Studies in the Life of Christ

By Andrew Martin Fairbairn

Chapter 3

 

THE GROWTH AND EDUCATION OF JESUS: HIS PERSONALITY.

The Person of Christ is the perennial glory and strength of Christianity. If the life of our faith had depended on its signs and wonders, it had perished long ago. If they win the ages of wonder they offend the ages of inquiry; and as the world grows in years credulous spirits die and critical spirits increase. But the Person that stands at the centre of our faith can never cease to be winsome while men revere the holy and love the good. His moral loveliness has been as potent to charm the human spirit into obedience as the harp of the ancient mythical musician was to charm nature into listening and life; has by its soft strong spell held the wicked till he ceased to sin and learned to love, and the tender and guileless heart of a child began to beat within his breast.

The Person of Christ makes the Christian faith, is its sacred source and highest object. In it lie hidden the causes of what He afterwards became. Circumstances did not make Him; God did. Thousands lived under the same conditions, in the midst of the same society, under the same heaven, in communion with the same nature, were born in the same faith, nurtured in the same schools and under the same influences; yet of these thousands not one can be named with even the most distant claim to be compared or matched with Jesus. And why from among the many millions living in His own land and time did He alone become the Christ? The ultimate answer must be sought in His nature, in His person. That was His own, not given by man, but by God, full of the potencies that have blossomed into the glorious Being that has overlooked and ruled the ages. Education can educe, but cannot produce; circumstances may plant and water, but they cannot create; the increase must be given of God. Where the eminence is so pre-eminent and peculiar, the name that best expresses the nature and relations of Him who achieved it is the one proper to Jesus alone among men, "the Son of God." The Person of Jesus stands in the most intimate and organic relation with His words and acts. Here the speaker and thing spoken are, while distinguishable and different, inseparable. The teaching of Jesus is His articulated character, His Person the realized religion of Christ. The more the Person is studied the better should the religion be understood; in the former the latter finds its creative source. Of the works Jesus performed, the greatest must ever remain Himself, since beyond all question the grandest element in Christianity is Christ. But if we are to know what He was as a result, we must, in some measure at least, know how He became it. He was not an abnormal being, an artificial or mechanical product, but a growth. His manhood developed out of a youth which had beneath it boyhood, childhood, and infancy. For the perfect man could be perfect only as His becoming was throughout human. A being sent full-formed into the world had been a monstrosity a stranger to our kind, like us, perhaps, in form, unlike us in everything essential and distinctive. But He who came to lift us from our evil came to do it in and through our nature, and in Him it orbed into the one perfect Person that has at once dignified and redeemed humanity. And so He has made the world feel that while He hates evil He loves man, and men can cry to Him

Be near us when we climb or fall:
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours,
With larger, other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.

The growth of Christ must, then, be considered natural: strictly so alike in its physical, intellectual, and ethical aspects. His manhood can be real only as it remains a manhood realized within the limits necessary to man. The supernatural in Jesus did not exist for Jesus, but for the world. What He achieved for others might manifest the superhuman; what He achieved in Himself showed the human humanity under its common conditions, obedient to its own, or rather its Maker's laws, become perfect, the realization of its eternal ideal or archetype as it exists in God. But one so conceived is not remote from God rather is penetrated and possessed by Him. His humanity is full of the Divine is a Divine humanity. Yet it is so for moral rather than physical reasons, because of spiritual rather than essential relationships. Were His humanity but a mask for His divinity, it would be illusive, without the meaning that belongs to truth, or the strength that belongs to reality. But if we must hold the reality of His manhood we must not shrink from the idea of His growth. Luke, at least, did not. He1 exhibits the marvellous boy as increasing in wisdom and stature,, and in favour with God and man.

But this growth cannot be well conceived apart from the scenes and influences amid and under which it went on. These, therefore, need to be collected into a more or less coherent picture. We must begin with His Home. It was at Nazareth, a town which survives almost unchanged to this day. Its narrow streets, tall houses, here and there almost meeting overhead, its still life, flowing undisturbed by the thoughts that move and the fears that agitate the great world, are now much as they were then. The home was poor. Joseph was an artizan, and Mary, woman of all work as well as mother. Their house would be of the common Eastern type, house and workshop in one, lighted mostly by the door, the light showing curiously mingled the furniture of the family and the tools of the mechanic.2 The daily fare would be humble enough; everywhere the signs of less meanness perhaps,, but more poverty than need be found in the home of our modern carpenter. The circumstances were not propitious to magnanimity, to wealth and majesty of soul. Town and home were alike insignificant, poor. Nazareth was a remote place, neither loved by the Jew nor admired by the Gentile. It was not a centre into which the wise of many lands gathered, where the words of the mighty dead were studied, and their spirits unsphered. Small as to population, secluded as to position, it nestled in its quiet nook, undisturbed by the march of armies, or the stiller but grander march of mind. There Jesus grew,. His genial soul making the soil genial, unwatered by strange dews, unwarmed by alien suns, in breeding, a Child of Moses, in birth, " the Son of God."

But the home is made by the Parents; they determine its ethical and intellectual character. For the Hebrew the home had pre-eminent sanctity; his religion dignified and blessed it. Paternity was honourable, the sign of Divine favour, children being " the heritage of the Lord." Honour to parents was the highest and best rewarded human duty, stood second only to the honour due to God. The children God gave man was to teach; He who made the family was to receive its homage. And so the home was to be a school for religion: the father was to instruct his children, and command them that "they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment."3 Parents and children in Israel had thus a sanctity to each other unknown to the men of Greece and Rome; their relations were throughout religious, consecrated by God and defined by His law. And if we may interpret the home at Nazareth through the mind and speech of Jesus, it must have been an ideal Hebrew home. It is but reasonable to suppose that in His later teaching His earlier experiences are in part reflected. " Father " is a name He so uses as to show that for Him it was steeped in the fondest and tenderest associations, was the symbol of loved memories and endeared relationships. In the picture of the father who cannot resist his child's pleading,4 or the still grander picture of one who knows how to forgive and restore a penitent son, and how to rebuke and forgive a son hyper- because hypo- critical,5 we seem to have features that could be painted only by a hand guided by a heart that had known before the imagination had created. Even within " Our Father which art in heaven " there may live a transfigured earthly reminiscence, the recollection of a father who had passed into the heavens. Childhood, too, is beautiful to Jesus, the manifest image of a time when He lived, sheltered and tended by prescient love.6 Years that were so sunny to memory could not have been bitter to experience, must have been possessed of the light and love that are to the heart of man as the life of God. Then He learned the value and the strength of human affection, the holy and beautiful love that in the child responds to the' brooding and creative love of the parent.

Beside the home there stood the School. The Jew loved education, to him instruction in the Law was the most important concern in life. Josephus boasted that the study of it commenced with the first dawn of consciousness, and was so conducted as to involve both knowledge and action.7 While the Spartans were anxious about practice, and the Athenians and other Greeks about theory, the Hebrew Lawgiver had so carefully bound both together, that to be well instructed in the Law was not only to know its doctrine, but to observe its precepts.8 He declared that He had had so full and accurate a knowledge of the Law in His fourteenth year, that He was consulted by the chief priests and first men of the city.9 Philo, too, says that the Jews were from their earliest youth so instructed in the Law as to bear in their souls its very image.10 This love of education, this zeal for instruction in the Law, was one of the most distinctive features in Judaism. And so it was a favourite axiom, " He who knows not the Law is accursed."11 Rabbi Hillel had said, " An ignorant can never be a really pious man; " and " the more instruction in the Law, the more life, the more of the great school, the greater the wisdom; the more counsel, the more reasonable the conduct. He who attains knowledge of the Law, gains life in the world to come."12 Rabbi Chananya ben Teradyon said, " If two sit together and speak not of the Law, then are they a company of mockers, of whom it is said, 'Sit not where the mockers sit.' But if two sit together and speak of the Law, then is the shechina present with them."13

Since enthusiasm for the Law and its study so possessed the Jew, Jesus could not have remained uninstructed. Schools, indeed, in the modern, or in any formal sense, He could hardly have known. There were, indeed, famous schools in Jerusalem, but no evidence that in the time of Jesus any existed in Nazareth. The wonder both of Nazareth and Jerusalem as to how He had come by His wisdom, and as to how He knew His letters,14 proves that He had not been educated in any school. Yet He must have had teachers. He knew letters, could read the Scriptures, was familiar with the interpretations of tradition and the school.15 We may well believe that His parents had been His earliest teachers. An authority no Hebrew could despise bound them to teach their children the law and the words of God.16 The proverbs the Jew loved, the short pregnant sayings into which were condensed the experience and wisdom of the ancients, were taught the child by father and mother alike.17 Then there was the synagogue, which, as Philo says,18 was everywhere an "institution for teaching prudence and bravery, temperance and justice, piety and holiness; in brief, every virtue which the human and Divine recognises and enjoins." Here Jesus must often have been, and here His wondrous open soul must have learned by every sense. In the society of the worshippers He would enter into the fellowship of Israel, become conscious of affinities that would awaken many sympathies, especially with the sins, the sorrows, the hopes, the aspirations of man. There, too, as He listened to the skilled yet childish interpretation of the Law, as He watched the masked yet apparent struggles for place, He may have learned to understand the scribes and Pharisees. The synagogue may have been the school that instructed Him in the idola of the human heart, showed Him how man could be so loyal to his own dreams and doctrines as to be faithless to Divine realities and truths. But with Him to see the folly and weakness of man was only the better to know the wisdom and strength of God. As He sat listening to the voices of heaven and earth, now blending in strange sweet music, and again meeting in sad deep discord, what thoughts, what visions of man's struggle towards God and God's endeavour to reach man must have come to Him! In experiences like these the Christ would find teachers qualifying Him to be a merciful and faithful High Priest, compassionate to the ignorant while dutiful to righteousness and truth.

Then, His study of the Scriptures must have been an eminently educative study. His knowledge of them was so great as to astonish the scribes and Pharisees, as well as the people. Such knowledge was possible only to years of study and meditation, and years so spent must have been full of the noblest formative and informative influences. Those old Hebrew books, with their great thoughts as to God, their strong faith in His righteous rule and high purposes, their record of man's sin and error, yet resolute and pathetic endeavour after the light, must have enabled the mind of the Christ to penetrate as from below the mysteries of the Divine nature, to see as from above the miseries of the human. And as He became conscious of their meaning, He must also have discovered that light did not always signify sight, that in man false or half vision often made the luminous worse than the dark. And so the Scriptures would awaken Him to the unity of the ages, the kinship of the earliest with the latest, the grand Divine purpose that man in all his times and families was fulfilling, though seldom with the consciousness that his acts were being used to promote, the ends of God. He has been to us the interpretation of the Scriptures, the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets; but before He could be so to us they must have been as an interpreter to Him, revealing Himself to Himself, translating, as it were, reminiscence into knowledge. Study of the written word became fellowship with the Living Will, and the visible Son rested consciously in the embrace of the invisible Father.

But Nature is to the spirit that loves her as great an educator as the Scriptures. The modern poet that knew and loved her best has made us feel how she can teach. and exalt, creating

                      sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into our purer mind,
With tranquil restoration;

how in her presence one can hear " the still sad music of humanity," and enjoy

                 that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motions of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul.

Now, the purest, calmest Spirit earth has known could not but find nature a translucent veil revealing the Father it seemed to conceal. Nazareth is said to lie amid beauties. The hill which rises behind the city looks upon a scene of rarest loveliness; mountains that uplift their snowy heads to a heaven that stoops to kiss them; valleys, fruitful, vineclad, swelling into soft ridges, melting into a plain that slopes in lines of rich beauty to the distant sea. And the scene must have been familiar to His eye, all its objects terms in which He and heaven could speak to each other, its moods moments when Father and Son could stand, as it were, face to face. His words show how full His mind was of Nature and the truths she teaches to those that in loving her love her Maker. The brooding heaven, so distant yet so near, where shone the sun that enlightened the earth, whence came the rain and the heat that fertilized it, was at once the home and symbol of His. Father.19 The lily, clothed with a loveliness which shamed the splendour of Solomon; the skimming swallows by dutiful diligence to-day making care for to-morrow vain and undutiful; the sparrow that, while unloved of man, yet lived and multiplied; the sower going out to sow; the green blade breaking through the dark soil; the fields yellowing for the sickle; the fig-tree throwing out its leaves; the vine, with its hanging clusters and grateful juices,20 had attracted His eyes, filled Him with a sense of the beauty that is everywhere in nature, of the Divine care that pervades everything and protects all life. Nature bears to us another and nobler meaning since He lived, and the meaning He found for us He must have first found for Himself. As He walked, " in pious meditation, fancy fed," on the hill that overlooks Nazareth, through the vineyards and corn-fields that clothe its slopes; as He stood on the shores of Gennesareth, watching the calm heaven mirrored in the calm lake, His spirit in the degree that it opened to nature opened to God, and humanity became in Him conscious of its Divine affinities, at one with the Father.

But man cannot be educated without Society; his nature cannot develop all its energies or breathe out all its fragrance in solitude. The teacher of man must know men, must be taught of men, that he may teach man. And Jesus was not denied the education society alone can give. He had the discipline that comes of social duty. He was a Son and Brother, fulfilled the duties proper to relations so near and tender, experienced and enjoyed the affections that brighten the home. He was not a father, yet it is almost certain that He knew paternal cares. He was the first, but not the only child of Mary; and it is more than probable that Joseph died during the youth or early manhood of Jesus. On the death of the father, the eldest Son would inherit his responsibilities, become the guardian and bread-winner of the family. And so to Him was granted the Divine discipline of toil, of labour for the bread that perisheth, yet undergone because of relations that are imperishable. Work for home is a noble. education. It makes man forethoughtful, unselfish, dutiful to the weak, tender to the sorrowful, mindful of the loving. It had been a calamity to Himself and His mission had our Christ been deprived of so grand yet so universal a discipline. He was not, and it was, perhaps, the condition of His sympathy with poverty and toil. His own mother may have been the widow that cast her mite into the treasury,21 and his own may have been a heart pierced and touched by a child's cry for bread.22 The education of Christ has been the education of man. What He learned in society and the home has helped Him to soften the heart and sweeten the relations of society throughout the world.

But we must now study the Personality formed under these varied influences. It was unique, a new embodiment of humanity, unlike anything that had been realized in Israel, or indeed in the world. He was no scribe or Pharisee, no shining example of conventional goodness or the traditional in character and conduct. While He had been educated in Galilee and within Judaism, He was no Jew, transcended in every way the moral and historical ideals of His race. The ideal of the scribes was narrow enough to be easily imitable in the schools; and the virtues they practised but reflected and expressed the law they studied and praised. Their characters were often very beautiful, marked by a fine simplicity and truth which adorned and illustrated their homely wisdom. Thus Hillel, zealous in his study of the law, but too poor to pay the entrance fee to the Beth-ha-Midrasch, clambers in the cold winter season up to the window sill, that he may there listen to the voice of the instructor within, and listens till he is found stiff with cold by the astonished teacher and scholars.23 So his distinguished rival, Schammai, thinks the fit celebration of a feast a matter so vital that when his daughter-in-law bears a boy during one, he has her bed made into the likeness of a tabernacle in order that the new-born child may keep the feast after the manner prescribed in the law.24 And these are typical cases. The pre-eminent virtues are zeal to know what has been delivered and scrupulous obedience to it. Knowledge of the law is the chief good; a conformity to it that knows no distinction between great and little, essential and accidental, the noblest virtue. But this ideal involves an increative particularism; the new is the false, the original the wrong. The knowledge most prized was remembrance Rabbi Eliezer was praised as " a well-trough that loses not a drop of water; " the moral faculty most esteemed the ability to imitate or reproduce. So peculiar and particular was the ideal of the schools that it could not have been either understood or realized outside Judaism. The man perfect according to the rabinnical standard could not have been defined as a man, but only as a Jew, had been no citizen of the world, but only a child of Moses or son of the Law. But Jesus was the opposite of all this, of a character so universal that He can only be described as the Man, of a nature so humane that He is to us as realized humanity. He created a type of manhood so absolutely original that it had no fellow in his present or past; yet so absolutely true that the world has ever since said, " If man is ever to be perfect, he must be as Jesus was." And so He is as. little of a Greek as of a Jew, He can be placed in no one of the ethico-national categories of His own or anytime. He: does more than embody Plato's dream of the righteous man, for His righteousness far exceeds the righteousness imagined by the Greeks. It was but conformity to the instituted, obedience to the laws established by man and approved of God; but Christ's was a creative type, great by its very transcendence of what had been instituted and its might to institute what was to be.

In studying the Personality that developed under the: agencies and influences just described, we are thus forced to see that they were not creative or constitutive, but only occasional or conditional. It was too transcendental a product to be the work of a mere empirical factor, and finds its material cause in the living Person, though its formal in the conditions under which He lived. And this becomes the more apparent when we analyze its contents and qualities. We cannot, indeed, see the process, only the result. The man in germ, the Personality in the making, we see but once,25 yet the once is almost enough. The Child has come with His parents to Jerusalem. The city, the solemnities,, the temple, the priests, the sacrifices, the people, have stirred multitudinous new thoughts in the marvellous boy. He becomes for the moment forgetful of His kin, conscious of higher and diviner relations, and seeks light and sympathy where they were most likely to be found in the temple, and with the doctors. It is an eminently natural and truthful incident. The ideal Child, wise in His innocent simplicity, seeks the society of simple but learned age, feels at home in it, wonders only, when sought and found, that it could be in His mother's mind other than it was in His own. The light that streams from the question, "'Wist ye not that I must be among my Father's matters," in his house, in search of his truth, mindful of his purposes? " illumines the youth, and makes Him foreshadow the man. For He who as boy was anxious to be absorbed in His Father and His Father's affairs, became as man the conscious abode of God. Here, indeed, emerges the sublimest and most distinctive feature of His Personality. In Him, as in no other, God lived; He lived as no other ever did in God. Their communion was a union which authorized the saying, " I and the Father are one; " " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." His consciousness was full of God, was consciousness of God. Fellowship' with man did not lessen it; solitude only made it more real. The society of the sinful did not disturb his serene certainty, or becloud for a moment His sense of the indwelling Presence. Amid faithless friends and bitter foes,, in the shadow of His doom and the exhaustion of His great sorrow, in the agony of the garden, the desertion and death of the cross, He was never without the clear and certain consciousness of the Father's presence. And this so distinctive feature of His Personality has made Him of pre-eminent religious significance. Since Jesus lived, God has been another and nearer Being to man; and the reason lies in that universal and ideal significance of His. Person which made it a symbol as well as a reality, and a symbol which showed that what God was to Jesus He might be to every man, what Jesus was to God every man ought to be. He who sails across an unknown sea and finds beyond it a continent is named a discoverer; and so Jesus, in the region of the Spirit, standing where no one in human form ever stood before, found a new relation to God, and became the Founder of a new religion for man. His Personality became the creative type of a new and more filial relation to God: since His day we have inherited the spirit of sons, and can cry, "Abba, Father."

But His relation to Man was in its kind and degree as perfect as His relation to God. It rested on a conception, at once truthful and generous. He conceived God as He is, and loved Him because He is Love; He conceived man as he ought to be, and loved him for the sake of the Divine ideal hidden under the depraved reality. Jesus loved holiness and hated sin. Evil was not in Himself, and His aversion to it was the radical and invincible aversion of a whole and holy nature. Yet He did not allow His hatred of the sin to become hatred of the sinners. He discovered within the evil a soul of good, and, what was even more, made them conscious of the discovery and the promise it contained. Men offensive to the traditional and typical religious character are seldom treated with mercy. A double and ineradicable suspicion almost always stands in the way of reaching and restoring outcasts their suspicion of the respectable and the religious, and the suspicion the respectable and religious have of them. A studiously correct society has ever found excommunication and exclusion of the evil easier and safer than reconciliation and restoration. But Jesus made His way to the outcasts, became their Friend in order that they might become His, and as His, friends of righteousness. Men whose goodness was of the conventional type thought they had condemned Him when they had named Him " the friend of publicans and sinners." But His friendship was justified by its results; it did not make Him a publican and a sinner, while it made men who were either or both friends of righteousness and truth. His relation to the evil was absolutely unique. He did not satirize or sneer at the sins and follies of men, like the cynic. Cynicism does not so much hate evil as despise folly; and, while it may keep the respectable from open vice, it can never restore the vicious to virtue. He did not, like the conventional moralist, hold Himself aloof from the fallen. The separation he enjoins may prevent the deterioration of the good, but can never promote the amelioration of the bad. Jesus, on the other hand, did not allow the man's evil to hide the man saw that he was a man in spite of the evil. In every one there was an actual and an ideal the actual might be His own, but the ideal was God's. Whatever the man might have made himself, there still remained the possibility of his becoming what God had intended him to be. And this belief of the Divine possibility within the depraved reality made Jesus seek, that He might save, the lost. The goodness He incarnated could vanquish man's evil, while the evil could not vanquish it. He had the purity which could see the best things in the worst man as well as the holiest and loveliest things in God; and when purity is hopeful of the impure, the impure themselves can hardly despair. And so the hope that lived in the Saviour was planted in the lost; what He believed possible they too came to believe, and the belief was at once translated into sublime and singular reality the lost were saved.

But the relation of Jesus to Righteousness was as perfect as His relation to God and man. His moral ideal was the highest. He lived to do the will of God. His beatitudes were moral, the good was the blessed man. But it is significant that one whose ethical ideal was so exalted had Himself no consciousness of sin, confessed to no sense of guilt, to no failure in obedience. In one constituted like Jesus, to be without the sense of sin was to be sinless, to be conscious of no disobedience was to have always obeyed. And this becomes the more evident when His. goodness is seen to be spontaneous, without effort, the free and joyous outcome of a nature so happy as to have been always holy. His calm and serene soul knew no struggle, no conflict of the flesh and spirit such as made the experience of His greatest apostle so tragic. He knew sorrow, but it was the sorrow of the heart that weeps for sin, not of the conscience that reproves it. And the character that expressed this spontaneous obedience was a harmony of blended opposites. He was so gentle as to -draw the love and trust of little children, as to conquer the suspicion and fear the fallen ever feel towards the holy; but He was so stern as to rebuke hypocrisy in words that still burn, so strong as to resist evil till it vanquished His life in revenge for its failure to vanquish His will. He was " meek and lowly in heart," had no love for place or power, no lust of wealth or position, no craving for the fame that is the last infirmity of noble minds; but yet He claimed a majesty so august that beside it Caesar's was the merest mock royalty. He had singular independence, a will so strong that nothing could unfix its resolution or divert it from its chosen path; but yet He was so dependent that in His deepest agony He sought the sympathy and presence of man. These features of His character -are but phases of His obedience. The principle that rules Him is one, the forms which express His loyalty to it are many. His nature is good, and His goodness spontaneous, but it ever assumes the aspect appropriate to the moments of His many-sided and significant life.

These phases and features of His Personality emerge in His teaching, give to it its most distinctive characteristics. His words as to God but express truths represented in His own relation to the Father. The love from heaven that filled and surrounded His soul became articulate in His sayings and parables. What He experienced He expressed; the God He knew He made known; and as we enter into the truth He embodied and revealed, we enter into a relation to the Father akin to His. And as He thought, felt, and acted towards man, so He taught concerning Him. His words witness to His faith in the Divine possibilities that still live in the most depraved man, and witness, too, to the yearning of the Supreme Goodness we call God after His broken and buried image. The parables that speak of the shepherd that seeks till He finds His lost lamb; of the woman that lights the candle and search for the coin she can ill spare; of the father who watches for the return of the prodigal, and receives him with weeping joy; represent the Divine side of His mission, the attitude of His own unique Personality to the fallen and outcast. And the sermons and parables that enforce and illustrate the righteousness He loved, the virtues He instituted or made possible, obedience of the one righteous Will, imitation of the perfect God, forgiveness, prayerfulness, truthfulness, purity, faith, charity, love to the stranger, sympathy with the suffering, tenderness to the fallen, only describe and enjoin the ideals He had realized, the graces that were personalized in Him. He who rightly apprehends the relation of the Personality to the teaching of Christ will understand why He was and is " full of grace and truth."

 

 

1) Luke ii. 52.

2) Renan, Vie de Jésus, c. ii.

3) Gen. xviii. 19.

4) Matt. vii. 9-11.

5) Luke xv. n, ff.

6) Matt, xviii. 1-6, 10-14; xix. 13-15.

7) Contra Apion., ii, 18.

8) Ibid, ii, 16, 17.

9) Vita, 2.

10) Legat. ad Cajum, 31; Ed. Mang., ii. 577.

11) John vii. 59.

12) Pirke Aboth, ii. 5, 7.

13) Ibid. iii. 2.

14) Matt. xiii. 54; Mark vi. 2; John vii. 15.

15) Matt. xii. 3, xix. 4; Luke iv. 16; Matt. xv. 1-9, xxiii. 2, ff., v. 17-20; Mark xii. 35.

16) Deut. xi. 19.

17) Prov. i. 8, xxxi. 1,

18) Vita Moses, lib. iii. § 27; Mang., ii. 168.

19) Matt. v. 34, 45, vi. 9.

20) Matt. vi. 25, 26, 28-30, x. 29, 31; Luke xii. 6, 7; Matt. xiii. 3, ff.; Mark iv. 28; John iv. 35; Matt. xxi. 19, xxiv. 32, xxvi. 21; John xv. 1, ff.

21) Mark xii. 42.

22) Matt. vii. 9.

23) Delitzsch, Jesus und Hillel, pp. 9-11.

24) Sukka, II, 8.

25) Luke ii. 41, ff.