John The Baptist's Knowledge Of Jesus' Childhood

Luke 1 is corroborated by other sources in a lot of ways, such as the ones discussed here. But what I want to focus on in this post is how the other gospels seem to support what Luke says about John the Baptist's knowledge of Jesus' childhood.

For one thing, John's popularity in his public ministry as an adult makes more sense if the events of Luke 1 really happened. John wasn't performing miracles as an adult, as far as we can tell, and there's no other competing hypothesis that makes comparable or better sense than the historicity of Luke 1 does as an explanation of John's early popularity in his adult ministry. What all four gospels and other sources say about John's adulthood becomes more coherent in the context of Luke 1.

Matthew 3:14 suggests that John the Baptist was already familiar with Jesus in some manner. While we can think of multiple ways in which such a familiarity could have arisen (e.g., Divine revelation to John around the time when the Matthew 3 passage occurred), the most natural explanation in Matthew's context is what happened in chapters 1-2. John not only was expecting the Messiah before Jesus' public ministry began, but also already held a high view of Jesus in particular.

Similarly, John 1:15 implies that John knew that he was born before Jesus, as Lydia McGrew explains here. That's a significant piece of information to have about Jesus, especially if John and Jesus were closer rather than further apart in age, since that greater closeness in age would make discerning who was older more difficult.

So, though neither Matthew nor John discusses how closely related John and Jesus were in their youth, they both suggest that John had substantial knowledge about Jesus' childhood, which offers some corroboration of Luke 1. And aside from the details found in the opening of Luke's gospel, it's significant that John seems to have so much knowledge of Jesus' childhood and already holds such a high view of Jesus at the start of his public ministry. That goes against the wedge Raymond Brown and others have tried to drive between the infancy narratives and the accounts of Jesus' adulthood, as I've discussed elsewhere.