Infant Jesus a Super Baby?

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Looking for some thoughts on the Infant Jesus for this Christmas season. Was the Baby Jesus a Super baby? That is could he walk and talk, and do adult things; or was he like all other infants?:blushing:
 
There is no evidence from Scripture or tradition that He was other than a normal, infantile human being. AIUI.

ICXC NIKA
 
From the Bible, the description of Jesus was that he was like us in every way, except sin.
 
The_Serpent said:
Looking for some thoughts on the Infant Jesus for this Christmas season. Was the Baby Jesus a Super baby? That is could he walk and talk, and do adult things; or was he like all other infants?:blushing:
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It is interesting, the use of “super”, here equated with superior, to describe Christ, when His teachings, His very presence on earth points to the vulnerability that comes with love. cf. Beatitudes and the rest of the NT.
 
Aloysium said:
It is interesting, the use of “super”, here equated with superior, to describe Christ, when His teachings, His very presence on earth points to the vulnerability that comes with love. cf. Beatitudes and the rest of the NT.
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I had “Superman” in mind when I typed this; recall he was lifting things as child!
 
Nothing really different to say except that if he was a “super baby” He could not be considered to be fully human.
 
This question has puzzled me since, I believe, I was around thirteen. If Jesus was a “super baby” why is there no Biblical mention of it? On the other hand, if Jesus was born our Lord and Savior, with all the physical mortality of man and all the wisdom of God, how would he even survive? Babies need breast milk, after all, but a Jesus omnipotent knowledge would hardly have been comfortable taking it the normal way. Yet he wouldn’t have been able to eat solid food right off, unless his digestive system matured supernaturally quickly. So would Mary have had to feed him second hand breast milk out of an animal skin or something?
This all sounds rather bizarre, even absurd, but then so does using fish guts to perform a miracle. (Tobit.) Or eating Jesus alive every Sunday, for that matter. Sounding bizarre is no reason for it to be false.
On the other hand, maybe there’s some philosophical explanation nobody who’s posted yet has heard? Anyone out there no of a good explanation how baby Jesus could be a normal baby and yet be God?
 
God is; He is Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.
It seems not so hard to imagine God incarnate as baby Jesus.
 
I believe He certainly could have been if He willed. He was found in the temple at age 8 teaching and the rabbis were amazed at His knowledge. He was fully man and fully God, I would imagine at conception. However, his fully human nature was also fully human and therefore He acted and looked as a baby would have acted and looked.

God penetrated the world, through enemy lines in the form of a baby.

This however begs another question? Why become a baby at all? Why not simply come as a fully grown human being?

This question answers your question I believe. God became the lowest of the low, born in a manger with no where to be born, no money, no goods so that He could become a servant and “the greatest among you will be a servant.”

Also, when the devil tempted Jesus he said “jump from this cliff and angels will surely catch you”

“Do not tempt the Lord Your God.” replied Jesus.

Nothing could harm the baby Jesus because Jesus is God and God had already been the Alpha and Omega therefore He needed not be anything but what He was, a baby.
 
Well said, but aren’t you trying to have your cake and eat it? Either Jesus was born as God, with all His wisdom, or he was a baby, in which case he would act like one. I could be wrong, but that seems logical, doesn’t it?
If he was fully God (and fully human) wouldn’t he find the business of being a baby, soiling himself, goo-goo-gah-gah, breastfeeding, rather awkward? How could Jesus be fully divine and yet somehow have this divinity separate from his human baby-hood? Isn’t to say Jesus was fully divine yet this divinity was somehow distant from his humanity as a baby rather… contradictory to traditional Catholic thinking? After all, we think of God’s humanity and divinity as fully united.
 
Did Jesus suffer on the cross? Did He bleed sweat from His brow at the Garden? He was fully human and felt all that humanity in the flesh. And if He were to be thrown from the cliff, angels certainly would have caught Him but He said “do not tempt the Lord your God” therefore He would not have become something unnecessarily because it was not necessary therefore Jesus was a baby and did all the things that a baby did. Just as He wouldn’t have jumped from the cliff, it was not necessary. He was a baby for the same reason He suffered, not because He had to, by showing us through example that we too can live out a life of suffering and self denial. He was lower than the lowest of us in both experience and reality.
 
Pound_Coolish said:
Well said, but aren’t you trying to have your cake and eat it? Either Jesus was born as God, with all His wisdom, or he was a baby, in which case he would act like one. I could be wrong, but that seems logical, doesn’t it?
If he was fully God (and fully human) wouldn’t he find the business of being a baby, soiling himself, goo-goo-gah-gah, breastfeeding, rather awkward? How could Jesus be fully divine and yet somehow have this divinity separate from his human baby-hood? Isn’t to say Jesus was fully divine yet this divinity was somehow distant from his humanity as a baby rather… contradictory to traditional Catholic thinking? After all, we think of God’s humanity and divinity as fully united.
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I truly don’t know what you are talking about. Please consider:

MYSTICI CORPORIS CHRISTI: ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII
  1. Now the only-begotten Son of God embraced us in His infinite knowledge and undying love even before the world began. And that He might give a visible and exceedingly beautiful expression to this love, He assumed our nature in hypostatic union: hence - as Maximus of Turin with a certain unaffected simplicity remarks - “in Christ our own flesh loves us.”[156] But the knowledge and love of our Divine Redeemer, of which we were the object from the first moment of His Incarnation, exceed all that the human intellect can hope to grasp. For hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love. O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself.
 
That’s a fairly explanation, Kingston. So, you’re saying that since it would be impossible for God to suffer except through manhood, by the same token he could be both a normal baby and God?
@ Alosyim
Well and good, but while I do not question the legitimacy of that quote, I still don’t follow it logically. Sorry, but I simply can’t grasp how, as God did indeed have divine knowledge as a baby, how on earth could he be a normal baby?And why would he be a normal baby Jesus wasn’t a normal man, but the bravest man of the greatest integrity ever? And if Jesus was a normal baby, then how come as a child and later in life he spoke with incredible wisdom far beyond that of anyone else? Was he born normal and then suddenly stopped being normal? Also, all that quote says is that God loved supernaturally… so maybe as a baby Jesus didn’t have all knowledge? And if he did, then how could he be a normal baby? Isn’t omniscience and “normal” a contradiction in terms?
 
Pound_Coolish said:
This question has puzzled me since, I believe, I was around thirteen. If Jesus was a “super baby” why is there no Biblical mention of it? On the other hand, if Jesus was born our Lord and Savior, with all the physical mortality of man and all the wisdom of God, how would he even survive? Babies need breast milk, after all, but a Jesus omnipotent knowledge would hardly have been comfortable taking it the normal way. Yet he wouldn’t have been able to eat solid food right off, unless his digestive system matured supernaturally quickly. So would Mary have had to feed him second hand breast milk out of an animal skin or something?
This all sounds rather bizarre, even absurd, but then so does using fish guts to perform a miracle. (Tobit.) Or eating Jesus alive every Sunday, for that matter. Sounding bizarre is no reason for it to be false.
On the other hand, maybe there’s some philosophical explanation nobody who’s posted yet has heard? Anyone out there no of a good explanation how baby Jesus could be a normal baby and yet be God?
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Of course baby Jesus suckled at His mother’s breast and drank her milk. There is NOTHING shameful about nursing, despite what some people today would have you believe. There are also hundreds of paintings of Mary nursing Jesus (Google “Maria Lactans”), and Him being nursed is referred to in the Gospels.
Secondly, of course He needed nappies (or diapers) and He pooped and peed and had to be trained to potty according to their custom just like every other child. There is artwork devoted to depicting washing day, when His Blessed Mother washed and hung to dry all of His baby nappies.There is also a Polish tradition about this aspect of their lives.
We may be appalled at the idea of God doing any of these things, but that is precisely the point. He truly, in every way except sin, became ONE OF US. Anything a normal human child went through, all the ages and stages, He did, too. Because He was fully human.
His Divine wisdom informed His human intellect, and He was born without any stain of sin, but He still was vulnerable and weak and absolutely dependent upon His mother and foster-father and the loving care and the training they provided for Him.
 
Pound_Coolish said:
. . . I still don’t follow it logically. Sorry, but I simply can’t grasp how, as God did indeed have divine knowledge as a baby, how on earth could he be a normal baby? . . .
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I see you have a lot of prayer and reflecting to do.
The Catholic Cathechism is great as is Fr Hardin’s Cathechism.
It will be clear eventually.
While it is well and good to share with other Catholics, I am not sure if forums is the best way to grow in knowlededge and understanding.
 
Pound_Coolish said:
…as God did indeed have divine knowledge as a baby, how on earth could he be a normal baby?And why would he be a normal baby Jesus wasn’t a normal man, but the bravest man of the greatest integrity ever? And if Jesus was a normal baby, then how come as a child and later in life he spoke with incredible wisdom far beyond that of anyone else? Was he born normal and then suddenly stopped being normal? Also, all that quote says is that God loved supernaturally… so maybe as a baby Jesus didn’t have all knowledge? And if he did, then how could he be a normal baby? Isn’t omniscience and “normal” a contradiction in terms?
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Excerpts from the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the “Knowledge of Christ”:

*“Moreover, a created intellect is simply perfect only when, besides the vision of things in God, it has a vision of things in themselves; God only sees all things comprehensively in Himself. The God-Man, besides seeing them in God, would also perceive and know them by His human intellect.”

“Jesus Christ had, no doubt, also an experimental knowledge acquired by the natural use of His faculties, through His senses and imagination, just as happens in the case of common human knowledge…Not that this kind of knowledge implies an enlarged object of His science; but it signified that He gradually came to know, after a merely human way, some of the things which he had known from the beginning by His Divine and infused knowledge.”*

So I would answer that Christ was not a “normal” baby, since His human nature is thought to have had knowledge infused into it by His divine nature. None of us have that. However, in order to gain the experiential knowledge that wasn’t infused into His human soul, He needed to grow up and have the same “normal” experiences that we all do (except for sin). Even breastfeeding! 😃 And He wouldn’t have been embarrassed about that at all…that kind of thinking comes from our flawed human nature which incorrectly sees the breasts as mainly sexual.
 
Aloysium said:
I see you have a lot of prayer and reflecting to do.
The Catholic Cathechism is great as is Fr Hardin’s Cathechism.
It will be clear eventually.
While it is well and good to share with other Catholics, I am not sure if forums is the best way to grow in knowlededge and understanding.
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when i pray the rosary and especially the “birth of Christ” or even when I say “the fruit of your womb, Jesus” I get this beautiful image of a messy baby still attached to the umbilical cord. Praying the mysteries of the rosary opens your mind…

agreed!
 
Pound_Coolish said:
Well said, but aren’t you trying to have your cake and eat it? Either Jesus was born as God, with all His wisdom, or he was a baby, in which case he would act like one. I could be wrong, but that seems logical, doesn’t it?
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You are wrong. 😉 Jesus was both fully human and fully God - two natures in one. He had all of the characteristics of both at the same time. We call this the Hypostatic Union. You can read about it here: newadvent.org/cathen/07610b.htm

Once you wrap you head around the fact that Jesus is both fully human and fully God at the same time, the rest falls into place. Like the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union is a mystery that we can try to explain but do not have the ability, as limited humans, to ever fully understand.
 
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