Luke 2:41-52

THIS section gives an example of the wisdom just spoken of (Luke 2:40), the more significant because the incident occurred at the age (twelve years) when a Jewish boy became a ‘son of the law,' was first fully subjected to the obedience of the law. The whole story is told so simply, with such internal marks of truthfulness, that no reason for rejecting it can be found. It is in marked contrast with the unnatural fictions of the Apocryphal Gospels.

ON OUR LORD'S CHILDHOOD. It was a real childhood and youth ripening into manhood. Here where Scripture is well nigh silent, we find an unanswerable argument for the doctrine of the Divine-human Person of Christ. How could such a one as Jesus afterwards became grow up in such a place and in such circumstances, unless He were the Incarnate Word? The human advantages He enjoyed were common to all the Jews. We find no trace of any contact with the learning of those days; there was no school of philosophers in despised Nazareth. Nor can He be ranked with self-made men of genius. For while these too have been deprived of living teachers, their development can still be accounted for by the use of other educational means, and we have to trace the energy with which such have sought these means and improved them. But there is no trace of such a life of application here. Nay, the character of His subsequent teaching forbids the theory that he thus attained His knowledge. It is too unique to be the result of study. Schaff (The Person of Christ): ‘He confined Himself strictly to religion. But from that centre He shed light over the whole world of man and nature. In this department, unlike all other great men, even the prophets and the Apostles, He was absolutely original and independent. He taught the world as one who had learned nothing from it and was under no obligation to it. He spoke from Divine intuition as one who not only knows the truth, but who is the truth, and with an authority which commands absolute submission, or provokes rebellion, but can never be passed by with contempt or indifference. His character and life were originated and sustained in spite of circumstances with which no earthly force could have contended, and therefore must have had their real foundation in a force which was supernatural and divine.'