion; in its swift obedience, the tender lamb.

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Notes

1. From the present history, we learn that the parents of Jesus generally went together to the Passover at Jerusalem. This certainty is derived from the words: His parents. But it does not follow that Joseph might not have frequented the other great annual festivals. It is probable that Jesus had frequently gone up to the feasts at Jerusalem before His public appearance, and that the intercourse with pilgrims, priests, and scribes, which such journeys involved, was undoubtedly one great element of His development, and of preparation for His ministry.

2. And when He was twelve years old (ὅτε ἐγένετο ἐτῶν δώδεκα), says the Evangelist. Strauss here alternately uses the expressions: in His twelfth year, and Jesus was twelve years old. Neander says he had entered His twelfth year. This inaccuracy must be avoided. If Jesus were born in the early months of the year, He had probably entered His thirteenth year.

3. The text gives us occasion to imagine a distinct grouping of the pilgrim caravans, and indeed such a one as enforced the separation of a boy from his parents on the return journey. This leads to the view of a separate company of boys.

4. Strauss makes the following objection to the early development of Jesus related in the present narrative (vol. i. 313): ‘For, though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as of poet, artist, &c., in which all depends upon the individual being gifted with early susceptibility, might possibly very soon manifest itself; yet an objective vocation, in which actual occurrences form a chief factor, such as the vocation of statesman, general, reformer of religion, could hardly become so clear, even in the most gifted individual; because such a knowledge of given circumstances is needed for it, as longer observation and more matured experience alone could afford. But it is to the latter kind that a vocation to be the Messiah belongs,’ &c. The same writer also says, in his article, Vergängliches und Bleibendes in Christenthum, p. 109 ff., A late penetrating observer rightly finds a main difference between human natures and endowments, in the circumstance that some feel an impulse and vocation to go out of themselves, and objectively to exhibit that which lives within them in works of art or science, in deeds of war or peace; while others, shut up in themselves, strive to make their inner nature unanimous with itself, to exercise, to cultivate its various powers, and thus to form their own life to a rich harmonious work of art. Now Christ belonged in the fullest and highest sense to this (latter) class of natures. Accustomed as we are to be astonished at the rapid turns of ‘criticism,’ we can but be astonished once more. So then, in the former, as well as in the latter work, the author gives the same classification of the great minds of the world’s history. But in the one, he places Christ in the class of those who have an objective, and in the other, of those who have a more subjective vocation. By this flagrant contradiction he gains a double advantage. He can first (presumptively at least) apply the theory of the objective vocation of Christ, as an argument against the development of Jesus at twelve years of age. But then he can afterwards, by connecting Him with the geniuses of the world, bring the Christ of more subjective gifts into a class which, in some measure, secures Him from being mixed up with the often impure ‘heroes of war and politics,’ and thus weaken the reproofs he might have expected.

Bruno Bauer, speaking against the early development of Jesus, says, vol. i. p. 65, ‘A twelve-years-old boy is a twelve-years-old boy in every region under heaven.’⁷

1) Comp. Tholuck, die Glaubewurdigheit der evang. Geschichte, p. 217. Even if this information should be regarded as correct, it would cast no difficulty upon the passage. It would rather prove that etiquette, with respect to scholastic deportment in the schools of the Rabbis, was, in the days of Jesus, in a state of transition. If it subsequently became a rule that scholars should sit, why should it not now have taken place exceptionally, in the case of a very promising boy who was not yet a scholar, and whom perhaps the Rabbis might hope to obtain, to make Him an honour to Phariseeism?

2) Strauss, vol. i. 310, expresses the view, that the sitting on the ground, which Paul designates (Acts xxii, 3) as the respect of a pupil to a teacher, forms a contradiction to this sitting of Jesus in the midst of the doctors. Why should it be impossible to sit on the ground in the midst of a circle of seats? Moreover, we may probably grant to these Rabbis sufficient homage for the genius of the boy to induce them to offer Him a seat. Schöttgen seats Him on a little throne ; it is questionable whether he does not give the Rabbis credit for too much. Others will not suffer Him to sit quietly on the floor, but disturb Him for the sake of rabbinical etiquette. We may at least claim for Him a little stool.

3) Jewish Rabbis could perhaps most easily answer the inquiry, whether the questioning of the boy implies teaching, properly so called, and whether a mass of difficulties against the historical statement do not arise, from a rabbinical point of view.

4) Compare Stier's Words of the Lord Jesus, i, 21 (Clark's Tr.

5) Compare my essay Ueber den geschichtlichen Charakter der kanonischen Evangelien, pp. 120 ff—Tholuck, die Glaubwurdigkeit, p, 221.

6) Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 313., ‘We might take this designation of God as τοῦ πατρός indefinitely, as showing that He would represent God as the Father of all men, and only in this sense as His also.’—This is said to be the description of a religious feeling—‘But not only are we forbidden so to understand it by the appended μοῦ, which in this sense would have been (as in Matt. vi. 9) ἡμῶν, but chiefly by the fact, that the parents of Jesus did not understand this saying, &c. But that a consciousness of His Messiahship should have been manifested in Jesus at twelve years of age,’ &c. The writer seems to have no notion that there is a form of the inner life called anticipation, a mid-region between unconsciousness and manifested consciousness; that this form of life is peculiar to mature childhood, and shows itself in gifted children in significant expressions, containing more than the speakers know with certainty.

7) [In some recent ‘ Lives of Jesus,’ notice has been taken of His bodily appearance. This has from the first been matter of dispute ; some of the fathers maintaining, that if the prophecy of Isaiah (chap. liii.) was fulfilled in Him, His appearance must have been far from beautiful or attractive. Others denied that any such inference was necessary, The various opinions have been collected and conveniently arranged by Le Nourry in his Dissertationes in Clem. Alex. (Dis. i.iv. art. 4). The traditions of supernaturally originated pictures are some centuries too late to claim consideration, The interesting fragment, however, preserved from very ancient times, and claiming to be the description of a contemporary (the proconsul Lentulus), embodies the leading features of that idea of our Lord’s appearance which the greatest painters have adopted or conceived. ‘There appeared in these our days a man of great virtue named Jesus Christ, who is yet living amongst us, and of the Gentiles is accepted for a prophet of truth, but his own disciples call him the Son of God, He raiseth the dead, and cureth all manner of diseases. A man of stature somewhat tall and comely, with a very reverend countenance, such as beholders may both love and fear; his hair the colour of a filbert full ripe, somewhat curling or waving about his shoulders ; his forehead plain and delicate; his face without spot or wrinkle ; his beard thick and short; his eyes gray, clear, and quick; in reproving awful, in admonishing courteous, in speaking very modest and wise. None have ever seen him laugh, but many have seen him weep—a man for his beauty surpassing the children of men,’ This extract will be found in Clark’s Travels, vol. iv. 177; or Lord Lindsay’s Christian Art, vol. i.v. 77. In connection with this, should be read the wise counsel of Augustine regarding the use to be made of ideas of our Lord’s personal appearance (De Trinitate, viii, 3-3).—ED.]