Sunday, December 04, 2022

Even Without The Miracles, Jesus' Childhood Was Unusually Memorable

Over my next few posts, I want to discuss some good ways for Christians to begin making an argument for a traditional Christian view of Jesus' childhood. After that series of posts is completed, I'll link those posts and some other relevant ones in one place, and I'll supplement that collection with anything else I want to add in the future.

Some critics of a traditional view of Jesus' childhood will go as far as to suggest that we should be highly skeptical of even the more ordinary claims about Jesus' youth. For example, Annette Merz wrote, "no one among his family or fellow villagers expected anything special from him, and thus nobody paid any special attention to him. No historically reliable traditions of Jesus' childhood have survived, nor would one expect that an ordinary craftsman's family in a collectivist society (even if it claimed Davidic provenance, which is doubtful) would engage in collecting memories of a family member's individual development….We must not confuse the world of high-ranking persons who documented their important lives with the world of nobodies from which Jesus originated. Of course, things changed when Jesus' career as a prophet of the kingdom of God and a successful healer unfolded." (in Peter Barthel and George van Kooten, edd., The Star Of Bethlehem And The Magi [Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015], 491) You can read my review of Merz's chapter in the book just cited for a fuller response to her. What I want to do here is provide a few examples of how memorable Jesus' childhood would have been even by the standards of the large majority of Christianity's modern critics. I'm not suggesting that every detail of his childhood would have been remembered, of course. But the evidence suggests that much more would have been remembered than Merz claims.

Jesus was a firstborn child. Firstborns tend to be remembered more in accordance with their uniqueness (the first birth in a family, the process of learning how to do things for the first time in the context of raising that child, etc.).

The pregnancy was premarital. The scandalous nature of the timing of the pregnancy would have made it and some surrounding events more memorable accordingly, as we see reflected in the controversies involving that timing of the pregnancy over the last two millennia.

Jesus probably had an unusual personality. That's typically the case with people who become such prominent public figures and have such an influence on history. It's unlikely that all of his unusualness didn't develop until adulthood. Most likely, some unusual traits were evident in his childhood, and those would have made his childhood more memorable.

Even ordinary men are occasionally involved in unusual events in their youth. Relatives, neighbors, and others involved will remember something unusual a child said, an unusually dangerous situation he was in, a type of clothing he often wore, or whatever else. It would be surprising if nothing of the sort was remembered about Jesus' childhood.

These are just a few examples. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't go beyond these kinds of aspects of Jesus' youth that would be commonly accepted even by modern critics of Christianity. But starting with examples like these is a good way of illustrating the unreasonableness of sentiments like Merz's. It's also a good way of making more reasonable critics aware, or reminding them, of how much warrant we have to think that reliable information was preserved about Jesus' childhood by the critics' own standards. Even when people aren't as skeptical as somebody like Merz or a Jesus mythicist, they often don't think through some of the pro-Christian implications of what they believe.

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