[Contents]CHAPTER V.THE FIRST VISIT TO THE TEMPLE, AND THE EDUCATION OF JESUS.[Contents]§ 40.JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196][Contents]§ 41THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.[Contents]§ 42.ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201][Contents]§ 43.THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]
[Contents]CHAPTER V.THE FIRST VISIT TO THE TEMPLE, AND THE EDUCATION OF JESUS.[Contents]§ 40.JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196][Contents]§ 41THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.[Contents]§ 42.ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201][Contents]§ 43.THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]
[Contents]CHAPTER V.THE FIRST VISIT TO THE TEMPLE, AND THE EDUCATION OF JESUS.[Contents]§ 40.JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196][Contents]§ 41THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.[Contents]§ 42.ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201][Contents]§ 43.THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]
CHAPTER V.THE FIRST VISIT TO THE TEMPLE, AND THE EDUCATION OF JESUS.
[Contents]§ 40.JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196][Contents]§ 41THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.[Contents]§ 42.ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201][Contents]§ 43.THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]
[Contents]§ 40.JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196]
§ 40.JESUS, WHEN TWELVE YEARS OLD, IN THE TEMPLE.
The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196]
The Gospel of Matthew passes in silence over the entire period from the return of the parents of Jesus out of Egypt, to the baptism of Jesus by John: and even Luke has nothing to tell us of the long interval between the early childhood of Jesus and his maturity, beyond a single incident—his demeanour on a visit to the temple in his twelfth year (ii. 41–52). This anecdote, out of the early youth of Jesus is, as Hess has truly remarked,1distinguished from the narratives hitherto considered, belonging to his childhood, by the circumstance that Jesus no longer, as in the latter, holds a merely passive position, but presents an active proof of his high destination; a proof which has always been especially valued, as indicating the moment in which the consciousness of that destination was kindled in Jesus.2
In his twelfth year, the period at which, according to Jewish usage, the boy became capable of an independent participation in the sacred rites, the parents of Jesus, as this narrative informs us, took him for the first time to the Passover. At the expiration of the feast, the parents bent their way homewards; that their son was missing gave them no immediate anxiety, because they supposed him to be among their travelling companions, and it was not until after they had accomplished a day’s journey, and in vain sought their son among their kinsfolk and acquaintance, that they turned back to Jerusalem to look for him there. This conduct on the part of the parents of Jesus may with reason excite surprise. It seems inconsistent with the carefulness which it has been thought incumbent on us to attribute to them, that they should have allowed the divine child entrusted to their keeping, to remain so long out of their sight; and hence they have on many sides been accused of neglect and a dereliction of duty, in the instance before us.3It has been urged, as a general consideration in vindication of Joseph and Mary, that the greater freedom permitted to the boy is easily conceivable as part of a liberal method of education;4but even according to our modern ideas, it would seem more than liberal for parents to let a boy of twelve years remain out of their sight during so long an interval as our narrative supposes; how far less reconcileable must it then be with the more rigid views of education held by the[192]ancients, not excepting the Jews? It is remarked however, that viewing the case as an extraordinary one, the parents of Jesus knew their child, and they could therefore very well confide in his understanding and character, so far as to be in no fear that any danger would accrue to him from his unusual freedom;5but we can perceive from their subsequent anxiety, that they were not so entirely at ease on that head. Thus their conduct must be admitted to be such as we should not have anticipated; but it is not consequently incredible nor does it suffice to render the entire narrative improbable, for the parents of Jesus are no saints to us, that we should not impute to them any fault.
Returned to Jerusalem, they find their son on the third day in the temple, doubtless in one of the outer halls, in the midst of an assembly of doctors, engaged in a conversation with them, and exciting universal astonishment (v. 45 f.). From some indications it would seem that Jesus held a higher position in the presence of the doctors, than could belong to a boy of twelve years. The wordκαθεζόμενον(sitting) has excited scruples, for according to Jewish records, it was not until after the death of the Rabbi Gamaliel, an event long subsequent to the one described in our narrative, that the pupils of the rabbins sat, they having previously been required to stand6when in the school; but this Jewish tradition is of doubtful authority.7It has also been thought a difficulty, that Jesus does not merely hear the doctors, but also asks them questions, thus appearing to assume the position of their teacher. Such is indeed the representation of the apocryphal Gospels, for in them Jesus, before he is twelve years old, perplexes all the doctors by his questions,8and reveals to his instructor in the alphabet the mystical significance of the characters;9while at the above visit to the temple he proposes controversial questions,10such as that touching the Messiah’s being at once David’s Son and Lord (Matt. xxii. 41), and proceeds to throw light on all departments of knowledge.11If the expressionsἐρωτᾷνandἀποκρίνεσθαιimplied that Jesus played the part of a teacher in this scene, so unnatural a feature in the evangelical narrative would render the whole suspicious.12But there is nothing to render this interpretation of the words necessary, for according to Jewish custom, rabbinical teaching was of such a kind that not only did the masters interrogate the pupils, but the pupils interrogated the masters, when they wished for explanations on any point.13We may with the more probability suppose that the writer intended to attribute to Jesus such questions as suited a boy, because he, apparently not without design, refers the astonishment of the doctors, not to his questions, but to that in which he could best show himself in the light of an intelligent pupil—namely, to his answers. A more formidable difficulty is the statement, that the boy Jesus satin the midst of the doctors,ἐν μέσῳ τῶν διδασκάλων. For we learn from Paul (Acts xxii. 3) the position that became a pupil, when he says that he was brought upat the feet(παρὰ τοὺς πόδας) of Gamaliel: it being the custom for the rabbins to be placed on chairs, while their pupils sat on the ground,14and did not take their places among their masters. It has indeed been thought thatἐν μέσῳmight be so explained as[193]to signify, either that Jesus sat between the doctors, who are supposed to have been elevated on chairs, while Jesus and the other pupils are pictured as sitting on the ground between them,15or merely that he was in the company of doctors, that is, in the synagogue;16but according to the strict sense of the words, the expressionκαθέζεσθαι ἐν μέσῳ τινῶνappears to signify, if not as Schöttgen believes,17in majorem Jesu gloriam, a place of pre-eminent honour, at least a position of equal dignity with that occupied by the rest. It need only be asked, would it harmonize with the spirit of our narrative to substituteκαθεζόμενον παρὰ τοῦς πόδας τῶν διδασκάλωνforκαθ. ἐν μέσω τ. δ.? the answer will certainly be in the negative, and it will then be inevitable to admit, that our narrative places Jesus in another relation to the doctors than that of a learner, though the latter is the only natural one for a boy of twelve, however highly gifted. For Olshausen’s position,18—that in Jesus nothing was formed from without, by the instrumentality of another’s wisdom, because this would be inconsistent with the character of the Messiah, as absolutely self-determined,—contradicts a dogma of the church which he himself advances, namely, that Jesus in his manifestation as man, followed the regular course of human development. For not only is it in the nature of this development to be gradual, but also, and still more essentially, to be dependent, whether it be mental or physical, on the interchange of reception and influence. To deny this in relation to the physical life of Jesus—to say, for example, that the food which he took did not serve for the nourishment and growth of his body by real assimilation, but merely furnished occasion for him to reproduce himself from within, would strike every one as Docetism; and is the analogous proposition in relation to his spiritual development, namely, that he appropriated nothing from without, and used what he heard from others merely as a voice to evoke one truth after another from the recesses of his own mind—is this anything else than a more refined Docetism? Truly, if we attempt to form a conception of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors in the temple according to this theory, we make anything but a natural scene of it. It is not to be supposed that he taught, nor properly speaking that he was taught, but that the discourse of the doctors merely gave an impetus to his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas.19But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expressionἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ(v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula.20[194]
The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God asτοῦ πατρὸςgenerally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronounμοῦ, the above sense requiringἡμῶν(as inMatt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, wasυἱὸς θεοῦin a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic relation to God; but it can only do so by the hypothesis of an unprecedented coincidence of extraordinary accidents. We, on the contrary, who have renounced the previous incidents as historical, either in the supernatural or the natural sense, are unable to comprehend how the consciousness of his messianic destination could be so early developed in Jesus. For though the consciousness of a more subjective vocation, as that of a poet or an artist, which is dependent solely on the internal gifts of the individual (gifts which cannot long remain latent), may possibly be awakened very early; an objective vocation, in which the conditions of external reality are a chief co-operator, as the vocation of the statesman, the general, the reformer of a religion, can hardly be so early evident to the most highly endowed individual, because for this a knowledge of cotemporary circumstances would be requisite, which only long observation and mature experience can confer. Of the latter kind is the vocation of the Messiah, and if this is implied in the words by which Jesus in his twelfth year justified his lingering in the temple, he cannot have uttered the words at that period.
In another point of view also, it is worthy of notice that the parents of Jesus are said (v. 50) not to have understood the words which he addressed to them. What did these words signify? That God was his Father, in whose house it behoved him to be. But that her son would in a specific sense be called aυἱὸς θεοῦhad been already made known to Mary by the annunciating angel (Luke i. 32,35), and that he would have a peculiar relation to the temple she might infer, both from the above title, and from the striking reception which he had met with at his first presentation in the temple, when yet an infant. The parents of Jesus, or at least Mary, of whom it is repeatedly noticed that she carefully kept in her heart the extraordinary communications concerning her son, ought not to have been in the dark a single moment as[195]to the meaning of his language on this occasion. But even at the presentation in the temple, we are told that the parents of Jesus marvelled at the discourse of Simeon (v. 33), which is merely saying in other words that they did not understand him. And their wonder is not referred to the declaration of Simeon that their boy would be a cause, not only of the rising again, but of the fall of many in Israel, and that a sword would pierce through the heart of his mother (an aspect of his vocation and destiny on which nothing had previously been communicated to the parents of Jesus, and at which therefore they might naturally wonder); for these disclosures are not made by Simeon until after the wonder of the parents, which is caused only by Simeon’s expressions of joy at the sight of the Saviour, who would be the glory of Israel, and a light even to the Gentiles. And here again there is no intimation that the wonder was excited by the idea that Jesus would bear this relation to the heathens, which indeed it could not well be, since this more extended destination of the Messiah had been predicted in the Old Testament. There remains therefore as a reason for the wonder in question, merely the fact of the child’s Messiahship, declared by Simeon; a fact which had been long ago announced to them by angels, and which was acknowledged by Mary in her song of praise. We have just a parallel difficulty in the present case, it being as inconceivable that the parents of Jesus should not understand his allusion to his messianic character, as that they should wonder at the declaration of it by Simeon. We must therefore draw this conclusion: if the parents of Jesus did not understand these expressions of their son when twelve years old, those earlier communications cannot have happened; or, if the earlier communications really occurred, the subsequent expressions of Jesus cannot have remained incomprehensible to them. Having done away with those earlier incidents as historical, we might content ourselves with this later want of comprehension, were it not fair to mistrust the whole of a narrative whose later portions agree so ill with the preceding. For it is the character, not of an historical record, but of a marvellous legend, to represent its personages as so permanently in a state of wonder, that they not only at the first appearance of the extraordinary, but even at the second, third, tenth repetition, when one would expect them to be familiarized with it, continually are astonished and do not understand—obviously with the view of exalting the more highly the divine impartation by this lasting incomprehensibleness. So, to draw an example from the later history of Jesus, the divine decree of his suffering and death is set forth in all its loftiness in the evangelical narratives by the circumstance, that even the repeated, explicit disclosures of Jesus on this subject, remain throughout incomprehensible to the disciples; as here the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus is exalted by the circumstance, that his parents, often as it had been announced to them, at every fresh word on the subject are anew astonished and do not understand.
The twofold form of conclusion, that the mother of Jesus kept all these sayings in her heart (v. 51), and that the boy grew in wisdom and stature, and so forth, we have already recognised as a favourite form of conclusion and transition in the heroic legend of the Hebrews; in particular, that which relates to the growth of the boy is almost verbally parallel with a passage relating to Samuel, as in two former instances similar expressions appeared to have been borrowed from the history of Samson.21[196]
[Contents]§ 41THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.
§ 41THIS NARRATIVE ALSO MYTHICAL.
Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.
Thus here again we must acknowledge the influence of the legend; but as the main part of the incident is thoroughly natural, we might in this instance prefer the middle course, and after disengaging the mythical, seek to preserve a residue of history. We might suppose that the parents of Jesus really took their son to Jerusalem in his early youth, and that after having lost sight of him (probably before their departure), they found him in the temple, where, eager for instruction, he sat at the feet of the rabbins. When called to account, he declared that his favourite abode was in the house of God;22a sentiment which rejoiced his parents, and won the approbation of the bystanders. The rest of the story we might suppose to have been added by the aggrandizing legend, after Jesus was acknowledged as the Messiah. Here all the difficulties in our narrative,—the idea of the boy sitting in the midst of the doctors, his claiming God as his father in a special sense, and the departure of the parents without their son, would be rejected; but the journey of Jesus when twelve years old, the eagerness for knowledge then manifested by him, and his attachment to the temple, are retained. To these particulars there is nothing to object negatively, for they contain nothing improbable in itself; but their historical truth must become doubtful if we can show, positively, a strong interest of the legend, out of which the entire narrative, and especially these intrinsically not improbable particulars, might have arisen.
That in the case of great men who in their riper age have been distinguished by mental superiority, the very first presaging movements of their mind are eagerly gleaned, and if they are not to be ascertained historically, are invented under the guidance of probability, is well known. In the Hebrew history and legend especially, we find manifold proofs of this tendency. Thus of Samuel it is said in the old Testament itself, that even as a boy he received a divine revelation and the gift of prophecy (1 Sam. iii.), and with respect to Moses, on whose boyish years the Old Testament narrative is silent, a subsequent tradition, followed by Josephus and Philo, had striking proofs to relate of his early development. As in the narrative before us Jesus shows himself wise beyond his years, so this tradition attributes a like precocity to Moses;23as Jesus, turning away from the idle tumult of the city in all the excitement of festival time, finds his favourite entertainment in the temple among the doctors; so the boy Moses was not attracted by childish sports, but by serious occupation, and very early it was necessary to give him tutors, whom, however, like Jesus in his twelfth year, he quickly surpassed.24
According to Jewish custom and opinion, the twelfth year formed an epoch in development to which especial proofs of awakening genius were the rather attached, because in the twelfth year, as with us in the fourteenth, the boy was regarded as having outgrown the period of childhood.25Accordingly it[197]was believed of Moses that in his twelfth year he left the house of his father, to become an independent organ of the divine revelations.26The Old Testament leaves it uncertain how early the gift of prophecy was imparted to Samuel, but he was said by a later tradition to have prophesied from his twelfth year;27and in like manner the wise judgments of Solomon and Daniel (1 Kings iii. 23 ff.,Susann. 45 ff.) were supposed to have been given when they were only twelve.28If in the case of these Old Testament heroes, the spirit that impelled them manifested itself according to common opinion so early as in their twelfth year, it was argued that it could not have remained longer concealed in Jesus; and if Samuel and Daniel showed themselves at that age in their later capacity of divinely inspired seers, Solomon in that of a wise ruler, so Jesus at the corresponding period in his life must have shown himself in the character to which he subsequently established his claim, that namely, of the Son of God and Teacher of Mankind. It is, in fact, the obvious aim of Luke to pass over no epoch in the early life of Jesus without surrounding him with divine radiance, with significant prognostics of the future; in this style he treats his birth, mentions the circumcision at least emphatically, but above all avails himself of the presentation in the temple. There yet remained according to Jewish manners one epoch, the twelfth year, with the first journey to the passover; how could he do otherwise than, following the legend, adorn this point in the development of Jesus as we find that he has done in his narrative? and how could we do otherwise than regard his narrative as a legendary embellishment of this period in the life of Jesus,29from which we learn nothing of his real development,30but merely something of the exalted notions which were entertained in the primitive church of the early ripened mind of Jesus?
But how this anecdote can be numbered among mythi is found by some altogether inconceivable. It bears, thinks Heydenreich,31a thoroughly historical character (this is the very point to be proved), and the stamp of the highest simplicity (like every popular legend in its original form); it contains no tincture of the miraculous, wherein the primary characteristic of a mythus (but not of every mythus) is held to consist; it is so remote from all embellishment that there is not the slightest detail of the conversation of Jesus with the doctors (the legend was satisfied with the dramatic trait,sitting in the midst of the doctors: as a dictum,v. 49was alone important, and towards this the narrator hastens without delay); nay, even the conversation between Jesus and his mother is only given in a fragmentary aphoristic manner (there is no[198]trace of an omission); finally, the inventor of a legend would have made Jesus speak differently to his mother, instead of putting into his mouth words which might be construed into irreverence and indifference. In this last observation Heydenreich agrees with Schleiermacher, who finds in the behaviour of Jesus to his mother, liable as it is to be misinterpreted, a sure guarantee that the whole history was not invented to supply something remarkable concerning Jesus, in connexion with the period at which the holy things of the temple and the law were first opened to him.32
In combating the assertion, that an inventor would scarcely have attributed to Jesus so much apparent harshness towards his mother, we need not appeal to the apocryphalEvangelium Thomæ, which makes the boy Jesus say to his foster-father Joseph:insipientissime fecisti;33for even in the legend or history of the canonical gospels corresponding traits are to be found. In the narrative of the wedding at Cana, we find this rough address to his mother:τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοὶ γύναι(John ii. 4); and in the account of the visit paid to Jesus by his mother and brethren, the striking circumstance that he apparently wishes to take no notice of his relatives (Matt. xii. 46). If these are real incidents, then the legend had an historical precedent to warrant the introduction of a similar feature, even into the early youth of Jesus; if, on the other hand, they are only legends, they are the most vivid proofs that an inducement as not wanting for the invention of such features. Where this inducement lay, it is easy to see. The figure of Jesus would stand in the higher relief from the obscure background of his contracted family relations, if it were often seen that his parents were unable to comprehend his elevated mind, and if even he himself sometimes made them feel his superiority—so far as this could happen without detriment to his filial obedience, which, it should be observed, our narrative expressly preserves.
[Contents]§ 42.ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201]
§ 42.ON THE EXTERNAL LIFE OF JESUS UP TO THE TIME OF HIS PUBLIC APPEARANCE.
What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201]
What were the external conditions under which Jesus lived, from the scene just considered up to the time of his public appearance? On this subject our canonical gospels give scarcely an indication.
First, as to his place of residence, all that we learn explicitly is this: that both at the beginning and at the end of this obscure period he dwelt at Nazareth. According toLuke ii. 51, Jesus when twelve years old returned thither with his parents, and according toMatthew iii. 13,Mark i. 9, he, when thirty years old (comp.Luke iii. 23), came from thence to be baptized by John. Thus our evangelists appear to suppose, that Jesus had in the interim resided in Galilee, and, more particularly, in Nazareth. This supposition, however, does not exclude journeys, such as those to the feasts in Jerusalem.
The employment of Jesus during the years of his boyhood and youth seems, from an intimation in our gospels, to have been determined by the trade of his father, who is there called aτέκτων(Matt. xiii. 55). This Greek word, used to designate the trade of Joseph, is generally understood in the sense offaber[199]lignarius(carpenter);34a few only, on mystical grounds, discover in it afaber ferrarius(blacksmith),aurarius(goldsmith), orcæmentarius(mason).35The works in wood which he executed are held of different magnitude by different authors: according to Justin and theEvangelium Thomæ,36they wereploughs and yokes,ἄροτρα καὶ ζυγὰ, and in that case he would be what we call a wheel-wright; according to theEvangelium infantiæ arabicum,37they were doors, milk-vessels, sieves and coffers, and once Joseph makes a throne for the king; so that here he is represented partly as a cabinet-maker and partly as a cooper. TheProtevangelium Jacobi, on the other hand, makes him work atbuildings,οἰκοδομαῖς,38without doubt as a carpenter. In these labours of the father Jesus appears to have shared, according to an expression of Mark, who makes the Nazarenes ask concerning Jesus, not merely as in the parallel passage of Matthew:Is not this the carpenter’s son?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός;butIs not this the carpenter?οὐκ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων(vi. 3). It is true that in replying to the taunt of Celsus that the teacher of the Christians was a carpenter by trade,τέκτον ἦν τὴν τέχνην, Origen says, he must have forgottenthat in none of the Gospels received by the churches is Jesus himself called a carpenter,ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων τεκτων αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται.39The above passage in Mark has, in fact, the various reading,ὁ τοῦ τέκτονος υἱός, which Origen must have taken, unless he be supposed altogether to have overlooked the passage, and which is preferred by some modern critics.40But here Beza has justly remarked thatfortasse mutavit aliquis, existimans, hanc artem Christi majestati parum convenire; whereas there could hardly be an interest which would render the contrary alteration desirable.41Moreover Fathers of the Church and apocryphal writings represent Jesus, in accordance with the more generally accepted reading, as following the trade of his father. Justin attaches especial importance to the fact that Jesus made ploughs and yokes or scales, as symbols of active life and of justice.42In theEvangelium infantiæ Arabicum, Jesus goes about with Joseph to the places where the latter has work, to help him in such a manner that if Joseph made anything too long or too short, Jesus, by a touch or by merely stretching out his hand, gave to the object its right size, an assistance which was very useful to his foster-father, because, as the apocryphal text naively remarks:nec admodum peritus erat artis fabrilis.43
Apart from these apocryphal descriptions, there are many reasons for believing that the above intimation as to the youthful employment of Jesus is correct. In the first place, it accords with the Jewish custom which prescribed even to one destined to a learned career, or in general to any spiritual occupation, the acquisition of some handicraft; thus Paul, the pupil of the rabbins, was also a tent-maker,σκηνοποιὸς τὴν τέχνην(Acts xviii. 3). Next, as our previous examinations have shown that we know nothing historical of[200]extraordinary expectations and plans on the part of the parents of Jesus in relation to their son, so nothing is more natural than the supposition that Jesus early practised the trade of his father. Further, the Christians must have had an interest in denying, rather than inventing, this opinion as to their Messiah’s youthful occupation, since it often drew down upon them the ridicule of their opponents. Thus Celsus, as we have already mentioned, could not abstain from a reflection on this subject, for which reason Origen willknownothing of any designation of Jesus as aτέκτωνin the New Testament; and every one knows the scoffing question of Libanius about the carpenter’s son, a question which seems to have been provided with so striking an answer, onlyex eventu.44It may certainly be said in opposition to this, that the notion of Jesus having been a carpenter, seems to be founded on a mere inference from the trade of the father as to the occupation of the son, whereas the latter was just as likely to apply himself to some other branch of industry; nay, that perhaps the whole tradition of the carpentry of Joseph and Jesus owes its origin to the symbolical significance exhibited by Justin. As however the allusion in our Gospels to the trade of Joseph is very brief and bare, and is nowhere used allegorically in the New Testament, nor entered into more minutely; it is not to be contested that he was really a carpenter; but it must remain uncertain whether Jesus shared in this occupation.
What were the circumstances of Jesus and his parents as to fortune? The answer to this question has been the object of many dissertations. It is evident that the ascription of pressing poverty to Jesus, on the part of orthodox theologians, rested on dogmatical and æsthetic grounds. On the one hand, they wished to maintain even in this point thestatus exinanitionis, and on the other, they wished to depict as strikingly as possible the contrast between theμορφὴ θεοῦ(form of God) and theμορφὴ δούλου(form of a servant). That this contrast as set forth by Paul (Phil. ii. 6, ff.), as well as the expressionἐπτώχευσε, which this apostle applies to Christ (2 Cor. viii. 9) merely characterizes the obscure and laborious life to which he submitted after his heavenly pre-existence, and instead of playing the part of king which the Jewish imagination attributed to the Messiah, is also to be regarded as established.45The expression of Jesus himself,The Son of man hath not where to lay his head,ποῦ τὴν κεφαλὴν κλίνῃ(Matt. viii. 20), may possibly import merely his voluntary renunciation of the peaceful enjoyment of fortune, for the sake of devoting himself to the wandering life of the Messiah. There is only one other particular bearing on the point in question, namely, that Mary presented, as an offering of purification, doves (Luke ii. 24),—according toLev. xii. 8, the offering of the poor: which certainly proves that the author of this information conceived the parents of Jesus to have been in by no means brilliant circumstances;46but what shall assure us that he also was not induced to make this representation by unhistorical motives? Meanwhile we are just as far from having tenable ground for maintaining the contrary proposition, namely, that Jesus possessed property: at least it is inadmissible to adduce the coat without seam47(John xix. 23), until we shall have inquired more closely what kind of relation it has to the subject.[201]
[Contents]§ 43.THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]
§ 43.THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF JESUS.
Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]
Our information concerning the external life of Jesus during his youth is very scanty: but we are almost destitute of any concerning his intellectual development. For the indeterminate phrase, twice occurring in Luke’s history of the childhood, concerning the increase of his spiritual strength and his growth in wisdom, tells us no more than we must necessarily have presupposed without it; while on the expectations which his parents cherished with respect to him before his birth, and on the sentiment which his mother especially then expressed, no conclusion is to be founded, since those expectations and declarations are themselves unhistorical. The narrative just considered, of the appearance of Jesus in the temple at twelve years of age, rather gives us a result—the early and peculiar development of his religious consciousness,—than an explanation of the causes and conditions by which this development was favoured. But we at least learn fromLuke ii. 41(what however is to be of course supposed of pious Israelites), that the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem every year at the Passover. We may conjecture, then, that Jesus from his twelfth year generally accompanied them, and availed himself of this excellent opportunity, amid the concourse of Jews and Jewish proselytes of all countries and all opinions, to form his mind, to become acquainted with the condition of his people and the false principles of the Pharisaic leaders, and to extend his survey beyond the narrow limits of Palestine.48
Whether or in what degree Jesus received the learned education of a rabbin, is also left untold in our canonical Gospels. From such passages asMatt. vii. 29, where it is said that Jesus taughtnot as the scribes,οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς, we can only infer that he did not adopt the method of the doctors of the law, and it does not follow that he had never enjoyed the education of ascribe(γραμματεὺς). On the other hand, not only was Jesus calledῥαββὶandῥαββουνὶby his disciples (Matt. xxvi. 25,49;Mark ix. 5,xi. 21,xiv. 45;John iv. 31,ix. 2,xi. 8,xx. 16: comp.i. 38,40,50), and by supplicating sufferers (Mark x. 5), but even the pharisaicἄρχωνNicodemus (John iii. 2) did not refuse him this title. We cannot, however, conclude from hence that Jesus had received the scholastic instruction of a rabbin;49for the salutation Rabbi, as also the privilege of reading in the synagogue (Luke iv. 16 ff.), a particular which has likewise been appealed to, belonged not only to graduated rabbins, but to every teacher who had given actual proof of his qualifications.50The enemies of Jesus explicitly assert, and he does not contradict them, that he had never learned letters:πῶς οὗτος γράμματα οἶδε μὴ μεμαθηκὼς(John vii. 15); and the Nazarenes are astonished to find so much wisdom in him, whence we infer that he had not to their knowledge been a student. These facts cannot be neutralized by the discourse of Jesus in which he represents himself as the model of a scribe well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven51(Matt. xiii. 52), for the wordγραμματεὺςhere means a doctor of the law in general, and not directly a doctor qualified in the schools. Lastly, the intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal traditions, and the abuses of the rabbins, which Jesus exhibits,52especially in the sermon on the mount and the anti-pharisaic discourse[202]Matt. xxiii.he might acquire from the numerous discourses of the Pharisees to the people, without going through a course of study under them. Thus the data on our present subject to be found in the Gospels, collectively yield the result that Jesus did not pass formally through a rabbinical school; on the other hand, the consideration that it must have been the interest of the Christian legend to represent Jesus as independent of human teachers, may induce a doubt with respect to these statements in the New Testament, and a conjecture that Jesus may not have been so entirely a stranger to the learned culture of his nation. But from the absence of authentic information we can arrive at no decision on this point.
Various hypotheses, more or less independent of the intimations given in the New Testament, have been advanced both in ancient and modern times concerning the intellectual development of Jesus: they may be divided into two principal classes, according to their agreement with the natural or the supernatural view. The supernatural view of the person of Jesus requires that he should be the only one of his kind, independent of all external, human influences, self-taught or rather taught of God; hence, not only must its advocates determinedly reject every supposition implying that he borrowed or learned anything, and consequently place in the most glaring light the difficulties which lay in the way of the natural development of Jesus;53but, the more surely to exclude every kind of reception, they must also be disposed to assign as early an appearance as possible to that spontaneity which we find in Jesus in his mature age. This spontaneous activity is twofold: it is theoretical and practical. As regards the theoretical side, comprising judgment and knowledge, the effort to give as early a date as possible to its manifestation in Jesus, displays itself in the apocryphal passages which have been already partly cited, and which describe Jesus as surpassing his teachers long before his twelfth year, for according to one of them he spoke in his cradle and declared himself to be the Son of God.54The practical side, too, of that superior order of spontaneity attributed to Jesus in his later years, namely, the power of working miracles, is attached by the apocryphal gospels to his earliest childhood and youth. TheEvangelium Thomæopens with the fifth year of Jesus the story of his miracles,55and the ArabianEvangelium Infantiæfills the journey into Egypt with miracles which the mother of Jesus performed by means of the swaddling bands of her infant, and the water in which he was washed.56Some of the miracles which according to these apocryphal gospels were wrought by Jesus when in his infancy and boyhood, are analogous to those in the New Testament—cures and resuscitations of the dead; others are totally diverse from the ruling type in the canonical Gospels—extremely revolting retributive miracles, by which every one who opposes the boy Jesus in any matter whatever is smitten with lameness, or even with death, or else mere extravagancies, such as the giving of life to sparrows formed out of mud.57
The natural view of the person of Jesus had an opposite interest, which was also very early manifested both among Jewish and heathen opponents of Christianity, and which consisted in explaining his appearance conformably to the laws of causality, by comparing it with prior and contemporaneous[203]facts to which it had a relation, and thus exhibiting the conditions on which Jesus depended, and the sources from which he drew. It is true that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the whole region of spirituality being a supernatural one for heathens as well as Jews, the reproach that Jesus owed his wisdom and seemingly miraculous powers, not to himself or to God, but to a communication from without, could not usually take the form of an assertion that he had acquired natural skill and wisdom in the ordinary way of instruction from others.58Instead of the natural and the human, the unnatural and the demoniacal were opposed to the divine and the supernatural (comp.Matt xii. 24), and Jesus was accused of working his miracles by the aid of magic acquired in his youth. This charge was the most easily attached to the journey of his parents with him into Egypt, that native land of magic and secret wisdom, and thus we find it both in Celsus and in the Talmud. The former makes a Jew allege against Jesus, amongst other things, that he had entered into service for wages in Egypt, that he had there possessed himself of some magic arts, and on the strength of these had on his return vaunted himself for a God.59The Talmud gives him a member of the Jewish Sanhedrim as a teacher, makes him journey to Egypt with this companion, and bring magic charms from thence into Palestine.60
The purely natural explanation of the intellectual development of Jesus could only become prevalent amid the enlightened culture of modern times.In working out this explanation, the chief points of difference are the following: either the character of Jesus is regarded in too circumscribed a view, as the result of only one among the means of culture which his times afforded, or more comprehensively, as the result of all these combined; again, in tracing this external influence, either the internal gifts and self-determination of Jesus are adequately considered, or they are not.
In any case, the basis of the intellectual development of Jesus was furnished by the sacred writings of his people, of which the discourses preserved to us in the Gospels attest his zealous and profound study. His Messianic ideas seem to have been formed chiefly on Isaiah and Daniel: spiritual religiousness and elevation above the prejudices of Jewish nationality were impressively shadowed forth in the prophetic writings generally, together with the Psalms.
Next among the influences affecting mental cultivation in the native country of Jesus, must be reckoned the three sects under which the spiritual life of his fellow-countrymen may be classified. Among these, the Pharisees, whom Jesus at a later period so strenuously combated, can apparently have had only a negative influence over him; yet along with their fondness for tradition and legal pedantry, their sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy, by which Jesus was repelled from them, we must remember their belief in angels and in immortality, and their constant admission of a progressive development of the Jewish religion after Moses, which were so many points of union between them and[204]Jesus. Still as these tenets were only peculiar to the Pharisees in contradistinction to the Sadducees, and, for the rest, were common to all orthodox Jews, we abide by the opinion that the influence of the Pharisaic sect on the development of Jesus was essentially negative.
In the discourses of Jesus Sadduceeism is less controverted, nay, he agrees with it in rejecting the Pharisaic traditions and hypocrisy; hence a few of the learned have wished to find him a school in this sect.61But the merely negative agreement against the errors of the Pharisees,—an agreement which, moreover, proceeded from quite another principle in Jesus than in the Sadducees,—is more than counterbalanced by the contrast which their religious indifference, their unbelief in immortality and in spiritual existences, formed with the disposition of Jesus, and his manner of viewing the world. That the controversy with the Sadducees is not prominent in the Gospels, may be very simply explained by the fact that their sect had very slight influence on the circle with which Jesus was immediately connected, the adherents of Sadduceeism belonging to the higher ranks alone.62
Concerning one only of the then existing Jewish sects can the question seriously arise, whether we ought not to ascribe to it a positive influence on the development and appearance of Jesus—the sect, namely, of the Essenes.63In the last century the derivation of Christianity from Essenism was very much in vogue; not only English deists, and among the Germans, Bahrdt and Venturini, but even theologians, such as Stäudlin, embraced the idea.64In the days of freemasonry and secret orders, there was a disposition to transfer their character to primitive Christianity. The concealment of an Essene lodge appeared especially adapted to explain the sudden disappearance of Jesus after the brilliant scenes of his infancy and boyhood, and again after his restoration to life. Besides the forerunner John, the two men on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the angels clothed in white at the grave, and on the Mount of Ascension, were regarded as members of the Essene brotherhood, and many cures of Jesus and the Apostles were referred to the medical traditions of the Essenes. Apart, however, from these fancies of a bygone age, there are really some essential characteristics which seem to speak in favour of an intimate relation between Essenism and Christianity. The most conspicuous as such are the prohibition of oaths, and the community of goods: with the former was connected fidelity, peaceableness, obedience to every constituted authority; with the latter, contempt of riches, and the custom of travelling without provisions. These and other features, such as the sacred meal partaken in common, the rejection of sanguinary sacrifices and of slavery, constitute so strong a resemblance between Essenism and Christianity, that even so early a writer as Eusebius mistook the Therapeutæ, a sect allied to the Essenes, for Christians.65But there are very essential dissimilarities which must not be overlooked. Leaving out of consideration thecontempt of marriage,ὑπεροψία γάμου, since Josephus ascribes it to a part only of the Essenes; the asceticism, the punctilious observance of the Sabbath, the purifications, and other superstitious usages of this sect, their retention of the names of the angels, the mystery which they affected, and their contracted, exclusive devotion[205]to their order, are so foreign, nay so directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus, that, especially as the Essenes are nowhere mentioned in the New Testament, the aid which this sect also contributed to the development of Jesus, must be limited to the uncertain influence which might be exercised over him by occasional intercourse with Essenes.66
Did other elements than such as were merely Jewish, or at least confined to Palestine, operate upon Jesus? Of the heathens settled inGalilee of the Gentiles,Γαλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν, there was hardly much to be learned beyond patience under frequent intercourse with them. On the other hand, at the feasts in Jerusalem, not only foreign Jews, some of whom, as for example the Alexandrian and Cyrenian Jews, had synagogues there (Acts vi. 9), but also devout heathens were to be met with (John xii. 20); and that intercourse with these had some influence in extending the intellectual horizon of Jesus, and spiritualizing his opinions, has, as we have already intimated, all historical probability.67
But why do we, in the absence of certain information, laboriously seek after uncertain traces of an influence which cotemporary means of development may have exercised on Jesus? and yet more, why, on the other side, are these labours so anxiously repudiated? Whatever amount of intellectual material may be collected, the spark by which genius kindles it, and fuses its various elements into a consistent whole, is neither easier to explain nor reduced in value. Thus it is with Jesus. Allow him to have exhausted the means of development which his age afforded: a comprehensive faculty of reception is with great men ever the reverse side of their powerful originality; allow him to have owed far more to Essenism and Alexandrianism, and whatever other schools and tendencies existed, than we, in our uncertainty, are in a condition to prove:—still, for the reformation of a world these elements were all too little; the leaven necessary for this he must obtain from the depth of his own mind.68
But we have not yet spoken of an appearance to which our Gospels assign a most important influence in developing the activity of Jesus—that of John the Baptist. As his ministry is first noticed in the Gospels in connexion with the baptism and public appearance of Jesus, our inquiry concerning him, and his relation to Jesus, must open the second part.[207]