My Christmas present this year from an old friend and mentor was not quite a lump of coal in my stocking, more like a hot potato bouncing from palm to palm to avoid getting singed. He responded to last week’s Anonymous Asks post (subtitled “If Jesus was/is omniscient, why did he ask questions?”) with this query: “What about the questions He asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”
I believe the correct theological rejoinder is “Aaargh!”
In the process of working through my own thoughts, I bounced a few ideas off Immanuel Can. He has his own take on the subject of Christ and learning that we’ll run this coming Sunday.
Meanwhile, how do we analyze the consciousness of a being unique in all of humanity, one in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”, but who is simultaneously fully human (“like his brothers in every respect”) as the scriptures affirm, “yet without sin”? Can we say with any scriptural confidence that there was ever a time from cradle to present day in which the words “partial deity” adequately describe the Lord Jesus? Surely not. The Lord Jesus was “full” in both respects, and the inner workings of his one-of-a-kind mind utterly beyond our comprehension at every age.
The Scene in the Temple
In my view the verse my friend has referenced in Luke, which describes the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple “sitting among the teachers and asking them questions”, may be explained in the same way as the many questions Jesus asked during the course of his ministry, a few of which were listed in the earlier post. He may have been pointing to his own deity, challenging unbelief, exposing hypocrisy or provoking deep consideration of spiritual truth. He may have been subtly teaching in other ways appropriate to his age. We can’t say for certain because Luke doesn’t tell us any of the questions he asked. I have known precocious and perceptive (fully human) twelve-year-olds who ended up teaching their teachers in one way or another, not by lecturing them like pedants, but by indirectly suggesting possibilities they had never considered; ways of looking at the text that explained its meaning more adequately than the book-learning of the instructors. It is therefore not impossible — in fact, it’s inevitable — that a young man indwelt by the fullness of the Godhead from conception would not only exceed these youngsters, but surpass them by orders of magnitude.
His subsequent question to his mother, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” is sometimes rendered “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” This is not an issue of variant manuscripts requiring reconciliation. What he said to Mary translates most literally as “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s?” There is no explanatory noun supplied, either “business” or “house”. If it were important, I’m quite sure the Holy Spirit would have provided clarification. But at age twelve, the Lord Jesus was “in his Father’s” — pursuing his Father’s agenda, speaking his Father’s words and, I am very sure, asking his Father’s questions of the decrepit and corrupt Jewish religious establishment. He was his Father’s agent on his Father’s business, in or out of the temple, at every age, in ways in keeping with the standing that age gave him within the first century Jewish community.
All Were Amazed
Can we honestly imagine, even at age 12, that those men in the temple had anything to teach him? Luke follows the statement that he was asking the teachers questions with this line: “All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” There was a reason learned men let him sit there and engage with them when they could quite acceptably have shooed him away and called him impertinent. The discussion his questions generated was complex, profitable, and way beyond what they expected given his years. There’s also no reason to think Jesus hit them with his best material, which would surely have been way beyond them.
I believe the conclusion the Holy Spirit would have us draw from Luke’s story is that for the young Jesus, this was not a learning experience but rather an early display of his unparalleled glory and likeness to his Father.
That said, verse 52 of the same chapter reminds us, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” We could perhaps infer from this that he learned as we do, but again, this is not a necessary conclusion. The word translated “wisdom” is sophia, a term that almost inevitably denotes the persuasive effect of one’s speech, not the content of one’s mind. As occasion permitted him to engage with adults in spiritual matters, his facility with the word of God became increasingly obvious, and so Luke could accurately say he “increased in wisdom” without in the least implying a learning curve. The most brilliant diamond cannot draw attention to its beauty until someone puts it on display.
Tapping Out and Crying Uncle
In the end, my answer to “Did he know the answers or did he learn?” with respect to any point prior to the temple scene in Luke 2 is to reverently tap out. (For the tiny minority of readers older than me and unfamiliar with wrestling terminology, I will reverently cry ‘uncle’.) The gospels say so little about the Lord’s life between birth and the beginning of his ministry that to make the nature of his consciousness during that period a matter of theological conjecture would be presumptuous.
I fall back on Luke’s remarkable statement in the next chapter that a voice from heaven declared the Father “well pleased” with the Son. This took place at the very beginning of his ministry, before he had done any recorded miracles, driven out any demons, or taken the gospel of the kingdom to the nation of Israel for the first time, before he walked on water, fed the 5,000 or was transfigured before his disciples. The Father’s good pleasure was entirely a commentary on the Son’s first thirty years of life, the part about which we have the least information.
Whatever way he manifested his deity in those early years, the Father was entirely delighted with it. We are unwise to obscure that holy brilliance with our uninformed speculations.
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