What Is The Reflection Of The Boy Jesus At The Temple

Introduction

Jesus, in addition to being identified as the central figure of world’s largest religion, is widely recognized as a historical figure. While historical Jesus scholars do not have any verifiable information about his childhood, Jesus was human, and thus must have been a child. The Gospel of Luke presents a story about the boy Jesus. While it is unlikely that this story holds any historical weight, it does provide an image of Jesus that is relevant and valuable to the Gospel of Luke. In Luke 's story of the "Boy Jesus at the Temple," Jesus simultaneously acknowledges that he is human and divine by demonstrating his loyalties to both his parents and God. This argument will first address how the boy Jesus understood his identity as

According to Joseph Fitzmyer’s commentary in The Anchor Bible, the text appears to serve as a transition because it is “in reality an independent unit, which does not depend on anything that precedes in the infancy narrative and which could be dropped without any great loss to the narrative.” At the same time, there must be some significance in the fact that Luke left the story in while the other canonical Gospels to not have it. Some of the details presented in this passage show readers and expanded view of Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ character. Fitzmyer later proposes that the story is “Luke’s way of getting across to his readers the difficulty of understanding who Jesus is or was.” Jesus, even as a child, had a complex identity that developed in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most transitory verse from this selection is Luke 2:52: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” This verse quickly bridges the gap between this story and Jesus’ adult teachings, echoes a similar verse Luke uses before this story (Luke 2:40), and specifically addresses Jesus’ humanness and

In verse 41, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus attend the Passover festival. More importantly, they make this “every year” and “as usual,” which demonstrates the family’s consistent observation of Jewish tradition (LK 2:41-42). In the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, the entry on “Family” examines Jesus’ Greco-Roman world in which “children learned the laws of the covenant and …families celebrated the Sabbath weekly and kept numerous feasts and sacrifices throughout the Jewish year, worshipping at home as well as in public.” With the guidance of his parents, Jesus, like any other twelve-year-old boy, learned to obey Jewish law and practice the traditions. Luke’s chosen age for Jesus, twelve, also plays a significant role in this Jewish context of the story because, “at twelve Jesus would be in terms of the culture of the day beginning to make the transition from childhood to adulthood.” Fitzmyer furthers the importance of Jesus’ age because Luke is “emphasizing the training of the young Jewish male…he is now shown to be one trained in the Torah and its requirements and fulfilling his obligations, even in advance.” Here, Jesus is like any other Jewish boy his age because he receives the same kind of training. Though he may be the Son of God, he still needed to learn about Jewish tradition and his divinity alone could not provide him with this