CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
It has been remarked as an odd thing by some readers that the
Gospels tell us so little of the childhood of Jesus. It must be
remembered, however, that they are not really biographies, even of
the ancient order--still less of that modern kind, in which the main
concern is a tracing of the psychological development of the man.
Plutarch, the prince of ancient biographers, put fact and eulogy
together, cited characteristic sayings or doings of his hero, quoted
contemporary judgements, and wove the whole into a charming
narrative, good to read, pleasant to remember, perhaps not without
use as a lesson in conventional morality; but with little real
historical criticism in it, and as little, or less, attempt at any
effective reconstruction of a character. His biography of Pericles
illustrates his method and his defects.
The writers of the Gospels did not altogether propose biography as
their object either in the ancient or the modern style. They left
out--perhaps because it did not survive--much about the life of
Jesus that we should like to know. The treatment of Mark by Matthew
shows a certain matter-of-fact habit, which explains the obvious
want of interest in aspects of the life and mind of Jesus that would
to a modern be fascinating. They are dealing with the earthly life
of the Son of God--and they deal with it with a faithfulness to
tradition and reminiscence, which is, when we really consider it,
quite surprising. But it is the heavenward side of the Master that
mattered to them most, and it is perhaps not a mere random guess
that they were not in any case so aware of the interest of childhood
and of children as Jesus was. Matthew and Luke record the miraculous
birth, and each adds a story, that has never failed to fascinate
men, of the Magi or the Shepherds who came to the manger cradle.
Luke gives one episode of Jesus' childhood. That is all.
The writers of the Apocryphal Gospels did their best to fill the gap
by inventing or developing stories, pretty, silly, or repellent,
which only show how little they understood the original Gospels or
the character of Jesus.
But when we turn to the parables of Jesus, and ask ourselves how
they came to be what they are, by what process of mind he framed
them, and where he found the experience from which one and another
of them spring, it is at once clear that a number of them are
stories of domestic life, and the question suggests itself, Why
should he have gone afield for what he found at home? If we know
that he grew up in the ordinary circle of a home, and then find him
drawing familiar illustrations from the common scenes of home, the
inference is easy that he is going back to the remembered daily
round of his own boyhood.
In stray hints the Gospels give us a little of the framework of that
boyhood in Nazareth. The elder Joseph early disappears from the
story, and we find a reference to four brothers and several sisters.
"Is not this the carpenter?" people at Nazareth asked, "the son of
Mary, the brother of James and Joseph, and of Judah and Simon? and
are not his sisters here with us?" (Mark 6:3); Matthew adds a word
that may or may not be significant "his sisters are they not all
with us?" (Matt. 13:56). In ancient times a particular view of the
Incarnation, linked with other contemporary views of celibacy and
the baseness of matter, led men to discover or invent the
possibility that these brothers and sisters were either the children
of Joseph by a former wife, or the cousins of Jesus on his mother's
side.[7] That cousins in some parts of the world actually are
confused in common speech with brothers may be admitted; but to the
ordinary Greek reader "brothers" meant brothers, and "cousins"
something different. No one, not starting with the theories of St.
Jerome, let us say, on marriage and matter and the decencies of the
Incarnation, would ever dream from the Greek narrative of the
episode of the critical neighbours at Nazareth, who will not accept
Jesus as a prophet because they know his family--a delightfully
natural and absurd reason, with history written plain on the face of
it--that Jesus had no brothers, only cousins or half-brothers at
best. When History gives us brothers, and Dogma says they must be
cousins--in any other case the decision of the historian would be
clear, and so it is here.
We have then a household--a widow with five sons and at least two,
or very likely more, daughters. Jesus is admittedly her eldest son,
and is bred to be a carpenter; and a carpenter he undoubtedly was up
to, we are told, about thirty years of age (Luke 3:23). The dates of
his birth and death are not quite precisely determined, and people
have fancied he may have been rather older at the beginning of his
ministry. For our purposes it is not of much importance. The more
relevant question for us is: How came he to wait till he was at
least about thirty years old before he began to teach in public? One
suggested answer finds the impulse, or starting-point, of his
ministry in the appearance of John the Baptist. It is a simpler
inference from such data as we have that the claims of a widowed
mother with six or seven younger children, a poor woman with a
carpenter's little brood to bring up, may have had something to do
with his delay. In any case, the parables give us pictures of the
undeniable activities of the household.
A group of parables and other allusions illustrate the life of woman
as Jesus saw it in his mother's house. He pictures two women
grinding together at the mill (Luke 17:35), and then the heating of
the oven (Matt. 6:30)--the mud oven, not unlike the "field ovens"
used for a while by the English army in France in 1915, and heated
by the burning of wood inside it, kindled with "the grass of the
field." Meanwhile the leaven is at work in the meal where the woman
hid it (Matt. 13:33), and her son sits by and watches the heaving,
panting mass--the bubbles rising and bursting, the fall of the
level, and the rising of other bubbles to burst in their turn--all
bubbles. Later on, the picture came back to him--it was like the
Kingdom of God--"all bubbles!" said the disappointed, but he saw
more clearly. The bubbles are broken by the force of the active life
at work beneath--life, not death, is the story. The Kingdom of God
is life; the leaven is of more account than any number of bubbles.
And we may link all these parables from bread--making with what he
says of the little boy asking for bread (Matt. 7:9)--the mother
fired the oven and set the leaven in the meal long before the child
was hungry; she looked ahead and the bread was ready. Is not this
written also in the teaching of Jesus--"your heavenly Father knoweth
that ye have need of all these things" (Matt. 6:32)? God, he holds,
is as little taken aback by his children's needs as Mary was by
hers, and the little boys did not did not confine their demands to
bread--they wanted eggs and fish as well (Matt. 7:10; Luke 11:11,
12; and cf. John 6:9)--there was no end to their healthy appetites.
It is significant that he mentions the price of the cheapest flesh
food used by peasants (Luke 12:6). They also wanted clothes, and
wore them as hard as boys do. The time would come when new clothes
were needed; but why could not the old ones be patched, and passed
down yet another stage? And his mother would smile--and perhaps she
asked him to try for himself to see why; and he learnt by experiment
that old clothes cannot be patched beyond a certain point, and later
on he remembered the fact, and quoted it with telling effect (Mark
2:21). He pictures little houses (Luke 11:5-7) and how they are
swept (Luke 11:25)--especially when a coin has rolled away, into a
dusty corner or under something (Luke 15:8); and candles, and
bushels (Matt. 5:15), and beds, and moth, and rust (Matt. 6:19) and
all sorts of things that make the common round of life, come into
his talk, as naturally as they did into his life.
The carpenter's shop, we may suppose, was close to the house--a shop
where men might count on good work and honest work; and what
memories must have gathered round it! Is it fanciful to suggest that
what the churches have always been saying, about "Coming to Jesus,"
began to be said in a natural and spontaneous way in that shop?
Those little brothers and sisters did not always agree, and tempers
would now and then grow very warm among them (cf. Luke 7:39). And
then the big brother came and fetched them away from the little
house to the shop, and set one of them to pick up nails, and the
other to sweep up shavings--to help the carpenter. They helped him.
Like small boys, when they help, they got in his road at every turn.
But somehow they slipped back to a jolly frame of mind. The big
brother told them stories, and they came back different people. I
can picture a day when there was a woman in the little house, weary
and heavy-laden, and the door opened, and a cheery, pleasant face
looked in, and said, "Won't you come and talk to me?" And she came
and talked with him and life became a different thing for her. Are
these pictures fanciful--mere imagination? Are we to think that all
the tenderness of Jesus came to him by a miracle when he was thirty
years of age? Must we not think it was all growing up in that house
and in that shop? Or did he never tell a story--he who tells them so
charmingly--till he wanted parables? We have to note, at the same
time, some elements of criticism of the elder brother in the family
attitude, some defect of sympathy and failure to understand him,
even if kindness prompted their action in later days (Mark 3:21,
31).
Nazareth lies in a basin among hills, from the rim of which can be
seen to the southward the historic plain of Esdraelon, and eastward
the Jordan valley and the hills of Gilead, and westward the
Mediterranean. On great roads, north and south of the town's girdle
of hills, passed to and fro the many-coloured traffic between Egypt
and Mesopotamia and the Orient. Traders, pilgrims, Herods--"the
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" (Matt. 6:8)--all within
reach, and travelling no faster as a rule than the camel cared to
go--they formed a panorama of life for a thoughtful and imaginative
boy. More than one allusion to king's clothes comes in his recorded
teaching (Matt. 6:29, 11:8), and it was here that he saw them--and
noticed them and remembered. One is struck with the amount of that
unconscious assimilation of experience which we find in his words,
and which is in itself an index to his nature. We are not expressly
told that he sought the sights that the road afforded; but it would
be hard to believe that a bright, quick boy, with genius in him,
with poetry in him, with feeling for the real and for life, never
went down on to that road, never walked alongside of the caravans
and took note of the strange people "from the east and from the
west, from the north and from the south" (Luke 13:29)--Nubians,
Egyptians, Romans, Gauls, Britons, and Orientals.[8] In the one
anecdote that survives of his boyhood, we find men "astonished at
his understanding" (Luke 2:47), his gift for putting questions, and
his comments on the answers; and all life through he had a genius
for friendship.
When we consider how Jesus handles Nature and her wilder children in
his parables, another point attracts attention. Men vary a great
deal in this. To take two of the Old Testament prophets, we find a
marked difference here between Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Ezekiel "puts
forth a riddle and speaks a parable" about an eagle--a frankly
heraldic eagle, that plants a tree-top in a city of merchants (Ezek.
17:2-5). Jeremiah is obviously country-bred. He might have been
surprised, if he had been told how often he illustrates his thought
from bird and beast and country life--and always with a certain
life-like precision and a perfectly clear sympathy.
In the Gospels we find again the same faithfulness to living nature,
another country-bred boy with the same love for bird and beast and
the wild, open countryside.
The Earth
And common face of Nature spake to me
Rememberable things.[9]
Nature is enough for Jesus as for Jeremiah; she needs no
remodelling, no heraldic paints--"long pinions of divers
colours"--she will do as she is; she is just splendid and lovable
and true as God made her; and she slides into his mind whenever he
is deeply moved. Think of all the parables he draws from Nature--the
similes, metaphors, and illustrations; every one of them will bear
examination, and means more the nearer we look into it, and the
better we know the living thing behind. The eagle, in Jesus'
sentence, plants no trees, but it has the living bird's instinct for
carrion; the ancient Greek historian and Lord Roberts at Delhi in
1858 remarked that "wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles
be gathered together" (Luke 17:37). In India that year, it was said,
they gathered from all over to Delhi. What brought them? Instinct,
we say; and we find Jesus, in that rather dark sentence, suggesting
somehow that there is an instinct which knows "where." And sheep and
cows and asses, and hens and sparrows, and red sunsets, fill men's
reminiscences of his talk; and we may safely conclude that, when
allusions are so many in fragments of conversation preserved as
these are, the man's speech and mind were attuned to the love of
bird and beast.
Is there another teacher of those times who is at all so sure that
God loves bird and flower? The Greek poet Meleager of Gadara--not so
very far removed from Jesus in space of time--has a good deal to say
about flowers, but not at all in the same sense as Jesus, not with
any feeling such as his for the immortal hand and eye that planned
their symmetry, and their colours and sweetness. St. Paul is
conspicuously a man of the town--"a citizen of no mean city" (Acts
21:39), and he dismisses the animals abruptly (1 Cor. 9:9); he has
hardly an allusion to the familiar and homely aspects of Nature, so
frequent and so pleasant in the speech of Jesus. He finds Nature, if
not quite "red in tooth and claw", yet groaning together, subject to
vanity, in bondage to corruption, travailing in pain, looking
forward in a sort of desperate hope to a freedom not yet realized
(Rom. 8:19-24). Nature is far less tragic for Jesus, far
happier--perhaps because he knew nature on closer terms of intimacy;
Nature, as he portrays things, is in nearer touch with the Heavenly
Father than we should guess from Paul[10], and there is no hint in
his recorded words that he held the ground to be under a curse. If
we are to use abstract terms and philosophize his thought a little,
we may agree that the four facts Jesus notes in Nature are its
mystery, its regularity, its impartiality, and its peacefulness[11].
What he finds in Nature is not unlike what Wordsworth also finds--
A Power
That is the visible quality and shape
And image of right reason; that matures
Her processes by steadfast laws; gives birth
To no impatient or fallacious hopes,
No heat of passion or excessive zeal,
No vain conceits; provokes to no quick turns
Of self-applauding intellect; but trains
To meekness, and exalts by humble faith;
Holds up before the mind intoxicate
With present objects, and the busy dance
Of things that pass away, a temperate show
Of objects that endure?[12]
This is not a passage that one could imagine the historical Jesus
speaking, or, still less, writing; but the essential ideas chime in
with his observation and his attitude "for the earth bringeth forth
fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full
corn in the ear" (Mark 4:28). Man can count safely on earth's
co-operation. From it all, and in it all, Jesus read deep into God's
mind and methods.
It has often been remarked how apt Jesus was to go away to pray
alone in the desert or on the hillside, in the night or the early
dawn--probably no new habit induced by the crowded days of his
ministry, but an old way of his from youth. The full house, perhaps,
would prompt it, apart from what he found in the open. St.
Augustine, in a very appealing confession, tells us how his prayers
may be disturbed if he catch sight of a lizard snapping up flies on
the wall of his room (Conf., 10:35, 57). The bird flying to her
nest, the fox creeping to his hole (Luke 9:58)--did these break into
the prayers of Jesus--and with what effect? Was it in such hours
that he learnt his deepest lessons from the birds and the lilies of
the field? Why not? As he sat out in the wild under the open sky,
did the stars never speak to him, as to Hebrew psalmist and Roman
Virgil?
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers.
The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visitest him?
(Psalm 8:3-4.)
It is a question men have to meet and face; and if we can trust
Matthew's statement, an utterance of his in later years called out
by the sneer of a Pharisee, shows how he had made the old poet's
answer his own:--
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise
(Matt. 21:16).
If this were a solitary utterance of his thought upon Nature, it
might be ranked with one or two pointed citations he made of the
letter of the Old Testament; but it is safe, perhaps, to take it as
one of many indications of his communion with God in Nature. The
wind blowing in the night where it listed--must we authenticate
every verse of the Fourth Gospel before we believe that he listened
to it also and caught something? At any rate, in later years, when
his friends are over-driven and weary, quiet and open-air in a
desert place are what he prescribes for them and wishes to share
with them--surely a hint of old experience (Mark 6:31).
But now let us turn back to Nazareth, for, as the Gospel reminds us,
there he grew up. "The city teaches the man," said the old Greek
poet Simonides; and it does, as we see, and more than we sometimes
realize. Jesus grew up in an Oriental town, in the middle of its
life--a town with poor houses, bad smells, and worse stories,
tragedies of widow and prodigal son, of unjust judge and grasping
publican--yes, and comedies too. We know at once from general
knowledge of Jewish life and custom, and from the recorded fact that
he read the Scriptures, that he went to school; and we could guess,
fairly safely, that he played with his school-fellows, even if he
had not told us what the games were at which they played:--
At weddings and at funerals,
As if his life's vocation
Were endless imitation.
Sometimes the children were sulky and would not play (Luke 7:32).
How strange, and how delightful, that the great Gospel, full of
God's word for mankind, should have a little corner in it for such
reminiscences of children's games! We cannot suppose that he had
access to many books, but he knew the Old Testament, well and
familiarly--better and more aptly than some people expected. Traces
of other books have been found in his teaching, not many and some of
them doubtful. Generally one would conclude that, apart from the Old
Testament, his education was not very bookish--he found it in home
and shop, in the desert, on the road, and in the market-place.
It is interesting to gather from the Gospel what Jesus says of the
talk of men, and it is surprising to find how much it is, till we
realize how very much in ancient times the city was the education,
and the market-place the school, where some of the most abiding
lessons were learnt. Is it not so still in the East? Here was a boy,
however, who watched men and their words more closely than they
guessed, on whose ears words fell, not as old coinages, but as new
minting, with the marks of thought still rough and bright on
them--indexes to the speaker.
Proverbs of the market every people has of its own. "It is nought,
it is nought, saith the buyer, but, after he is gone his way, then
he boasteth." And the seller has all the variants of caveat emptor
ready to retort. In antiquity, and in the East to-day, apart from
machine-made things, we find the same uncertainty in most
transactions as to the value of the article, the same eagerness of
both seller and buyer to get at the supposed special knowledge of
the other, and the same preliminary skirmish of proposal, protest,
offer, refusal, and oath. Jesus stands by the stall, watching some
small sale with the bright, earnest eyes which we find so often in
the Gospels. The buyer swears "on his head" that he will not give
more than so much; then, "by the altar" he won't get the thing. "By
the earth" it isn't worth it; "by the heaven" the seller gave that
for it. So the battle rages, and at last the bargain is struck. The
buyer raises his price; the seller takes less than he gave for the
thing; neither has believed the other, but each, as the keen eyes of
the onlooker see, feels he has over-reached the other. Heaven has
been invoked--and what is Heaven? As the words fell on the
listener's ears, he saw the throne of God, and on it One before
whose face Heaven itself and earth will flee away--and be brought
back again for judgement. And by Heaven, and by Him who sits on the
Throne, men will swear falsely for an "anna" or two. How can they?
It is because "nothings grow something"; the words make a mist about
the thing. In later days Jesus told his followers to swear not at
all--to stick to Yes and No.
Then a leader in the religious world passes, and the loiterers have
a new interest for the moment. "Rabbi, Rabbi," they say, and the
great man moves onward, obviously pleased with the greeting in the
marketplace (Matt. 23:7). As soon as he is out of hearing, it is no
longer "Rabbi" he is called; talk turns to another tune. How little
the fine word meant! How lightly the title was given! Worse still,
the title will stand between a man and the facts of life. Some will
use it to deceive him; others, impressed by it, are silent in his
presence; one way and another, the facts are kept from him. Seeing,
he sees not, and he comes to live in an unreal world. How many men
to-day will say what they really think before a man in clerical
dress, or a dignitary however trivial? "Be not ye called 'Rabbi,'"
was the counsel Jesus gave to his followers, and he would accept
neither "Rabbi," nor "Good Master," nor any other title till he saw
how much it meant. "Master!" they said, "we know that thou art true,
and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any
man; for thou regardest not the person of men" (Matt. 22:16). But as
the evangelist continues, Jesus "perceived their wickedness"--he had
heard such things before and was not trapped. "Hosanna in the
highest!" (Mark 11:10)--strange to think of the quiet figure, riding
in the midst of the excited crowd, open-eyed and undeceived in his
hour of "triumph"--as little perturbed, too, when his name is cast
out as evil. How little men's praise and their blame matter, when
your eyes are fixed on God--when you have Him and His facts to be
your inspiration! On the other hand, when you have not contact with
God, how much men's talk counts, and how easy it is to lose all
sense of fact!
By and by the talk veers round to what Pilate had done one to the
Galileans--if the dates fit, or if for the moment we can make them
fit, or anticipate once for all, and be done with the bazaar talk
which never stopped. Pilate had killed the Galileans when they went
up to Jerusalem--yes! mingled their own blood, you might say, with
the blood of their sacrifices (Luke 13:1). What would he do next?
There was no telling. What was needed--some time--it was bound to
come--and the voice sank--a Theudas, or a Judas again (Acts 5:36,
37)--it would not be surprising. ... There were no newspapers, no
approved and reliable sources of news such as we boast to have from
our governments and millionaires; all was rumour, bazaar talk--"Lo!
here!" and "Lo! there!" (Mark 13:21). "Prohibiti sermones ideoque
plures", said Tacitus of Rome--rumours were forbidden, so there were
more of them. The Messiah _must_ come some time, said one man who
might be a friend of the Zealots. In any case, reflected another,
those Galileans had probably angered Heaven and got their deserts;
ill luck like that could hardly come by accident; think of the tower
that fell at Siloam--anybody could see there was a judgement in it.
Might it not be said that God had discredited John the Baptist, now
his head was taken off? So men speculated (cf. John 9:2). Jesus saw
through all this, and was radiantly clear about it.
So they chattered, and he heard. Then the talk took another turn,
and tales were told--bad eyes flashed and lips smacked, as one
story-teller eclipsed the other in the familiar vein. The Arabian
Nights are tales of the crowd, it is said, rather than literature in
their origin, and will give clues enough to what might be told.
Jesus heard, and he saw what it meant; and afterwards he told his
friends: "From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil
thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders ... foolishness; all
these evil things come from within, and defile the man" (Mark
7:21-23). The evil thought takes shape to find utterance, and gains
thereby a new vitality, a new power for evil, and may haunt both
speaker and listener for ever with its defiling memory.
By and by he intervened and spoke himself. Every one was shocked,
and said, "Blasphemy!" They were not used to think of God as he did,
and it seemed improper.
Then the whole question of human speech rises for him. What did they
mean by their words? What could their minds be like? God dragged in
and flung about like a counter, in a game of barter--but if you
speak real meaning about God it is blasphemy. "Rabbi, Rabbi" to the
great man's face--he turns his back--and his name is smirched for
ever by a witty improvisation. Why? Why should men do such things?
The magic in the idle tale--ten minutes, and the memory is stained
for ever with what not one of them would forget, however he might
wish to try to forget. The words are loose and idle, careless, flung
out without purpose but to pass the moment--and they live for ever
and work mischief. How can they be so light and yet have such power?
Later on he told his friends what he had seen in this matter of
words. They come from within, and the speaker's whole personality,
false or true, is behind what he says--the good or bad treasure of
his heart. There are no grapes growing on the bramble bush. No
wonder that of every idle word men shall give account on the day of
Judgement (Matt. 12:36). The idle word--the word unstudied--comes
straight from the inmost man, the spontaneous overflow from the
spirit within, natural and inevitable, proof of his quality; and
they react with the life that brought them forth.[13]
So he grows up--in a real world and among real people. He goes to
school with the boys of his own age, and lives at home with mother
and brothers and sisters. He reads the Old Testament, and forms a
habit of going to the Synagogue (Luke 4:16). All points to a home
where religion was real. The first word he learnt to say was
probably "Abba", and it struck the keynote of his thoughts. But he
knew the world without as well,--turned on to it early the keen eyes
that saw all, and he recognized what he saw. Knowledge of men, but
without cynicism, a loving heart still in spite of his freedom from
illusions--these are among the gifts that his environment gave him,
or failed to take away from him.