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Jesus Christ: His Early Life
To avoid misconception, it is important to remember, that, rich as are the narratives of the Gospels, materials do not exist for a complete biography or "Life" of Jesus. There is a gap, broken only by a single incident, from His infancy till His 30th year; there are cycles of events out of myriads left unrecorded (
The Nativity
Hidden Piety in Judaism
Old Testament prophecy expired with the promise on its lips, "Behold, I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire, behold, he cometh, saith Yahweh of hosts" (
Birth of the Baptist
(Luke 1)
In the last days of Herod--perhaps in the year 748 of Rome, or 6 BC--the aged priest Zacharias, of the course of Abijah (
The Annunciation and Its Results
(
Meanwhile yet stranger things were happening in the little village of Nazareth, in Galilee (now enNacirah). There resided a young maiden of purest character, named Mary, betrothed to a carpenter of the village (compare
(1) The Amazing Message
(2) The Visit to Elisabeth
With the announcement to herself there was given to Mary an indication of what had befallen her kinswoman Elisabeth, and Mary’s first act, on recovering from her astonishment, was to go in haste to the home of Elisabeth in the hill country of Judea (
Here a new trial awaited her. Mary’s condition of motherhood could not long be concealed, and when Joseph first became aware of it, the shock to a man so just (
The Birth at Bethlehem
(Matthew 2:1; Luke 2:1-7)
Matthew gives no indication of where the events narrated in his first chapter took place, first mentioning Nazareth on the occasion of the return of the holy family from Egypt (2:23). In 2:1 he transports us to Bethlehem as the city of Christ’s birth. It is left to Luke to give an account of the circumstances which brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem--thus fulfilling prophecy (
(1) The Census of Quirinius
The emperor Augustus had given orders for a general enrollment throughout the empire (the fact of periodical enrollments in the empire is well established by Professor W.M. Ramsay in his Was Christ Born at Bethlehem?), and this is stated to have been given effect to in Judea when Quirinius was governor of Syria (
(2) Jesus Born
It must be left undecided whether the journey of Mary to Bethlehem with Joseph was required for any purpose of registration, or sprang simply from her unwillingness to be separated from Joseph in so trying a situation. To Bethlehem, in any case, possibly by Divine monition, she came, and there, in the ancestral city of David, in circumstances the lowliest conceivable, brought forth her marvelous child. In unadorned language--very different from the embellishments of apocryphal story--Luke narrates how, when the travelers arrived, no room was found for them in the "inn"--the ordinary eastern khan or caravanserai, a square enclosure, with an open court for cattle, and a raised recess round the walls for shelter of visitors--and how, when her babe was born, Mary wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger. The wearied pair having, according to Luke, been crowded out of, and not merely within, the inn, there is every probability that the birth took place, not, as some suppose, in the courtyard of the inn, but, as the oldest tradition asserts (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 78), in a cave in the neighborhood, used for similar purposes of lodgment and housing of cattle. High authorities look favorably on the "cave of the nativity" still shown, with its inscription, Hic de virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est, as marking the sacred spot. In such incredibly mean surroundings was "the only begotten of the Father" ushered into the world He came to redeem. How true the apostle’s word that He "emptied" Himself (
The Incidents of the Infancy
(Luke 2:8-39; Matthew 2:1-12)
Born, however, though Jesus was, in a low condition, the Father did not leave Him totally without witness to His Sonship. There were rifts in the clouds through which cidents of the hidden glory streamed. The scenes in the narratives of the Infancy exhibit a strange commingling of the glorious and the lowly.
(1) The Visit of the Shepherds
To shepherds watching their flocks by night in the fields near Bethlehem the first disclosure was made. The season, one would infer, could hardly have been winter, though it is stated that there is frequently an interval of dry weather in Judea between the middle of December and the middle of February, when such a keeping of flocks would be possible (Andrews). The angel world is not far removed from us, and as angels preannounced the birth of Christ, so, when He actually came into the world (compare
(2) The Circumcision and Presentation in the Temple
(3) Visit of the Magi
Flight to Egypt and Return to Nazareth
(Matthew 2:13-15,19-23)
Questions and Objections
The objections to the credibility of the narratives of the Virgin Birth have already partly been adverted to. (See further the articles on MARY; VIRGIN BIRTH; and the writer’s volume, The Virgin Birth of Christ.)
(1) The Virgin Birth
The narratives in Matthew and Luke are attested by all manuscripts and versions genuine parts of their respective Gospels, and as coming to us in their integrity. The narrative of Luke is generally recognized as resting on an Aramaic basis, which, from its diction and the primitive character of its conceptions, belongs to the earliest age. While in Luke’s narrative everything is presented from the standpoint of Mary, in Matthew it is Joseph who is in the forefront, suggesting that the virgin mother is the source of information in the one case, and Joseph himself in the other. The narratives are complementary, not contradictory. That Mark and John do not contain narratives of the Virgin Birth cannot be wondered at, when it is remembered that Mark’s Gospel begins of purpose with the Baptism of John, and that the Fourth Gospel aims at setting forth the Divine descent, not the circumstances of the earthly nativity. "The Word became flesh" (
(2) The Genealogies
(Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-28)
Difficulty is felt with the genealogies in Matthew and Luke (one descending, the other ascending), which, while both professing to trace the descent of Jesus from David and Abraham (Luke from Adam), yet go entirely apart in the pedigree after David. See on this the article GENEALOGY OF JESUS CHRIST. A favorite view is that Matthew exhibits the legal, Luke the natural descent of Jesus. There is plausibility in the supposition that though, in form, a genealogy of Joseph, Luke’s is really the genealogy of Mary. It was not customary, it is true, to make out pedigrees of females, but the case here was clearly exceptional, and the passing of Joseph into the family of his father-in-law Heli would enable the list to be made out in his name. Celsus, in the 2nd century, appears thus to have understood it when he derides the notion that through so lowly a woman as the carpenter’s wife, Jesus should trace His lineage up to the first man (Origen, Contra Celsus, ii.32; Origen’s reply proceeds on the same assumption. Compare article on" Genealogies" in Kitto, II).
The Years of Silence — the Twelfth Year
The Human Development
(Luke 2:40,52)
With the exception of one fragment of incident--that of the visit to Jerusalem and the Temple in His 12th year--the Canonical Gospels are silent as to the history of Jesus from the return to Nazareth till His baptism by John. This long period, which the Apocryphal Gospels crowd with silly fables (see Apocryphal Gospels), the inspired records leave to be regarded as being what it was--a period of quiet development of mind and body, of outward uneventfulness, of silent garnering of experience in the midst of the Nazareth surroundings. Jesus "grew, and waxed strong, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon him .... advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men" (
Jesus in the Temple
(Luke 2:41-50)
Every year, as was the custom of the Jews, Joseph and Mary went, with their friends and neighbors, in companies, to Jerusalem to the Passover. When Jesus was 12 years old, it would seem that, for the first time, He was permitted to accompany them. It would be to Him a strange and thrilling experience. Everything He saw--the hallowed sites, the motley crowd, the service of the temple, the very shocks His moral consciousness would receive from contact with abounding scandals--would intensify His feeling of His own unique relation to the Father. Every relationship was for the time suspended and merged to His thought in this higher one. It was His Father’s city whose streets He trod; His Father’s house He visited for prayer; His Father’s ordinance the crowds were assembled to observe; His Father’s name, too, they were dishonoring by their formalism and hypocrisy. It is this exalted mood of the boy Jesus which explains the scene that follows--the only one rescued from oblivion in this interval of growth and preparation. When the time came for the busy caravan to return to Nazareth, Jesus, acting, doubtless, from highest impulse, "tarried behind" (verse 43). In the large company His absence was not at first missed, but when, at the evening halting-place, it became known that He was not with them, His mother and Joseph returned in deep distress to Jerusalem. Three days elapsed before they found Him in the place where naturally they should have looked first--His Father’s house. There, in one of the halls or chambers where the rabbis were wont to teach, they discovered Him seated "in the midst," at the feet of the men of learning, hearing them discourse, asking questions, as pupils were permitted to do, and giving answers which awakened astonishment by their penetration and wisdom (