Luke 2:41-52

Absorbing Israel’s Tradition in Obscurity

Luke 2:41-52  -  The Young Jesus in the Temple

There was still more that Luke wished to add before concluding his reflection on the person and mission of Jesus.

Among the points to notice are Luke’s mentioning of:

• Jesus’ familiarity with and initiation into the key rituals of Judaism, in this case, the Passover
• perhaps a slowly mounting distinction, distancing and difference between Jesus and his parents, along with their growing inability to understand his attitudes and behaviour
• the gently developing wisdom of Jesus and his knowledge of Torah
• his emphasis on his need to be in the midst of my Father’s things. (The phrase can be translated in my Father’s house or the matters that concern my Father. Whatever the translation, this was the first time that Luke referred to Jesus’ own personal relationship with God, and he had Jesus call God his Father.)

The age of twelve was about the time when Jewish boys were expected to assume the responsibilities of adults.

Luke had no trouble in stating that Jesus increased in wisdom. He obviously believed that Jesus experienced the normal psychological development - physical, emotional and intellectual - of which every human person is capable.

What was Life in Nazareth Like?

The Town. According to Luke Jesus spent all of his early life in Nazareth. Nazareth was a walled town in Galilee, only about one hour’s walk from a major administrative city, Sepphoris. Sepphoris had recently been built by Herod the Great, and was home to wealthy public servants, Jewish aristocrats and land owners. Luke never made any reference to Sepphoris, or to Tiberias, in his account of Jesus’ public life. (It seems that Jesus deliberately avoided cities, other than Jerusalem, and restricted his mission to the smaller towns, villages and open countryside of Galilee and, later, Judea.) In size Nazareth would have measured less than three hundred meters from side to side. It could have fitted easily into the external courtyard of the temple in Jerusalem. Its resident population would have been upwards of about one thousand people, many of them children. The only really clear space in the place would have been located just inside the gates. The town was surrounded by numerous dependent villages, inhabited usually by large families or small clans, whose members worked the neighbouring fields.

Work. Joseph, and later Jesus, worked with wood. They may have found work from time to time in Sepphoris. Occupations in the towns and villages of Galilee were normally handed on from father to son, and usually produced enough to maintain the subsistence life-style of the peasant class. People spoke Aramaic at home, but many residents of Sepphoris and others who worked there would have used Greek. In the local synagogue, the scriptures were read in Hebrew, under the general direction of Pharisees or local priests. (Jesus was himself probably familiar with both Greek and Hebrew, as well as his own native Aramaic.)

Family. Social relationships in the towns and villages were under very rigid patriarchal control, the villages being even more constricted than the towns. Families tended to keep close to each other, even in the towns.  Where possible the residences of the sons clustered around a central residence where the father/patriarch lived, who controlled the life of the whole family.

Until a woman married, she was under the strict protection of her father and brothers. When she married, she invariably moved out of her family complex and went to live with her husband and his extended family. This could be a difficult time for her, having to break into a network of already established relationships. The emotional tie between husband and wife was not always deep, and the husband was able to divorce her if ever and whenever he chose. Only after she had produced a male heir would she really have been accepted by the extended family. Her closest emotional bonds would have been with her male children as they grew older. On the death of her husband, the sons would look after her interests.

The average life span in the peasant culture of the time was between thirty and forty years, though there were always exceptions. Consequently, lifetime relationships were not necessarily long by today’s standards. 

Society. Though social cohesion in the towns was not as tight as in the smaller villages, mindsets throughout Galilee were very restricted, actions and reactions being judged by collective standards. Individuality was seen as a danger to community cohesion. Relationships were controlled on the basis of honour or shame, publicly granted or withheld, rather than on the basis of personal integrity. 

Women had no legal rights but were under the complete control of their fathers or husbands. Generally they were given free rein, however, in the day-to-day running of the family unit. Their honour was an offshoot of the honour shown to their fathers or husbands.

Male sons followed the vocation of their father. Social mobility was not generally possible, nor was it desired. However, social change was happening in Galilee. The wealthy aristocracy, including the high priestly families of Jerusalem, as well as agents within the bureaucratic structure of the Herodian kingdom, were gradually accumulating ownership of the better farming land of Galilee. Former peasant owners were becoming tenant farmers, due to their inability to repay debts on borrowed monies, and tenant farmers were becoming day labourers for the same reason. 

Within the villages and among the poorer workers of the towns, private accumulation of wealth was not culturally encouraged; good fortune was something to be shared immediately among peers. Disputes were generally settled by the local elders on the basis of honour granted or withheld.

Jesus’ Family. In the family scenario described by Luke, Mary was still living with her father and family at the time of her conceiving. Her pregnancy happening before she was married would have caused grave consternation to her father and her brothers. If she were regarded as complicit in the pregnancy, their honour would have been gravely offended. If her pregnancy were an act against her will, they would have been seen by the community as failing in their duty of protection. The honour of Joseph, her betrothed husband, would also have been deeply compromised. Certainly, the strict interpretation of the law required death for adultery, though it is uncertain whether the law was always enforced. An eventual satisfactory outcome would have depended on her husband’s accepting her explanation of her pregnancy. Given that a claim to have conceived by the power of God would have been interpreted as incredible pretension on her part in the closed and jealous environment of a small town, the truth was probably kept secret, and her marriage to Joseph would have had to be quickly formalised.

After their marriage, Joseph and Mary probably lived in a close compound with other brothers of Joseph and their families.

It is possible that Joseph was a widower, with a family of children. How Mary might have been accepted as she moved into his extended family, particularly by any older children of Joseph, is a matter of conjecture. 

When Joseph eventually died, Jesus would have become particularly significant, indeed necessary, to Mary. When Jesus departed from home to begin his public ministry, Mary would have in all likelihood been left dependant on the good graces of the extended family, particularly of her brothers and of her step-sons (if in fact there were any), not only for defence of her rights but even for food

That Jesus remained unmarried was extremely unusual in the culture and even threatening. It would also have been judged a dereliction of duty, given God’s injunction in Genesis to increase and multiply.

By means of his narrative Luke had made the point that the spirit of prophecy, a responsive sensitivity to the action of God’s Spirit in the human heart, was vigourously stirring in Israel. Three women witnessed to that inspiration of God’s Spirit: Elizabeth, Mary and Anna. Two men did likewise: Zechariah and Simeon.

Zechariah had explicitly said that his son would become a prophet. In the unfolding story, Luke would describe Jesus particularly as a prophet, following in the footsteps of Israel’s great prophetic heroes, and surpassing them: Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and others.

Already in his narrative Luke had also connected prophecy with innocent suffering. Elizabeth had endured the lifelong contempt of her contemporaries by reason of her infertility; Anna had been a widow, a person without status or legal protection, for about sixty years; and, according to the insight of Simeon, a sword would pierce the heart of Mary.

Next >> Luke 3:1-20