There is reason to suppose, that in accordance with the established
principles of parental duty among the Jews, he had learned the
rudiments of the knowledge of the Mosaic law; for a proverbial sentence
of the religious teachers of the nation, ranked among the vilest of
mankind, that Jew, who suffered a son to grow up without being educated
in the first principles, at least, of his national religion. But that
his knowledge, at the time when he first became a disciple of Jesus,
extended beyond a barely respectable degree of information on religious
matters, there is no ground for believing; and though there is nothing
which directly contradicts the idea that he may have known the alphabet,
or have made some trifling advances in literary knowledge,――yet the
manner in which he, together with Peter, was spoken of by the proud
members of the Sanhedrim, seems to imply that they did not pretend to
any knowledge whatever of literature. And the terms in which both Jesus
and his disciples are constantly alluded to by the learned scribes
and Pharisees, seem to show that they were all considered as utterly
destitute of literary education, though, by reason of that very
ignorance, they were objects of the greatest wonder to all who saw
their striking displays of a religious knowledge, utterly unaccountable
by a reference to anything that was known of their means of arriving
at such intellectual eminence. Indeed, there seems to have been a
distinct design on the part of Christ, to select for his great purpose,
men whose minds were wholly free from that pride of opinion and learned
arrogance, almost inseparable from the constitutions of those who
had been regularly trained in the subtleties of a slavish system
of theology and law. He did not seek among the trained and drilled
scholars of the formal routine of Jewish dogmatism, for the instruments
of regenerating a people and a world,――but among the bold, active, and
intelligent, yet uneducated Galileans, whose provincial peculiarities
and rudeness, moreover, in a high degree incapacitated them from taking
rank among the polished scholars of the Jewish capital. Thus was it,
that on the followers of Christ, could never he put the stigma of mere
theological disputants; and all the gifts of knowledge, and the graces
of mental power, which they displayed under his divine teachings,
were totally free from the slightest suspicion of any other than a
miraculous origin. Some have, indeed, attempted to conjecture, from the
alleged elegance of John’s style in his gospel and epistles, that he
had early received a finished education, in some one of the provincial
Jewish colleges; and have even gone so far as to suggest, that probably
Jairus, “the ruler of the synagogue” in Capernaum, or more properly,
“the head of the school of the law,” had been his instructor,――a guess
of most remarkable profundity, but one that, besides lacking all sort
of evidence or probability, is furthermore made totally unnecessary,
by the indubitable fact, that no signs of any such perfection of
style are noticeable in any of the writings of John, so as to require
any elaborate hypothesis of this kind to explain them. The greatest
probability is, that all his knowledge, both of Hebrew literature and
the Greek language, was acquired after the beginning of his apostolic
course.