Abstract
The only things that the Gospels tell us about the childhood of Jesus are contained in these few verses. But there are other clues from which, without too much fantasy, we can build up a fuller picture.
In one of the sayings of Jesus the grown man, we catch a glimpse of children playing in the market place:
We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge and you did not cry. (Luke 7:32)
Where is the boy Jesus in this group of children? Is he standing aside and observing them? Is he one of those sulking, and not wanting to play? Or is he one of those trying to get a game going? And what are they trying to play? Is it weddings and funerals? If so, does Jesus get a turn one day to be the bridegroom—or the corpse?
We need less imagination to see him beside his father learning his trade. Jesus is described both as ‘the carpenter’ and ‘the carpenter's son’. That is entirely feasible: a trade being passed on from father to son. If so, then, from an early age, we can see Jesus in the workshop with his father, first sweeping up the sawdust and the shavings, and then learning to use the tools and develop the skills of a carpenter.
But we are on the safest ground of all when we consider Jesus’ familiarity with the Scriptures, a familiarity that began in his childhood. Godly parents, like Joseph and Mary, were aware of their duty to teach their children, especially their sons, the history of their people and the commandments that God had given them. How else would they know who they were and what God required of them? In the time of Jesus, this duty was delegated to the local rabbi.
From the age of about six, boys would attend the synagogue school. There, the rabbi would teach them to recognize and write the Hebrew letters, perhaps writing them in the sand. Then they would be taught to read from the sacred scrolls kept in the cupboard in the apse of the synagogue. This was not easy: Hebrew was not the language spoken by the people every day, which was Aramaic, a language related to, but not the same as, Hebrew. So the Hebrew text had to be read, then translated and explained by the rabbi, a tradition that was eventually formalised in the Targums. The next difficulty was that the Hebrew text was written with consonants but without vowels. In order to read with any fluency, the reader had already to know what the text said. With the help of the rabbi, a text would be mastered by one of the more advanced scholars and then memorized by the rest of the class by oral repetition, until it was indelibly implanted in their young minds.
In our literate and digital age, when even the memorization of poetry is out of fashion, we underestimate the power of the human mind, especially the young mind, to retain vast amounts of learning word for word. In this way a Jewish boy, attending synagogue school for six or seven years, would cover the whole of the first five books of the Bible, and large portions of the prophets and other writings such as the Psalms. There were no other subjects taught in the synagogue school: this was the curriculum.
We are so used to having the Bible in the form of a single book, ready to be carried about (or to collect dust on our shelves), that we have perhaps never realised that ancient scrolls were large, expensive and rare items, not to be found in common households like that of Joseph and Mary. People’s acquaintance with the Scriptures was hearing them read in public worship, and learning them by heart.
These must be the most important and valuable hours of Jesus’ childhood: hearing and memorizing the Scriptures in the synagogue school, so that when he was grown up, it was a verse or a passage from these Scriptures that would come to his mind in any and every circumstance—as we see over and over again during the course of his ministry, from his temptations in the wilderness to his death on the cross.
Finally, what the Gospels tell us explicitly about the childhood of Jesus is that, every year, his parents went up to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. We learn later that it was his custom also to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath Day. All of which tells us that from infancy the boy Jesus was brought up within the fellowship of the people of God and of the worshipping community.
So what can we learn from Jesus’ childhood about the upbringing of children within the family of God?
Do we need to be reminded that play is an important part of child development? It is the way in which children explore their relationships with each other and the world of human experience. Is free and imaginative play still available to our children, or are they too much occupied from an early age with structured learning and computer games?
Then, everybody needs to acquire a skill or a trade, from carpenters to kings. School and further education are the means by which children explore and discover their gifts and abilities, and acquire the learning and expertise to do the work in the world for which God has prepared them. Work is not just a means of earning a living, but of finding personal fulfillment and satisfaction in making things or serving others as God has gifted us.
But, after the example of Jesus and his parents, there is nothing more important that we can do for our children than to introduce them to the Scriptures and bring them up within the family of the church. Whether we like it or not, our children will grow up to decide for themselves whether to follow Jesus or not. But a sound knowledge of the Bible and the experience of belonging to the wider community of the church will never be wasted.
One of the drawbacks of the many modern translations of the Bible that we use today, is that people do not learn the Scriptures by heart. I was brought up with the King James Bible and, even today, when a Scripture verse comes to my mind, it is in the words of that old translation. I was not made to learn these verses, but hearing and reading them again and again, they became engraved in my mind. It is a gift that I don’t believe many young people today will have to carry them through their lives. I wonder if the children’s leaders in our churches could not revive the age-old discipline of learning by heart. It was good enough for Jesus; it should be good enough for us.
We could all do worse than to memorise these words from the passage in Colossians that we read today:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.
Reading Prophetic Books
Marvin A. Sweeney, Reading Prophetic Books: Form, Intertextuality, and Reception in Prophetic and Post-Biblical Literature (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. €134,00. pp. xvi + 408. ISBN: 978-3-16-152374-8).
In this volume, the renowned scholar of prophetic literature Marvin A. Sweeney presents a selection of his work on the prophetic books. The collection of 24 essays builds upon a former volume in the series (Form and Intertextuality in Prophetic and Apocalyptic Literature, FAT 45 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005)). However, while the previous volume concentrated on the development of the study of prophetic literature from the work of Bernhard Duhm through to the present, the new collection serves to illustrate Sweeney’s approach from the standpoint of contemporary form-critical exegesis and intertextual method. The methodological perspective is laid out in the introduction, where Sweeney argues for his understanding of form criticism as ‘a full understanding of the final, synchronic form of the text as a precondition for reconstructing diachronic forms and settings’ (p. 1). This text-orientated understanding is enhanced with the insight that contemporary form criticism is heavily bound up with intertextuality in all of its dimensions’ (p. 11). Referring to Mikhail Bakhtin, Sweeney emphasises that every literary work has to be read against the literary background, with which the text engages in dialogue. Thus, the form critical approach to the prophetic books has to be complemented with the analysis of their respective intertextual links.
These methodological principles are illustrated by the textual studies of the volume, which are introduced by the title essay ‘Reading Prophetic Books’ (Part 1). Here, the author discusses the final forms and distinctive perspectives of the Latter Prophets each, and shows how the inter-prophetic dialogue can be explained as making theological sense out of the crisis of the Babylonian destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (587/586 BCE). He furnishes proof that the prophetic books provided the theological means by which Israel/Judaism overcame these fundamental challenges to their existence and formed a new identity. The further studies of the volume assemble contributions on the Books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Prophets (Parts 2–5), while four essays in Part 6 focus on post-biblical literature.
This volume draws on recent developments in Hebrew Bible Studies and demonstrates convincingly that synchronic and diachronic perspectives are not mutually exclusive but have to be correlated in order to enhance our understanding of the texts. It will contribute greatly to the current discussion on how to read prophetic books, while at the same time offering a comprehensive introduction to the field for every interested reader.
ANJA KLEIN
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh