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46And it came to pass, that after three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors [teachers], both hearing them, and asking them questions. 47, And all that heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. 48And when they saw Him, they were amazed: and His mother said unto Him, Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us? behold, Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing. 49And He said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not [Did ye not know] that I must be about my Father’s business [ ἐí ôïῖò ôïῦ ÉÉáôñüò ìïõ ]? 50And they understood not the saying which He spake unto them.
51And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but His mother kept all these sayings in her heart. 52And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature [age], and in favour with God and man.
Luk_2:43. The child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem.—Luke neither tells us that Jesus remained behind at Jerusalem intentionally, nor that Joseph and Mary lost sight of Him through want of necessary care. A circumstance must here have been omitted; and we may safely suppose, that Joseph and Mary joined their elder fellow-travellers in the persuasion that Jesus, who knew of the time and place of departure, was among the younger ones. The more Mary was accustomed to trust to His obedience and wisdom, the less necessary would it be always to watch Him. An involuntary mistake, of whatever kind it might be, separated the child from the parents. Perhaps, too, they might have become uneasy on His account earlier in the day; but the multitude of the caravans at a time when, as Josephus tells us, Galilee contained more than four million inhabitants, would render an instantaneous search impracticable; and a day’s journey being generally not very long, inquiry was delayed till the end of the day. It must not, besides, be forgotten, that in the East even an ordinary child of twelve would be equal to one of fourteen or fifteen among us; and that they could not, therefore, be extremely uneasy, especially about such a child as He was.—See Tholuck’s apologetic treatment of this subject in his Glaubwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, p. 210, etc.
Luk_2:46. After three days.—If we understand, with de Wette and others, that these three days were spent in seeking for the child in Jerusalem, it is almost inexplicable that it should only so late have come into their thoughts to go to the temple. It seems more probable that we must allow one day for their departure, Luk_2:44; one for their return, Luk_2:45; and the third, Luk_2:46, for their search; and that they found Him in the sanctuary at the close of the latter. (See Grotius and Paulus in loc.)
In the temple.—Probably in one of the porches of the Court of the Women, where the schools of the Rabbis were held, and the law regularly expounded. The Evang. infant. Arab. Luke 50–53, gives a lengthy apocryphal account of the conversation of Jesus with the Jewish Rabbis in the temple.
Sitting in the midst of the teachers.—It has been often said, that it was the custom of the times for scholars to receive the instructions of the Rabbis standing, as a mark of reverence. This has been, however, well disproved by Vitringa (de Synagog. Vet. i. p. 167). We have to understand it in the same sense as St. Paul speaks of his sitting at the feet of Gamaliel (Act_22:3). De Wette insists, notwithstanding, that the child Jesus appears here in a consessus of discussing Rabbis, entering into the argument as a member of it would do. Surely he has not sufficiently considered the following words, ἀêïýùí êáὶ ἐðåñùôῶí , which plainly show, that the idea of receiving is here made far more prominent than that of communicating. Olshausen far more suitably remarks, that “a lecturing, demonstrating child would have been an anomaly, which the God of order would never have exhibited.” The astonishment of His hearers at the intelligence manifested in His answers, need not surprise us, if these answers were even as excellent as that which He gave to Mary’s somewhat hasty demand.
Luk_2:48. Thy father and I.—Not merely the only possible manner in which Mary could publicly speak to her son of Joseph, but also an indisputable proof of the wisdom with which she brought up the child; a wisdom, which taught her to say nothing yet to Him of the mystery of His birth, and which had faith enough to wait, till His own consciousness should be fully and clearly awakened to the fact of His being the Son of God. The more surprising, therefore, must His answer have seemed to His mother, as containing a hint, intelligible to her alone, that He already knew who His Father was.
Luk_2:49. How is it that ye sought Me?—The quiet repose of this answer, contrasted with Mary’s natural agitation, produces an impression quite peculiar. He is apparently astonished that He should have been sought, or even thought of, anywhere else, than in the only place which He felt to be properly His home.—Perhaps this was the moment in which His immediate intuition of His destination was aroused. Thus the magnet, if it could speak, would express its astonishment, if it were assigned another than a northward direction, or the sunflower, if it was supposed not to be always turned toward the sun. [Alford:—“This is no reproachful question. It is asked in all the simplicity and boldness of holy childhood.”—P. S.]
About My Father’s business.—The rendering of some, “in My Father’s house” unnecessarily narrows the fulness of the expression. He stays in the temple as such only, inasmuch as it is there that to ôὰ ôïῦ ðáôñüò are for the present concentrated, according to His view. Better: in the things or affairs of my Father, in that what belongs to His honor and glory. A beautiful exposition of this inexhaustible text may be found in Stier’s Words of the Lord Jesus, vol. I. [I must be, äåῖ .—It signifies a moral necessity which is identical with perfect freedom.—P. S.]
Luk_2:50. And they understood not the saying.—If Meyer and others are right, in concluding that the meaning of these words was totally incomprehensible to His parents, this inexplicable ignorance might perhaps be adduced, as evidence against the truth of the history of the Nativity and its miracles. We do not, however, see any reason why we should not attribute their astonishment to the fact, that he should, sponte sua, so plainly express what He had learned neither from them nor from the doctors Besides, twelve years of quiet oblivion had elapsed, between His birth and this moment; and even the faith of a Mary would not be always equally clear and strong.
Luk_2:51. And was subject unto them.—It seems almost as if Luke were trying to oppose the notion, that the child, whose faculties were developing in so heavenly a manner, had even for an instant spoken in an unchildlike manner to His mother and foster-father. If His heart drew Him to the temple, the voice of duty called Him back to Galilee; and, perfect even in childhood, He yielded implicit obedience to this voice. The blossom of His inner life, which had opened and spread abroad its first fragrance in the temple, was to continue expanding in the obscurity of Nazareth; and Mary was to wait eighteen years, keeping “all these sayings in her heart,” before anything else unprecedented should occur.
Luk_2:52. In wisdom and age.—Age (margin) would seem the preferable rendering of ἡëéêßá , for, though increase in age is as inevitable a consequence as increase of stature, yet the former expression is important to Luke, who, having spoken of His twelfth year, and being about to mention His thirtieth (Luk_3:23), characterizes, by this concluding formula, the whole of these eighteen years as a period of development.
2. Perhaps there are few passages in Luke’s history of the birth and childhood of Jesus, which bear such incontestable marks of truth and reality as this. A comparison with the apocryphal Gospels is even unnecessary, as the whole narrative breathes throughout a truth and simplicity, with which nothing else can be compared. What writer of a fiction would ever have imagined an occurrence, from which the miraculous is so entirely banished, in which no angel is introduced to assist in the discovery of the lost child, but his parents are represented as finding Him again in an ordinary manner, and one in which even an appearance of disobedience to Mary is cast upon Jesus! To be unable to imagine so precocious a development, is to place the Lord behind many children, of whom remarkable traits of early maturity are related. Nor should we forget here the remark of a Christian apologist, that “in Christianity, and in its sacred records, the motto of cold intellectual culture, ‘nil mirari,’ is less applicable than the principle of the most sublime of its predecessors: ôὸ èáõìÜæåéí ôῆò öéëïóïößáò ἀñ÷Þ .” Osiander.
[“Of the boyhood of Jesus, we know only one fact, recorded by Luke; but it is in perfect keeping with the peculiar charm of His childhood, and foreshadows, at the same time, the glory of His public life, as one uninterrupted service of His heavenly Father. When twelve years old, we find Him in the temple, in the midst of the Jewish doctors, not teaching and offending them, as in the apocryphal Gospels, by any immodesty or forwardness, but hearing and asking questions, thus actually learning from them, and yet filling them with astonishment at His understanding and answers. There is nothing premature, forced or unbecoming His age, and yet a degree of wisdom and an intensity of interest in religion, which rises far above a purely human youth. ‘He increased,’ we are told, ‘in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.’ He was subject to His parents, and practised all the virtues of an obedient son; and yet He filled them with a sacred awe as they saw Him absorbed in the things of His Father, and heard Him utter words, which they were unable to understand at the time, but which Mary treasured up in her heart as a holy secret, convinced that they must have some deep meaning, answering to the mystery of His supernatural conception and birth. Such an idea of a harmless and faultless heavenly childhood, of a growing, learning, and yet surprisingly wise boyhood, as it meets us in living reality at the portal of the Gospel history, never entered the imagination of a biographer, poet, or philosopher before. On the contrary, as has been justly observed by Dr. H. Bushnell (on the Character of Jesus, p. 19), ‘in all the higher ranges of character, the excellence portrayed is never the simple unfolding of a harmonious and perfect beauty contained in the germ of childhood, but is a character formed by a process of rectification, in which many follies are mended and distempers removed, in which confidence is checked by defeat, passion moderated by reason, smartness sobered by experience. Commonly a certain pleasure is taken in showing how the many wayward sallies of the boy are, at length, reduced by discipline to the character of wisdom, justice, and public heroism, so much admired. Besides, if any writer, of almost any age, will undertake to describe not merely a spotless, but a superhuman or celestial childhood, not having the reality before him, he must be somewhat more than human himself, if he do not pile together a mass of clumsy exaggerations, and draw and overdraw, till neither heaven nor earth can find any verisimilitude in the picture.’—This unnatural exaggeration, into which the mythical fancy of man, in its endeavor to produce a superhuman childhood and boyhood, will inevitably fall, is strikingly exhibited in the myth of Hercules, who, while yet a suckling in the cradle, squeezed two monster serpents to death with his tender hands, and still more in the accounts of the apocryphal Gospels, on the wonderful performances of the infant Saviour. These apocryphal Gospels are related to the canonical Gospels as the counterfeit to the genuine coin, or as a revolting caricature to the inimitable original; but, by the very contrast, they tend, negatively, to corroborate the truth of the evangelical history. The strange contrast has been frequently urged, especially in the Strauss controversy, and used as an argument against the mythical theory. While the evangelists expressly reserve the performance of miracles to the age of maturity and public life, and observe a significant silence concerning the parents of Jesus, the pseudo-evangelists fill the infancy and early years of the Saviour and His mother with the strangest prodigies, and make the active intercession of Mary very prominent throughout. According to their representation, even dumb idols, irrational beasts, and senseless trees, bow in adoration before the infant Jesus, on his journey to Egypt; and after His return, when yet a boy of five or seven years, He changes balls of clay into flying birds, for the idle amusement of His playmates; strikes terror round about Him, dries up a stream of water by a mere word, transforms His companions into goats, raises the dead to life, and performs all sorts of miraculous cures, through a magical influence which proceeds from the very water in which he was washed, the towels which he used, and the bed on which he slept. Here we have the falsehood and absurdity of unnatural fiction, while the New Testament presents to us the truth and beauty of a supernatural, yet most real history, which shines out only in brighter colors by the contrast of the mythical shadows.” (From Schaff’s Person of Christ, the Miracle of History. Boston, 1865, p. 28 ff.)—P. S.]
3. The first words which drop from the lips of the Word made flesh, are especially important in a doctrinal point of view. They are the childlike and naïve expression of direct and infallible self-consciousness, now gradually developing into higher knowledge. This is the moment in which the long-closed and slowly-growing bud first breaks through its outer covering. The child Jesus excites astonishment, but shows none, except at the fact that they knew not where to find Him. But the deep mysteries of His nature are still covered with a garment of the purest innocence. The temple is to Him, in the fullest sense, the dwelling-place of His Father, of whom He will soon declare, that “God is a Spirit.” His ear, desirous of instruction, is seeking answers to important and vital questions from those Rabbis, against whose perversions of Scripture He will soon denounce a terrible woe. His foot, which an irresistible yet inexplicable attraction draws toward the temple, soon submissively follows the track which the will of His parents points out. We feel that the child Jesus must have acted thus, and could not have acted otherwise.
4. But this passage of Christ’s early history is of extreme importance for other reasons. It is important in its influence on the present. Hitherto pious Jews and lowly shepherds, waiting for the salvation of Israel, have borne testimony to the infant Messiah: He now bears testimony to Himself; and the whole occurrence, which would surely be impressed on the mind of certain doctors of Jerusalem, was a fresh hint to the whole Jewish nation, to give a becoming reception to Him who would shortly appear among them. It is also important in its relation to the past. A seal is now set to the word of the angel, “He shall be called the Son of the Highest” (Luk_1:32). The consciousness of Jesus is aroused to this unique relationship, and a ray now gilds the obscurity of Nazareth, which must recall to Mary’s mind the miracles of Bethlehem, and direct her hopes to a future full of blessings. Finally, it is important as a sign of the future: if ever the saying of a child was prophetic, it was the saying of Jesus in the temple. It is the programme, the key-note, of the whole future earthly and heavenly life of our Lord. His consciousness of divinity, His obedience, His self-denial, His speech, as never man spake, all are here present in nuce, soon to be manifested in luce. Luk_2:49 is the germ of Joh_4:34; Joh_8:29; Joh_9:4; and even His farewell to life, Joh_17:4, naturally refers to this beginning.
5. The outer life of Jesus, during the next eighteen years, is covered with a veil of obscurity, which not even the writers of the apocryphal Gospels have ventured to lift. His days seem to have been quietly passed in the privacy of the domestic circle. Even Nathanael, who lived at Cana, only three leagues off from Nazareth, Joh_1:46-47, had never yet heard anything of the son of Joseph. The death of His foster-father probably happened during this interval. Miracles would have been without purpose in the retirement of home; and Joh_2:3 cannot be understood to denote that any had yet been performed by him. Mar_6:3 (according to the true reading, ὁôÝêôùí ) shows decidedly that He had worked at His father’s trade; a fact supported also by tradition. See Justinus M., Dialog. cum Tryph. Luke 88. Compare the account of a remarkable statement of Julian the Apostate, in Theodoret, H. E. iii. 23, and Sozomen, vi. 2. The family of Nazareth seems not to have lived in a state of extreme poverty, but still less in the possession of any temporal superfluity.
6. The increase of Jesus in wisdom during this period was,—(1) real. Jesus had to learn from the words of others what as yet He knew not; and that was entirely unknown to Him as a child, which He had a glimpse of as a boy, conjectured as a youth, and first clearly perceived as a man.—(2) Unchecked. In attributing to the Lord Jesus the relative imperfection of childhood, we must carefully avoid imputing to Him the failings of childhood. His life showed no trace of childish faults, to be hereafter conquered. The words of John, Mat_3:14, show, on the contrary, what impression was made by His moral purity when thirty years of age; and the voice from heaven, Luk_2:17, sets the seal of the divine approval on the now completed development of the Son of Man, a seal which the Holy One of Israel would only have affixed to absolute perfection.—(3) It was effected by means. We may exclude from the means whereby this development was effected, (a) a learned education by Jewish doctors (Joh_7:15); (b) an Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, or Alexandrian training, which was formerly thought of; (c) an instruction in the principles of the various Jewish sects, viz., the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. On the other hand, we may ascribe more or less influence to—(a) His training by the pious Mary, and the godly Joseph, in the ways of a quiet domestic life; (b) to the natural beauties of the neighborhood of Nazareth; (c) to the Scriptures of the Old Testament, which He undoubtedly read, understood, and delighted in, more than any other child; (d) to the annual journeys to Jerusalem, which must certainly have opened His eyes to the corruption of His nation and its leaders; and (e) above all to prayerful communion with His heavenly Father. But, allowing for all these, we are forced to recur (f) to that essential singularity in the personality of the Lord, whereby, with such comparatively weak and disproportioned means, he could become actu, what He had been from His birth potentiâ.—Lastly, [4] the development of the God-Man was normal, inasmuch as it holds up to His people an example of what they must more and more approach unto, in fellowship with Himself, growing by the faithful use of every means of grace, from “little children” to “young men,” and from “young men” to “fathers” in Christ: 2Co_3:18; 2Pe_3:18.—On the whole subject of the human development of the Son of Man, compare Athanasius, Orat. III. contra Arian, Luke 51 (tom. i., p. 475), and Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 43 in laud. Basilii, Luke 38. See also the excellent remarks of Ullmann, Sinlessness of Jesus (p. 104 f. of the 5th German edition), and those of Martensen in his Dogmatik ii., p. 315. The latter well observes, that “we see in this narrative, not only that the consciousness of His peculiar relation to His Father is dawning within Him; but that in His sitting in the midst of the teachers of His nation, not merely listening, but astonishing them by His questions and answers, we may also perceive the earliest revelation of His productive relation to those around Him (discendo docuit).”
[P. Schaff (The Person of Christ, etc., 1865, p. 34 ff.): “Jesus grew up among a people seldom and only contemptuously named by the ancient classics, and subjected at the time to the yoke of a foreign oppressor; in a remote and conquered province of the Roman empire; in the darkest district of Palestine; in a little country-town of proverbial insignificance; in poverty and manual labor; in the obscurity of a carpenter’s shop; far away from universities, academies, libraries, and literary or polished society; without any help, as far as we know, except the parental care, the daily wonders of nature, the Old Testament Scriptures, the weekly Sabbath services of the synagogue at Nazareth (Luk_4:16), the annual festivals in the temple of Jerusalem (Luk_2:42), and the secret intercourse of His soul with God, His heavenly Father. These are, indeed, the great educators of the mind and heart; the book of nature and the book of revelation are filled with richer and more important lessons, than all the works of human art and learning. But they were accessible alike to every Jew, and gave no advantage to Jesus over His humblest neighbor. Hence the question of Nathaniel, “What good can come out of Nazareth?” Hence the natural surprise of the Jews, who knew all His human relations and antecedents. “How knoweth this man letters?” they asked, when they heard Jesus teach, “having never learned?” (Joh_7:15.) And on another occasion, when He taught in the synagogue, “Whence has this man this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not His mother Mary and His brethren (brothers) James and Joses and Simon and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Whence, then, hath this man all these things?” These questions are unavoidable and unanswerable, if Christ be regarded as a mere man. For each effect presupposes a corresponding cause. .. Jesus can be ranked neither with the school-trained nor with the self-trained or self-made men, if by the latter we understand, as we must, those who without the regular aid of living teachers, yet with the same educational means, such as books, the observation of men and things, and the intense application of their mental faculties, attained to vigor of intellect and wealth of scholarship, like Shakspeare, Jacob Boehm, Benjamin Franklin, and others. All the attempts to bring Him into contact with Egyptian wisdom, or the Essenic Theosophy, or other sources of learning, are without a shadow of proof, and explain nothing after all. He never quotes from books except the Old Testament, He never refers to secular history, poetry, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, foreign languages, natural sciences, or any of those branches of knowledge which make up human learning and literature. He confined himself strictly to religion. But from that centre He shed light over the whole world of man and nature. In this department, unlike all other great men, even the prophets and the apostles, He was absolutely original and independent. He taught the world as one who had learned nothing from it and was under no obligation to it. He speaks from divine intuition as one who not only knows the truth, but who is the truth, and with an authority, which commands absolute submission, or provokes rebellion, but can never be passed by with contempt or indifference. His character and life were originated and sustained in spite of circumstances with which no earthly force could have contended, and therefore must have had their real foundation in a force which was preternatural and divine.”—P. S.]
7. We may be thankful that St. Luke, compared with the other Evangelists, has communicated to us so much of the early history of our Lord; nor less so, that he has told us so little; as this very reticence furnishes a proof of his fides historica, checks vain curiosity, and shows us how infinitely more important for our faith is the history of His ministry, passion, death, and glorification, than that of His youth and childhood.
Starke:—The care parents should have for their children.—To public worship must be added domestic worship.—Quesnel:—Jesus is more often lost in time of prosperity than in times of misfortune and persecution.—Hedinger:—We often, from erroneous judgment, seek Christ among our kinsfolk and acquaintance, where He
is not to be found.—We often have to seek long for Jesus; and this is our best employment, even if we have to spend more than one spiritual day’s journey upon it.—Sorrow for the loss of Jesus, a reasonable sorrow.—He who would be a teacher of others, must first be a learner.—Cramer:—Christ has hallowed instruction by question and answer.—The more spiritual gifts any one has received, the more careful will he be to avoid boasting.—Nova Bibl. Tub.:—Jesus more learned than His teachers (Isa_50:4): let us hear Him.—Parents transgress when they reprove and punish their children unseasonably or unreasonably, Pro_20:1-6; Pro_22:6.—Majus:—Children may instruct their parents, if they do it respectfully and modestly, 1Sa_19:4.—We must not despise what we do not understand.—Osiander:—Christ has, by His obedience, made satisfaction for the disobedience of children; while, by His example, He teaches children to obey their parents.—Faith keeps in her heart even what she does not understand.—There is little hope of children who increase in age and stature only, and decrease in wisdom and favor.
Heubner:—The care of man is not sufficient for children, if God does not add to it the care of His angels.—Even good children may innocently cause grief.—As Jesus grew and ripened in retirement, so the ministers of the gospel often have long to wait before God calls them into full work.—Jesus commanding respect even as a boy.—The family of Jesus a model for Christian families.—The charms of the history of Jesus for the young.
Stier:—The holy child Jesus and our children (a continuous contrast).—Arndt:—1. The tokens; 2. the excitements; 3. the fruits of early piety, visible in the holy child Jesus.—The early history of Jesus: 1. Jesus in Nazareth; 2. Jesus of Nazareth.—A des Amorie v. d. Hoeven (preacher in Utrecht, died 1849): 1. Behold the child Jesus! 2. Behold in the child the man Jesus! 3. Become children in Christ, that you may become men!—Gerdessen:—The appearance of Christ in the sanctuary: Ought He not to be, 1. about His Father’s business; 2. in the midst of the teachers; 3. according to the usage of the feast; 4. sought for sorrowing; and 5. manifesting a childlike disposition?—M. G. Albrecht (died 1835): The child Jesus is often lost in our days, after a spiritual manner.—Gaupp:—The Mediator between God and man discernible in Jesus, even in His twelfth year: 1. In the holy privacy of His life in God; 2. in the consciousness of His relation to the Father; 3. in the unintermitted occupation of His spirit with the work which the Father had given Him to do.—Rautenberg:—Our children our judges: 1. What this means; 2. how this happens; 3. to what this leads.—Finally, an excellent sermon by Adolphe Monod (died 1856): Jésus enfant, modèle des enfants, Paris, 1857.
Footnotes:
Luk_2:43.—It is more probable that the original reading ïἱ ãïíåῖò áὐôïῦ , His parents, which is sustained by Codd. Sinait., Vatic., Vulg. (parentes ejus), etc., recommended by Griesbach, and adopted by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Alford, Tregelles (also by van Oosterzee in his Version), was changed for dogmatic reasons into the text. rec.: Ἰùóὴö êáὶ ἡ ìÞôçñ áὐôïῦ , than vice versa. Comp. Crit. Note 1 on Luk_2:33. Meyer, however, defends the lect. rec., and regards ïἱ ãïíåῖò áὐôïῦ as an addition from Luk_2:41.
Luk_2:45.— Áὐôüí , after åὑñüíôåò is wanting in the best authorities, and a superfluous insertion a seriore manu.
Luk_2:49.—Literally: in the things of My Father; in rebus Patris Mei; in dem, was Meines Vaters ist. Comp. 1Ti_4:15, ἐí ôïýôïéò ἴóèé . So Maldonatus, Wolf, Valckenaer, Rosenmüller, de Wette, Ewald, van Oosterzee, Alford (who, however, strangely translates: among My Father’s matters), and all the older English Versions. But the fathers and the majority of modern commentators, including Meyer, also the revised N. T. of the Am. B. U., give the phrase a local reference: in My Father’s house, i.e., in the temple. This is grammatically equally correct, but it improperly limits and weakens the rich meaning, since Christ could only occasionally be in the temple. The preposition ἐí denotes the life-element in which Christ moved during His whole life, whether in the temple or out of it. See also the author’s Exeg. Note, p. 49, in which I entirely concur.
Luk_2:52.—The primary meaning of ἡëéêßá (from ἧëéî , of age, in the prime of life) is age, the flower or prime of life, manhood, and is so correctly understood here by the Vulgate (ætate), Erasmus, Luther, Wiclif, Tyndale, Cranmer, the Rheims N. T., Kuinœl, de Wette, Alford, Whiting, van Oosterzee, and many others, comp. Joh_9:21; Joh_9:23; Heb_11:11; also Luk_12:25 and Mat_6:27 (see Lange’s note, vol. i. p. 134). The Genevan and the Authorized E. V., Beza, Grotius, Bengel, Ewald, Meyer, Robinson (Diction.), the revised N. T. of the Am. B. U., etc., translate: stature, growth, as in Luk_19:3 ( ôῇ ἡëéêßá ìéêñüò ). But the only reason urged by Meyer against the former version, applies rather to the latter; for growth in age is more comprehensive than growth in stature. The meaning of the passage is that Jesus grew in wisdom as well as in age.—P. S.]
[At the time of David the whole population of Palestine furnished one million three hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms (2Sa_24:9), which would give us only a total population of nearly five millions. But at the time of Christ, Galilee, owing to the great fertility of its soil, was very densely populated, and Josephus states that the smallest of its four hundred and four towns and villages, numbered over fifteen thousand inhabitants (De bello Judges 1.i. c. 3, § 2; Vit. 25). As to the city of Jerusalem, the ordinary number of inhabitants, according to Hecatæus, was one hundred and twenty thousand; and at the time of the passover, the population, according to Josephus, De bello Jud. iv. 9, 3, exceeded the number of two million seven hundred thousand male individuals, including, of course, all foreigners from Syria, Egypt, etc.; the number of paschal lambs slaughtered amounting once to one hundred and thirty-six thousand five hundred. In such a crowd it was easy to be lost. Perhaps Mary’s homeward-bound steps were quickened “by motherly anxiety for other and younger children left behind in Nazareth.”—P. S.]
[Renan, in the second chapter of his Vie de Jésus, gives, from personal observation, the following graphic description of the beauty of nature around Nazareth: “Nazareth was a little town, situated in a fold of land broadly open at the summit of the group of mountains which closes on the north the plain of Esdralon. The population is now from three to four thousand, and it cannot have varied very much. … The environs are charming, and no place in the world was so well adapted to dreams of absolute happiness. Even in our days, Nazareth is a delightful sojourn, the only place perhaps in Palestine where the soul feels a little relieved of the burden which weighs upon it in the midst of this unequalled desolation. The people are friendly and good-natured; the gardens are fresh and green. … The beauty of the women who gather there at night, this beauty which was already remarked in the sixth century, and in which was seen the gift of the Virgin Mary (by Antonius Martyr, Itiner. § 5), has been surprisingly well preserved. It is the Syrian type in all its languishing grace.”—P. S.]