Luke 2:42

when he was twelve years old No single word breaks the silence of the Gospels respecting the childhood of Jesus from the return to Nazareth till this time. We infer indeed from scattered hints in Scripture that He "began to do" His work before He "began to teach," and being "tempted in all points like as we are" won the victory from His earliest years, alike over positive and negative temptations. (Hebrews 5:8. See Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus, E. Tr. p. 140.) Up to this time He had grown as other children grow, only in a childhood of stainless and sinless beauty "as the flower of roses in the spring of the year, and as lilies by the waters," Sir 39:13-14. This incident of His -confirmation," as in modern language we might call it, is "the solitary flowret out of the wonderful enclosed garden of the thirty years, plucked precisely there where the swollen bud at a distinctive crisis bursts into flower." Stier, Words of Jesus, i. 18.

This silence of the Evangelists is a proof of their simple faithfulness, and is in striking contrast with the blaze of foolish and dishonouring miracles with which the Apocryphal Gospels degrade the Divine Boyhood. See my Life of Christ, 1. 58 66. Meanwhile we are permitted to see (i) That our Lord never attended the schools of the Rabbis (Mark 6:2; John 6:42; John 7:15), and therefore that His teaching was absolutely original, and that He would therefore be regarded by the Rabbis as a -man of the people," or -unlearned person." (See Acts 4:13; T. B. Berachôth, f. 47. 2; Sir 38:24 fg.) (ii) That He had learnt to write (John 8:6). (iii) That He was acquainted not only with Aramaic, but with Hebrew, Greek, and perhaps Latin (Life of Christ, i. 91); and (iv) That he had been deeply impressed by the lessons of nature (id. i. 93).

twelve years old Up to this age a Jewish boy was called -little," afterwards he was called -grown up," and became a -Son of the Law," or -Son of the Precepts." At this age he was presented on the Sabbath called the -Sabbath of Phylacteries" in the Synagogue, and began to wear the phylacteries with which his father presented him. According to the Jews twelve was the age at which Moses left the house of Pharaoh's daughter, and Samuel was called, and Solomon gave his judgment, and Josiah carried out his reform. (Jos. Antt.ii. 9. 6, v. 10. 4.)