Jesus and His knowledge of the Torah

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Sooner87

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Since I was younger I’ve had something that I’ve always wondered. When Joseph and Mary lose Jesus as a child, they find Him teaching in the temple. My question is, did Jesus learn the Old Testament/Torah or was He born with this knowledge?

Jesus shows time and again his divine nature, so I’ve always figured He was born with this knowledge. Anyone have any (name removed by moderator)ut that may help?

Thanks!
 
Jesus is the Author of the Torah. 😃
Gosh, I enjoyed saying that. lol That’s why, as a boy, he asked the questions, he gave the answers, and they were amazed. It implies that the Pharisees couldn’t answer the questions he gave them. We see hints of that in the New Testament as well, like when he asks, If the Messiah was David’s descendent, why did David call him Lord? A question they couldn’t answer. We can answer it though.
 
Catholic Christology says that He had a regular human mind as far as needing to be taught things, forgetting things, getting a question wrong, stubbing His toe etc. So He would have had to learn the Torah like any other boy.

He grew into knowing who He was as His mind matured while growing like all children do, so there wasnt some kind of implanted knowledge in His mind.
 
Did His family have frequent access to the Torah then? As a teenager, how would He have had enough time to memorize all that information?
 
Sooner87 said:
Did His family have frequent access to the Torah then? As a teenager, how would He have had enough time to memorize all that information?
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The Torah consists of the first five books of the Old Testament. I would imagine that he learned them much as any other young man would have in those days, but having a different insight into what was written would probably account for his mastery of it.

I have never felt that Jesus was completely cognizant of everything, past present and future, from birth, but rather due to the limitations that a human has, things were revealed to Him over time.
 
I wish to know the answer to the posters question as well. I have struggled to understand this; If Jesus IS the Word Incarnate, why would He need to learn sacred scripture?
 
FooFee said:
I wish to know the answer to the posters question as well. I have struggled to understand this; If Jesus IS the Word Incarnate, why would He need to learn sacred scripture?
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Either way, it doesn’t shake my faith. It’s just an interesting thought! Did Jesus sit and learn the Old Testament as you and I did, or was He inherently born with said knowledge. Regardless, it’s an intersting conversation!
 
Luke says that Jesus “advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man” (2:52). He wouldn’t have needed to advance in wisdom if he knew everything from the start.

I picture Mary sitting down with her son and telling him stories. She held her toddler in her arms and said, “Once there was a man named Noah…” And Joseph similarly sitting with a slightly older child and teaching him Scripture. And Jesus soaked up this knowledge with enthusiasm. He learned from his parents just as we all learned from our parents.
 
Sooner87 said:
Either way, it doesn’t shake my faith. It’s just an interesting thought! Did Jesus sit and learn the Old Testament as you and I did, or was He inherently born with said knowledge. Regardless, it’s an intersting conversation!
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His knowledge was limited due to human constraints…just like as God He is omnipresent (and He shows it to Nathanael when He says He saw him under the fig tree) but He was limited to the place He was and had to walk and sweat like a regular human being…As a child of 12, it is fairly possible that He had been learning about the Torah already, and that He did have a special infused knowledge about the meaning of many passages…we read He taught the teachers, true, but how? Perhaps He made remarks on the meaning of passages being brought to His attention that astonished them. We don’t know much in detail.

Now, we do have people who naturally can remember a very large body of text…I read for instance that Thomas Aquinas as a youth memorized the entire Bible, and later on he would do the same with many other texts (perhaps he benefited from some sort of photographic memory, or from a special grace…). So it is indeed possible that the Lord, even in His humanity, could have learned Scripture from an early age.

But ultimately, knowledge of Scripture is not in being able to recall verses or even the entire Bible (for by that matter even the devil knows Scripture by heart), is in being able to understand it and interpret it correctly by the Spirit of Truth! 🙂
 
FooFee said:
I wish to know the answer to the posters question as well. I have struggled to understand this; If Jesus IS the Word Incarnate, why would He need to learn sacred scripture?
Click to expand...
Remember, Jesus was/is completely human AND completely divine. It is beholding His divine nature to protect and preserve His human frailties, but not to make Him an instant genius.

Douay-Rheims Bible
And Jesus advanced in wisdom, and age, and grace with God and men. - Luke 2:52

It is thought by some {and I buy into that] that Jesus was only fully united in awareness and cognition of His divine nature at or near His end on the Cross. He was obviously aware from an earlier age that there was something very special about him.
 
Sooner87 said:
Did His family have frequent access to the Torah then? As a teenager, how would He have had enough time to memorize all that information?
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I understand that the Jews started schooling children at an early age and that they were a very literate people as a whole compared with their pagan neighbors. Further,
There are children who exhibit prodigious abilities in music and and math.so that Mozart was composing at five and Pascal was doing original work in conics at fifteen.Even at the natural level, the youngJesus would have been a prodigy capable of memorizing whole tracts of Scripture and with the insight to see what it all meant. Of course, we cannot pretend to know the psychology of a god-man, but if he was true man, then he knew things as a human being knows things. in this we glimpse the reason why he waited until he was a mature man before he began his mission. ,
 
Sooner87 said:
Did His family have frequent access to the Torah then? As a teenager, how would He have had enough time to memorize all that information?
Click to expand...
He didn’t fill his mind with iPods, Tv, video games, etc.

Back then they worked and went to synagogue and heard lots of scripture every day as oral tradition, and as the law of the land.

…submitted from my iPod. 😉
 
Jon_S said:
He didn’t fill his mind with iPods, Tv, video games, etc.

Back then they worked and went to synagogue and heard lots of scripture every day as oral tradition, and as the law of the land.

…submitted from my iPod. 😉
Click to expand...
Exactly this!👍

Kids are remarkable at memorizing things. Mine can retell an entire movie verbatim after viewing it once, so if their only form of entertainment was stories from their family, friends, teachers, priests imagine how smart my munchkins would be
 
I believe that Jesus is present Body, Blood, Soul and divinity in a little wafer. It is not a stretch to me that He was present, conscious, and praying, united with the Father, even while in the womb, but in sublime humility, respected the boundaries and burdens of the limits of the flesh he took on. I believe He offered to God the Father all the pains of this humanity for the conversion of sinners. If this is true, His emptying of Himself is even greater than we can comprehend, but the Infinite took on the boundaries of finite, what the heavens could not contain, was contained within a womb of a woman. We cannot comprehend what a gift the Eucharist is. We cannot comprehend the Godhead willingly contained within a 2 cell being in a womb. Saying that He did not understand who he was until later in life diminishes this unbelievable and awesome gift.

For example, if a person who could speak 5 languages, understand and compose music like a great composer, was accomplished in math, physics and chemistry, could chisel marble into a David, and could improve on the Sistine Chapel, if this person was mystically ‘put into’ a dog, and continued to contain all his faculties, what an immense cross, and great gift that would be. To willingly be confined to barking and wagging a tail for ‘conversation’, to live outside, suffer cold and fleas, is a much greater thing than losing all that capacity when entering into a dog.

It would be better for us, if we cannot know for certain, to err on the side that says that Christ contained all his faculties as God, yet willingly stayed within those boundaries of flesh, out of love for us and to redeem us. That is infinitely more difficult than to be ‘just a boy like any other’. This is indeed what He does for us in the Eucharist already. Hidden, silent, innocent, interceding, obedient to men, and abused by ungrateful persons.

John 1: 46-50 “I saw you under the fig tree”.
Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”
 
What does it matter? If he was born with the knowledge, or acquired it through learning, being able to teach it at, what approx. 12 years of age, is prodigy. I think what matters to the story at hand is his perfect knowledge of it, at a very precocious age.
 
This is an interesting Christological question.

One one hand: the human mind of Jesus of Nazareth may have been familiar with the Torah through study and his time in the synagogue. Is this possible? Yes.

On the other hand: the Logos (that is, the mind of God, which is fully part of Christ’s nature, and inseparable with his humanity), would have all knowledge of the Torah, because of His omnipotence.

Keeping in mind that Christ is fully God and fully Man, but these two natures can be prevalent at different times.

Personally, I’m in favor of the concept that Christ knew the Torah so well because of the knowledge of the part of him that was God, the Logos.
 
Mount_Carmel said:
It is thought by some {and I buy into that] that Jesus was only fully united in awareness and cognition of His divine nature at or near His end on the Cross. He was obviously aware from an earlier age that there was something very special about him.
Click to expand...
There are different approaches to this. The concept that you speak of is known as Low Christology: that Jesus of Nazareth was a man who was deified, or that Christ’s divine nature only became fully prevalent at the time of his death.

Opposite this is High Christology, which teaches that the Logos was God, became Man, and returned to God. This is most prevalent in the Gospel of John.

The Catholic Church takes the middle ground on this one. It uses bits and pieces from each Christology.
 
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