Connections between the adult Jesus, His childhood, and the family in which He was raised aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the Gospels don’t seem to sympathize with our natural human curiosity; whatever the Gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching His career. John has a short prelude and then does the same thing. Matthew and Luke give us the infancy narratives with a couple of sketchy references to childhood (flight into Egypt for Matthew, visit to the Temple in Luke), and that is pretty much it.
To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary. Even this late in the Christmas season, I haven’t yet written much about Mary at the Yule Blog, other than to write about her virginity. That is a characteristically Protestant and American choice. Throughout the Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic worlds, the Virgin Mary isn’t just a figure in a storybook. She’s the object of widespread popular devotion.
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